Thanks for the info, nice and clearly explained.

I'm not using those options at all now for encoding for N810 and haven't encountered any ill effects. I've encoded from PAL Progressive DVD and NTSC mixed Progessive/Interlaced DVD and from a wide variety of .avi .mkv .mp4 and similar. Initially I encoded quite a few with a video bitrate max set at 1000 with vbr mp3 audio....no issues so far, though 768 seems like more sensible maximum if the compression is of high quality.

Usually if I'm watching video on the N810 I'm not doing much else with it, though typically the wifi will be on, the file manager will be open in the background and sometimes I'll be transferring a large file onto it using ssh and midnight commander. I expect some people will have more going on and the vrc_* options will be more useful, but improving the compression quality is the big one.

I'll make a few encodes with cmp=10:subcmp=10 and compare. Previously I've only been using cmp and subcmp values when encoding full size high quality from DVD.