The VideoLAN Forums

I'm really not able to understand that why two pass encoding is not a visible option in VLC ? Two Pass Encoding really increases the ratio of Quality and File Size Significantly over the 1-Pass. Please let me know if there are any possible workarounds available for enabling 2-Pass or even n-pass encoding options in vlc?

It wouldn't be very good option for streaming files, because you would have to access file twice (or N times). And also it is encoder specific setting, not all encoders support multi pass encoding. x264 encoding in VLC supports it from command-line, but I am not sure if it works correctly.

http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_command-line_help

--sout-x264-pass=<integer [0 .. 3]>
Multipass ratecontrol
Multipass ratecontrol:
- 1: First pass, creates stats file
- 2:
Last pass, does not overwrite stats file
- 3: Nth pass, overwrites
stats file

--sout-x264-stats=<string> Filename for 2 pass stats file
Filename for 2 pass stats file for multi-pass encoding.

Yes ... you are right .. 2 or n pass encoding isn't suitable for LIVE Streaming or VOD Server. Infact vlc really does 1 pass encoding very well however when we are encoding (transcoding) into a file then I guess the story can be different because we can access the file as many times as possible [provided we have time which at least a user like me isn't void of ]

I think 2 pass encoding is also possible for DivX and xVid codecs as I have many encoders like Dr. Divx or AVS Video Tools providing me with that option. I guess that as VLC already uses FFMPEG Modules so it can also give users option to provide the n pass encoding techniques. Yes 2 pass or n pass encoding isn't possible for LIVE or VOD Streams served dynamically.

There are better tools for encoding/conversion than VLC if you want to do superb quality encodings.