the sample evo was created with dd, copying a few kb from the beginning of the
original evo to grab header stuff and then 15mb from the credits at the end of
the movie where the problem ffmpeg has with it is easiest to see. its not
pretty but ffmpeg accepts it anyway. both using ffplay on the original evo and
trying to encode it to x264 using ffmpeg produce the same problem (mplayer
plays the evo fine) - it plays slow and appears as if the video pauses for a
fraction of a second every second or so. (this is not a slow computer problem).
this is easy to see in the sample - the credits if played correctly should
scroll smoothly.

an example of my commandline for ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -s 1920x1080 -r 30000/1001 -cropright 640 -i MainMovie.EVO -f h264 -s 1280x1080 -aspect 2.37 -vcodec libx264 -b 5000000 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me hex -subq 5 -trellis 0 -refs 3 -bf 16 -b_strategy 1 -coder 1 -me_range 16 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -threads 4 -pass 1 test.264

the problem is evident in both the output of pass 1 and pass 2, played with
either ffplay or mplayer. im using svn checkouts of ffmpeg, libx264, and mplayer.