I recently did a 2-pass encode of a file to XVID at about 1850kbs... and was rather shocked to see how badly it dealt with smoke and fog... especially in night scenes. I don't have the original now but hope to try again. Any suggestions for settings? Thanks!
Oops... I no longer think this is an encoding problem... but a decoding problem. The files in question look fine using VLC. The problem seems to be with WMP.