Hi Sharktooth,
I really like your CQM. When I was trying to determing a good bitrate before I used your CQM, I had trouble with blocky dark backgrounds even at what I thought were too high bitrates. When I finally switched to your CQM, I found the blockyness was dramatically reduced. I'm guessing your CQM gives more bitrate in the dark color range than the standard one does.
So, all was well in the world. I have always been frustrated by my encodes being a tad too dark though. I recently stumbled onto
this 9-04 thread about ColorMatrix, which corrects that (or the real problem rather). I tried it and in fact it really improved things. So, I started a reencode. Unfortunately, after my first reencode, I found the blockyness was back. Now, there are other differences as well: x264 cli rev 291B instead of 287A, substituted limitedsharpen instead of xsharpen.
I've had a hard time finding an old 287a x264 rrev to test with, so I thought I post here and ask if you think the ColorMatrix change could be responsible. Is there a chance that you tuned your CQM for the incorrect color spectrum that ColorMatrix is meant to correct? Not accusing or anything, just asking so I can narrow down the permutations I need to test.
Thanks!