[Jonathan Norris]

The upgraded HandBrake verison has the newest version of the open source x264 codec, which is best H264 encoder you can get without paying $1000s. They've put some really interesting new techniques into the x264 codec that makes it so you really don't need to use 2-pass, aslong as you use Constant Quality. use a Constant Quality of about 62% (its a logarithmic scale) and you will get great results. Aslong as you don't need a constant bitrate or file size use Constant Quality, it uses some really neat math to analyize each part of the video using the history of that area of the video to determine if it needs more bitrate or not. There is some really interesting and powerful programing going on in these open source projects like x264.