I encoded everything I could get my hands on with ASP. I was storing it on hard disks so size was a very little concern.
It was amazingly good at shrinking the size of low motion dark movies and cartoons with relatively little loss to quality. If you cropped the video to one of the magic numbers it supported You could get away with some astounding results.
But raising the bit rate on it usually yielded marginally poor results. Even running bit rates relatively close to raw MP4 yielded The same artifacts in high motion that you saw in the much lower bit rates.
I occasionally ran across movies that didn’t work well with it. I probably spent three months trying to get a really nice encode of The Fifth Element. The movie checked all the normal boxes It was relatively dark it had relatively few background motion scenes. But VBR at 1500 and CBR at much higher rates, is asteroids in the opening scenes just turned into a rave and the chase scenes stuttered like hell. To be fair the 1500 VBR was super super tiny. For the size the quality was very impressive, just not archive worthy. But you could pump it up to 6 gigs which was bigger than the original MPEG, and it just failed to touch the quality of the original disc.