H.264 looks horrible at higher bitrate than iTunes videos

I export my videos as .mp4 with H.264 at 2000 kbits/s. I was looking at some videos from the iTunes store and they have a lower bitrate but have significantly higher quality. My videos are full of artifacts, especially if there is any movement. Is there a way to better optimize my video output so that it will look better without significantly increasing the bitrate (I am stuck with H.264 for my PS3)? Thanks.

Wow...I started playing around with this a little more, and I can see what you mean (now that I think about it, I don't recall ever getting a usable result using the movie to mpeg-4 iMovie feature...I probably should have thought of that before).
What I was able to do with decent results was this: I exported from iMovie to quicktime movie using h.264 at the best quality, frame reordering, no bitrate constraints, etc. The I used mpeg streamclip (free at http://www.squared5.com/) to convert that movie to mpeg-4. The resulting movie was not as good as the original, but it was watchable and by far better than the output from iMovie. Try this and see if you like it. It looks like iMovie for some reason doesn't like to output directly to mpeg-4.

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