DV codec differences and aviSynth oddity

[binister]

Info: Captured VHS tapes w/ Canopus ADVC110 via Firewire to my PC. Using aviSynth for resizing/etc and HC Encoder/CCE for encoding to MPEG2.

Issue #1: I installed the Canopus and Cedocida DV codecs and did a quick comparison of the decoded output (between the two using VirtualDub) and as far as I can tell there is 0 difference (using Subtract in aviSynth) between the decoded AVI output. Is this correct? I was under the impression certain DV decoding codecs are better than others.

Issue #2: I get an aviSynth "frame error" in my encoding apps when opening the source AVIs with the Cedocida codec but the Canopus codec works fine. The really strange part is both codecs work fine with the same clips when opened in VirtualDub. The error in my encoding apps always occurs around the time another AVISource() call is made and always during the first pass of a multipass encoding.

Can someone with Cedocida do a quick test for me?

Create a 3 minute test clip from any DV AVI file (make sure it has a 4CC code of dvsd and is opened by Cedocida).
Create two directories "Tape01" and "Tape02"
Copy the test clip to two files called clip01.avi and clip02.avi in both of the Tape01 and Tape02 directories (you should now have 2 directories with 2 clips in each directory).
Create an avs script called "base.avs" in both Tape01 and Tape02 directories that looks like this:

function openSource() {
  source = AVISource("clip01.avi") + AVISource("clip02.avi")
  return source
}

Create an avs script called "clip.avs" in both the Tape01 and Tape02 directories that looks like this:

Import("base.avs")
clip = openSource()
clip

Create another avs script called "movie.avs" next to the Tape01 and Tape02 directories:

clip1 = AVISource("Tape01/clip.avs")
clip2 = AVISource("Tape02/clip.avs")
movie = clip1+clip2
movie

These are really stripped down scripts but they should work in our test.

Finally try to encode the movie.avs file in either CCE or HC Encoder using 2-Pass VBR. Give it a try 2 or 3 times. For some reason my encode process crashes around the 80-100% mark during the first pass. You will notice I have some nested avs scripts referenced in there. That along with the Cedocida decode codec is what seems to cause my encoding apps to panic. If I merge all of those scripts into a single script I don't have any problems.

Thanks for any help you can give me, I have been struggling with this for the past 4 days. I have about 50-60 hours of footage that I carefully created 100 aviSynth scripts for in order to burn to DVD. As a software engineer by trade I tried to modularize it but haven't had much luck!