My EVE

Being as it's already h264(thus being .mkv is just a difference in container afaik), ~1077MB was the best I could achieve, even after throwing all the quality options at it and giving it a 2pass long soak while aiming for 5Mb/s bitrate. Ah well.

Handbrake may be your friend in future though.

It could well be your choice of encoder implementation. Think of the standards not as how to encode media, but as what will be understood & valid to a decoder/player. Some encoders/apps can do all the tricks the standard allows, and/or find all the cases where the best techniques can be used rather than the simpler, older standards might have stopped at.
Terrible example: the standard may be happy to record a black block occurs ten times, but it may also have a way of saying 10x1 black block in far less space.
Better examples might be encoding 2 blocks with 1block's worth of pattern moving across them for many frames as 2 blocks' worth in every frame, rather than describe the pattern & it's motion; or how mostly duplicate frames are stored only as differences, but could be stored as full frames & still decode fine.

It's not just a matter of being the fastest app to encode a media for given hardware, or to produce the least human-perceived artifacts when it's decompressed by players, but also applying all the pattern & motion prediction mechanisms to find the most data duplication that can be expressed in the least target output format.

Then again, if you also used something based on the FOSS x264 library, it's hard to immediately say why the results differ
Unless that ~15% target rate difference compresses a lot of detail into simpler things which then suddenly can be encoded ~30% better.

I always represent Curse

Friendly bump to main page...

Brilliant video and soundtrack. Noticed aswell that "Kythena Delarth" was there. First alt I ever made, wish I never sold her :P Glad to see she's been put to work :D

Your choice in music is spectacular.