What are the best settings for TV Wonder VE

[tay666]

I am trying to capture MPEG 1 for use in VCD 2.0
I have a TV Wonder VE capture card and a Celeron 1 gig processor. Running Win98SE.
I am using the digital VCR that came bundled with the card.
I have been playing around with different things to try to improve picture quality but am getting nowhere. I don't have a problem with dropped frames. On the rare occasions it is <1%. I have tried to play around with the adjustments but I just seem to make things worse.

I started out with their quarter resolution setting
352 x 240 MPEG-1 with visual masking
4 P frames per and 2 B frames per
Constant bit rate of 2.4 M bit/sec
Motion estimation at 75 with search ranges of 32 H and 16 V

Then I tried the VCD setting
352 x 240 MPEG-1
1.05 M bit/sec
(can't tell you anymore, because I can't access the particulars of this setting)

Both settings give me very nice looking MPEGs, but by the time I get them on disc, they look like crap. Ranging from blurry, to choppy, to out of sync, and combinations of all 3.

It might be from all the conversions I have to do with TEMPGEnc. I have to run the MPEG through once before I can do anyting with it otherwise the sync gets messed up when I edit it. Then I have to run the cut/merged file back through TEMPGEnc again or Nero tells me the file is invalid.
But I don't think that is the problem. I have done the same with files I have extracted from other VCDs and they look fine when I re-burn them. So I think the file I am capturing and starting with is the problem.

Anyone have one of these cards and know some good settings to start with?
Anyone see anything in the settings I can try to adjust?
Anyone know any other capture software I can try to use with this card?
I'm going to try to capture to AVI tonight and see what happens.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Try Stinky's RegTool 7.5/7.6(free in Tools)it will allow you to make a XVCD that Nero et al will recognize as a VCD.
Also...set Motion Estimation to 100 for better results.