I've run into this too.  In fact a lot of hardware decoders don't like things that are produced above 4.1 profile.  Things that are crash my ATI video card if I have hardware acceleration turned on for H.264 when it happens.  It'd be nice if we could get a profile for it, but I suspect we'll have to manually configure a 2-pass job in 2.8 to make it produce compatible files.

The splitter is for playback, it shoudln't affect creation of mkv files.
What is your preferred file format set to in the options?  Maybe that is overriding the profile setting?

After some tinkering I got H.264 hardware assisted playback going on my system last week.  I thought I'd see how some of my FairUse Wizard rips worked and when I tried them, well the grahpics driver or something didn't like them much.  I'm using MPC_HomeCinema version which does have some restrictions on the content it can accelrate with DXVA and I'm assuming maybe it's hitting that?

Does anyone know what settings might work?  I normally to H.264/AC3 in an AVI container and I'd like to try and keep to those lines if I can.  I don't mind switching containers but I would like to not re-encode the audio if I can avoid that.

Thanks!

I've been trying to encode a roughly 2 minute clip using varying settings on CODEC settings.  As far as I can tell, based on what I see in the log file, FUW is ignoring whatever you set in the codec or it's own interface and just using some setting it's decided on everytime.  Is anyone else seeing this?

Awesome! I'm glad I bought the full version, and the timing is great, because I just started looking at other encoders with improved x264 support this week since FUW hadn't been updated in so long!

Oldish thread...still...

The guess is almost right.  ESS is referring to a chipset in some standalone DVD players that have "mpeg4" support.  In particular the Philips DVP-642(A common player) uses it.  The ESS chipset is relatively limited, in particular it doesn't support GMC or QPEL so those features have to be disabled to produce content that is playable on players with ESS chipsets. Using the ESS setting does that afaik.  So in fact the ESS setting should increase compatibility, but at the expense of some quality improvement features. 

I am guessing the quality/speed slider bar does something like adjust the ASP in use but that one I am not certain on.

I tried this on a quad-core box recently.  It doesn't appear to be threaded for more then 2 cores.  Given the nature of encoding though, I'm not surprised that you can't get much more benefit from additional threading.