What is best capture settings re:bitrate & resolution?

[alandla]

Hi all. I would like to finalize this if at all possible.
If I want to capture from my TV or camcorder using either my TV Wonder VE MMC7.1 settings for MPEG1 or other program like Virtual VCR for AVI then convert to MPEG1 or MPEG2, what are the best settings?

Which is better to sacrifice to keep file size lower, capturing bitrate or resolution?

To capture MPEG1, you set the resolution at 352 x 240 but would the quality improve if you captured at higher resolution? Also the bitrate is 1150 and would this improve if captured higher?

For AVI, what are the best reolution and bitrate settings if I want to convert to VCD, CVD, SVCD, XVCD? I guess there is no harm in 720x480 for resolution but what about bitrate?

Thanks for any help. I know that I could do a lot of playing around with settings but unfortunately my 2 year old twins don't seem to like it when daddy disappears into the computer room for days on end!

[puertorican138]

I would recommend capturing at 720x480. Make sure you have a good enough bitrate to support the resolution.

[crahak]

Capturing at a higher resolution will yield better results. I personally capture at 720x480 with an mjpeg codec, then frameseve it with avisynth. You load the .avi in your fav encoder and let it encode

[Anonymous65]

http://steve.kittelsen.com/vcd/

[alandla]

Thanks for the advice but I think my question is what is good enough bitrate? Also thanks to Steve Kittelsen for the info. I cannot seem to get any third party capture program to work quite right but Virtual VCr came the closest.
One question about the compression codecs? Are they preloaded in the program so I just select it. I tried capturing with different ones (MJPEG, etc) in the drop down list but all of my file sizes were the same (and large).

[crahak]

A MJPEG codec around 95% quality should give decent results