Firstly I have to say, HandBrake runs great on my Intel iMac 2,0 GHz. Video encoding is so much faster compared to my PCs.

Just one thing: The maximum width for a PAL movie is 720 pixels. If I want to keep aspect ratio, the maximum height for a 16:9 movie is 400 px, which means a loss of 176 lines! People who know about the PAL format know, that PAL does not use square pixels. Encoding without loss of lines must be 1024x576 pixels for 16:9 and 768x576 px for 4:3 movies.

Now I have set the size to the real size (720x576), which doesn't look very good, and then I have to stretch it to 1024x576 using QuickTime Pro and save it again.