Strange blocking problem and x264

I'm trying to encode the Japanese version of City Hunter - Bay City Wars and I am coming across a weird problem in the opening scene of the movie. Basically it starts with a pan into the City Hunter logo and then the logo flashes and dims again. Now the problem is that with the x264 encode I did this scene gets bad blocks, but oddly enough an XviD encode I did doesn't have this problem and it looks nice and smooth. Now I really want to do an encode of this with x264 because overall it has less noise around lines and generally less blocky, but this one scene just really stands out as being ugly in the encode. I've tried creating a zone to increase the bitrate to that scene alone but that usually results in even worse blocking than in this encode. I'm really at a loss of what to do and any help would be appreciated. Here is a shot of the same frame that shows the problem: x264: XviD: Here are clips of the scene as it really shows up as looking ugly during playback : , And here is an unprocessed m2v file of the scene if anyone wants it: Both encodes are done at ~1367kbit/sec to get a 450 meg file with a single aac audio stream. The command line from the megui-x264 encode is: E:\Program Files\x264\x264.exe --pass 2 --bitrate 1367 --stats ".stats" --ref 16 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --bframes 2 --b-pyramid --b-rdo --bime --weightb --filter 2,2 --subme 7 --trellis 2 --analyse all --8x8dct --me umh --merange 32 --sar 1:1 --cqm "jvt" --progress --no-psnr --nr 150 --output "I:\Encodes\City Hunter\Bay City Wars\thing.mkv" "I:\Encodes\City Hunter\Bay City Wars\thing.avs" The settings for the XviD encode was: B-VOPS: 2/1.0/1.0 No QPEL, No AQ, No GMC H.263 Quantization Motion Search Precision: 6 VHQ: 4 and VHQ for b-frames. Chroma Motion Trellis And the avisynth script I used was: mpeg2source("Bay City Wars.d2v",cpu=3) RemoveGrain(mode=5) FluxSmoothST(Spatial_Threshold=7) Crop(2,4,-2,0) LanczosResize(640,480) ColorMatrix()

I forgot to mention that I am using Sharktooth's build r408.

Might also try AQ along with adding a custom zone for that scene, weight it 200% or so.

use newer builds.

sounds like the typical fast-pskip problem try --no-fast-pskip

he already has it in the commandline

I don't think newer builds will help him much. My suggestion is to remove that FluxSmooth. I have the same kind of problem when using any kind of temporal smoothing.

try a build without the experimental stuff as sharktooth said (and make sure to use --no-fast-pskip)

files.x264.nl? try x264.nl...

Well I believe I isolated the problem. I downloaded the latest build and used the exact same options and it had the same problems. I even tested with a constant quant 2 encode to eliminate it being a bitrate problem. Commenting out fluxsmooth had no effect. The quant matrix didn't cause it because the blocking appeared when I selected none. The only thing that eliminated the blocking was turning the noise reduction down to 0. I've used it before on other encodes with no problem and with the exact same settings, so I don't know what it is that caused it this time with this source. Very odd.