To address the time-consuming nature of an exhaustive search for desirable encoding parameters, encoding the representative segments with trial encoding settings (306) may include, in a class of implementations, encoding parameter prioritization. Instead of relying on an exhaustive search, a limited set of encoding profiles is selected for trial encoding profiles 155. Continuing the previous example, a limited set of encoding profiles out of the 13,440 possible permutations for the 5 example encoding parameters discussed above is selected. For instance, trial encoding profiles 155 includes encoding profiles that use each of the three possible values for adaptive quantization. In contrast, for the subme encoding parameter which has 7 options, trial encoding profiles 155 only includes two of the seven options. For the ref encoding parameter corresponding to the number of reference frames, 4 of the 16 different available values, such as 1, 6, 11, and 16 reference frames, are included in trial encoding profiles 155. For the part encoding parameter, the original 10 different values that specify the partition size for intra (I), predictive (P) and bi-predictive (B) macroblocks are included in trial encoding profiles 155. However, for the trellis parameter, only one option, such as uniform quantization with context adaptive arithmetic coding, is included in trial encoding profiles 155.