I've been recording a favorite show of mine and was wondering which standard I should use for the best quality. The source in my case is a regular, normal cable hookup. I'm using an ATI TV Wonder card for capturing duty. I've used the instructions on this site for setting up my ATI card for VCD compatible capturing. I think I'll still run the mpg file through TMPGEnc to re-multiplex it as well.

My question is, should I consider trying to capture SVCD quality instead? Or is that a total waste of time and energy with a standard cable broadcast? The first show I captured I used the highest quality setting that the ATI program had. It produced a 3.8 GB file for a 1 hour show. My VCD setup produced a 600 MB file for the same time period. On my computer the quality of this recording is noticably worse than other file. At fullscreen on my monitor it looks pretty bad. But perhaps this won't be a problem after burning to disc and playing it back on a normal TV. I've also noticed (ironically) that normal TV broadcasts look quite lousy on my HDTV. Granted, it rocks for playing DVD's or a true HD broadcast, but for normal TV my old 27" Magnavox looks better. I'm hoping the same will be true for the VCD's I create. I haven't actually burned one yet.