I was recently encoding some .avi's to dvd and was having a hard time dealing with a night scene with a lot of detail at the extreme end of the luminanace spectrum. After nearly giving up, I decided to try adding cmp=3 and subcmp=3 to my ffmpeg.cfg, knowing that it would slow the encode to a crawl, but hoping it would buy me something. Well, I was astonished to find that the detail in the darkest and lightest parts of the scene were preserved VERY well afterwards. BTW, I did NOT set precmp.
