hello all,

Can anyone tell me whether xvid and nero digital have a quality-based preset system and, for either of them, what would be the 'good quality' preset? (I mean a system like lame with --preset-standard).
I remember from the old days that for eg creating svcd discs there were at least some guidelines. (for svcd resolution don't go beneath 1850 Kbit/s). In xvid i know where the quantizer-based presets are, but I have no idea what corresponds to good quality. In nerodigital you have the bitrate slider, but do you set it at 50%? 75%? 100%?

if you are talking about nero recode then i can not remember any bitrate slider in percents? or maybe there is some app in nero digital i dont know about?

Indeed it is not in %. What I wanted to say: to get acceptable quality for an encode, and provided length of the resulting output file is not a factor, how do you move the bitrate slider? completely to the right, about halfway, ...?

Practically every guide I know of tells you to do this, do that, and then they get to this point...and tell you to 'just configure for an 80 min cd-rom'. Obviously if I put 3 hours of video on that cd, quality will be less than if I put 60 minutes on that same disc....What I want to do is: give me 'normal' quality, (which is subjective, I know) and I'll see how much discs I need to put it on...If I need to swap a disc, so be it...

nope, there is no real quality based way to do it in recode that i would know of, it is possible with x264 for example, the switch is called --crf, for example --crf 30 (iam talking about cli version).

this should be possible via forcing only one quantizer for encoder to use, ie in nero recode do 1pass with (for example) quants set to 23 on both min and max sections.

in video
constant quantizer=constant quality

No its not.

ok
constant quantizer=constant quality(-gradient blocking)

AutoGK has a quality setting.
When using target quality, encoding is done in one pass. (Versus two passes if encoding to reach a target size)
Target size encoding is said (by author) to give very good results, even if only pass is used.
AutoGK supports at least Xvid and DviX, I don't know about the other codecs.

See the FAQ at autogk site, or documentation at doom9 for recommended quality setting.