In this paper, we propose a rate control technique for H.264/AVC using subjective quality of video for off line video coding. We propose to use Video Quality Metric (VQM) with an evolution strategy algorithm, which is capable of identifying the best possible quantization parameters for each frame/macroblock to encode the video sequence such that it would maximize the subjective quality of the entire video sequence subjected to the target bit rate. Simulation results suggest that the proposed technique can improve the RD performance of the H.264/AVC codec significantly. With the proposed technique, up to 40% bit rate reduction can be achieved at the same video quality. Furthermore, results show that the proposed technique can improve the subjective quality of the encoded video significantly for video sequences especially with high motion.