Using "cartoon mode" in Xvid encoding

[XiOUS]

I was wondering what qualifies as cartoon?

I know that Simpsons, Southpark, Donald Duck... all qualifies, but how about for instance: Shark Tale, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Final Fantasy, and other animated movies?

What do you gain if cartoon mode is enabled and should it be enabled when encoding for example Shark Tale?

[Ark]

Basically a "cartoon" is mainly made of large flat areas of solid color, without gradient (like "the simpsons"), so movies like Shark Tale, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Final Fantasy are all like natural movies for me.

[XiOUS]

Thanks Ark for your response, it's like I suspected, "cartoon mode" should be disabled while encoding films like Shark Tale.

[Shinigami-Sama]

basicly it should be used on what ark said but it seems to work well on clearer b/w movies because of hte monotone nature of tehm
or so I've heard from various people
and a 5min trailer i made a while back
it works well on things like htat =)
which makes xvid my fave for encoding anime =)
keep up hte good work guys =)

[phædrus]

I'm an Xvid newbie, in fact I'm working on my first real Xvid encode in VDub as I write this -- of Casablanca. No doubt I have not optimized all the options, but we'll see what happens. I was shocked to find how slow the second pass goes. In Divx, the second pass is somewhat faster, but in Xvid it is taking twice as long as the first pass. I hope I didn't mess something up.

Sorry for the OT jabber, but to the point of this "cartoon mode" question, you've all explained when it should be used, but not what it does, and how. I assume it reduces blockiness, but how does it do so? I never encode at very low bitrates. Normally I shoot for at least 1800kbps, and usually a bit more. Will it be of benefit mainly to the low bitrate crowd, or would it be equally beneficial for people like me? (I'd be happy to put one 22 minute cartoon episode on a CD, if that's what it took to get exceptional quality, but I'm not averse to lower bitrates, if cartoon mode helps reduce need for bits.)

[Shinigami-Sama]

fyi mate
most anime avaible online is xvid compressed and comes out 170mb give or take and they;re about 24min long
so
(I'd be happy to put one 22 minute cartoon episode on a CD
that seems very overkill to me
unless thats raw video of course :p