DIVX 5.03 for medium motion problems

[danwatt]

I have been recording some presentations (speaker+overhead) for a few months now with my DV camera, and after converting them to VHS for some people who want copies, I store them away on DIVX on CD. I have noticed in 5.03 some very strange things happening. The desired filesize is right on with the 5.02 version, but the quality is somewhat lacking. I do a deinterlace plus a noise reduction on all video with predefined settings (same room and usually the same lighting for every tape I make). The speaker usually walks around a little, and the camera will zoom in on the overhead, but other than that, that is all the motion that is in the video. In 5.02, when you turn the playback options to a minimum, you would see some blockyness around the speaker, but that was about it. In 5.03, the blockyness is much more noticable around the speaker, and sometimes evident in other parts of the frame. It also appears that the scene detection is off, since it frequently re-compresses (re-draws?) the static background (with the exception of shadows and some noise), at least more so than 5.02. All my videos are encoded at 500kbps for 720x480, and if I make a 360x240 (1/2 resolution) copy, those are done at 200kbps (slightly higher bitrate per pixel).

I know this site deals mainly with ripping, but this sort of thing has equal application since DIVX is supposed to be a well rounded codec. I was wondering if anyone else has noticed something similar in 5.03. I am currently doing the "Old 2 pass" method in 5.02, but if that does not work, I am going to have to reinstall 5.02 to compress the 40GB of DV that is backing up on my system. Maybe this would be a good test of the "low motion" npass settings (I did mention in an earlier pass that maybe I should try that out).