Compressability problems

I have run into some problems encoding Mission: Impossiple. It is only 1 hour and 45 minutes, so i thought it would make an excellent 1 CD rip. I am using the Gordian Knot package and DivX 5 pro and followed the guide here on Doom9.org. I used 128 kbit/s MP3 audio and 740 kbit/s video, which should make for quite good quality. But the quality of the movie was low. When i checked the compression it said 43%, which is much lower than what i usually do. But when going two CDs the compression tests says 83%, which would be wasting CDs, don't you think? I can't believe Mission: Impossible can't fit on one CD. Am i doing something wrong here? I thought a bitrate of 740 kbit/s would produce pretty good quality. Should i try a one CD rip again? Or go two CDs with AC3? Any help is greatly appreciated!

I forgot to mention that the bits/(p*f) is 0.254 at a resolution of 800x336. The compressability is still only 53% even at two CDs. I'm not really sure how i can tell what quality i will achieve after the encoding. Is it the 1740 kbit/s video stream, the 0.254 bits/(p*f) or the compreassability of 53%? Sorry if i'm being too dumb.

800x336 was the resolution of two CDs if i were targeting a b/p*f og 0.25. The problem may have been, that i was trying to keep the b/p*f value around 0.17 (for one CD) and 0.25 (for two CDs). I will just disregard this value if i do a compressability test next time. Thanks for your help!

I make it a two-CD rip with AC3. I've done Die Hard I recently and it compressed much too good for two CD's (the compress test was about 97% at maximum resolution with 448kbit AC3). I just encoded the movie at 100% quality (quant 2), added the AC3 and got two nice 645MB files from it :)

Zalbar, I agree and disagree with you. There is nothing wrong with encoding a movie at the full DVD resolution of 720x576 or (x480 NTSC), and stretching it at playback...but... When you resize more than 100%, it can... a) Seriously hurt the compressability of the movie (encoding information that isn't in the source material isn't exactly a good encoding practice...) and b) Create artifacts and other problems. Ringing and haloing often occurs. There is no real excuse to encode > 720. You are wasting bits on information that is simply not there. If you absolutely want the extra resolution, the best option is to stretch it in realtime during playback. All you need is a decent player such as BSPlayer or whatever.