The answer appears to be yes on both fronts. I made a test on my quintessential anime clip. 0.46 yields 0.9741681 SSIM 4537KB 2.0a yields 0.9710652 SSIM 4557KB (--aq-strength 2 --aq-metric 3) 2.0a yields 0.9724646 SSIM 4546KB (--aq-strength .3 --aq-metric 3) Baseline profile, defaults, no fast pskip.

@DS: 1.- Is there any minimum birates required for VAQ2 to be efficient? 2.- How can we compare different settings if SSIM is irrelevant? 3.- What is the --aq mode/metric/strength default in VAQ2? Thanks a lot DS for your great job! - Dan