BitVice MPEG2 Encoder - 2.3

I purchased BItVice almost a year ago, looking for a higher quality alternative to mpeg stream encoding (for use with DVDSP2 &3). I wasn't disappointed with my purchase. At low bit-rates, BitVice beats the pants off of compressor, delivering a picture that appears to be encoded at 1 to 2 mbps higher than it actually was. If your seeking the ultimate in quality and want higher bit-rates, your output is likely to look better than compressor, but not by the same margins as when using low bit-rates. Where bit-vice has usually been weak is in it's speed to compress. I have a 1ghz AL PB G4 and a 2.0ghz G5 tower. Encoding on the powerbook is usually five to six times slower than with compressor (often, I'm forced to use compressor because of time constraints). On the G5, BitVice is speedy enough to get the job done when you don't have a lot of projects in your que. So today, when I tried BV v. 1.6, my first surprise was that the test video I encoded, did so in half the time on my G5 as I would have expected from the program in the past. This puts it nearly in the same speed league as compressor (with regard to the G5) and that makes this release a major improvement.