Let's do the first pass first.

In the first screen there's nothing you have to change. Obviously, setting a bitrate doesn't make any sense since the bitrate will be different for each movie (don't worry, GKnot will fill this in automatically for each movie). Press the first more.. button.

Set Quantization type to H.263 for 1 CD movies, and MPEG for 2 CD movies.

Checking Quarter Pixel can help increase quality, especially at low bitrate, so check that too, and keep the rest at their defaults.

Then press OK to get back to the main screen and click on the Advanced Options button:

Make sure Motion search precision is set to 6, VHQ mode is 1 and Use chroma motion is checked.

Turbo ;-) also seems like a good option, it helps speed up the encoding while not visibly degrading the quality of the output.

Keep the rest of the options at their defaults, and press OK twice to get back to Gordian Knot.

Then press the Second pass button and make sure the settings correspond to what you set for the first pass. The only difference is that Encoding type has to be set to Twopass - 2nd pass. If you're wondering what all the options are good for, check out this comprehensive XviD 1.0 guide.

Now as previously mentioned, you'll make those settings once and they are then used for each encoding session. But of course you can always change the defaults, or use special parameters just for a specific movie. In that case you can manipulate the codec settings just before you start encoding (and they will only be applied to the movie you're about to encode).

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This document was last updated on August 10, 2005