You haven't clearly told us what the problem is. I don't see anything wrong with the face and "it looks like the color depth is too low" is extremely vague. What exactly are you pointing out to us?

Nothing wrong with that. It's a phenomenon called image compression. Unless you're encoding at the highest quality possible stuff like this will always happen. Ways to get rid of it: - Encode with higher quality (bigger filesize/higher bitrate) - Use filters to smooth the video

1. i have try'ed a min quant. of 2 and a max quant. 2 its the highest qual. setting i think... and min bitrate of 1000 but it doesn't help. i think its an divx311 related problem. i have done this scene with xvid and divx5 and doesnt get this color prob in dark areas its very strange. 2. i have try'ed some filter like smart smoother hiq or 2dcleaner and they doesnt help much only at extrem high settings and then the whole movie looks washed and that isn that what i want. could you give me some very high settings of divx311 plz. then i try if it helps. if anyone else expecting the same problem, plz help! i dont know how to fix this!!!

If DivX 5 works why do you need to use DivX 3?

if i mux divx5 and ogg vorbis with oggmux the video stream gets corrupted on some parts... i dont know why... i have try'ed it several times and the ogm has this little errors at the same situation every time, it looks like a keyframe is set wrong or something like this...

What you are describing now is a known problem resulting from DivX5 (I believe the B-frame code in particular) in combination with the ogg format. However it's only a decoder problem which can be easily fixed by using the ffdshow decoder instead of the DivX5 decoder. In any case your video is perfectly safe, it's just playback that's corrupted.

Hmmm, I've done few experiments with XviD on Anime, but the results looked very nice to me. H.263-quantizer, linear scaling (curve-compression '0' on high and low), I-frame boost 100% (to reach I-frame quantizers of around quant=2), below I-frame-distance something like '25' and I-frame bitrate-reduction 50% (that way consecutive I-frames don't get a boost in bitrate - and they are still smaller than P-frames could be). Wasn't much of a problem, you might give it a try. And good luck with your encoding anyway!

I hope you'll get a nice result. And don't use lumi-masking on Anime.

iam tested your settings and they helped me very much! now my xvid encode looks as good as my divx5 encode with same size. i think use xvid now, because divx 5 does some color modulating on color transitions that i dont really like, it makes the color transition less blocky than in xvid but also looks some kind of washed. so thanks again, now i can continue my anime encodings :)