Is MPEG1 better for low res sources

[scottb721]

If I'm capturing from analog camcorder onto VirtualDub as an AVI and encoding with TMPG would I get a better result encoding to MPEG1 format because of the camcorders poor resolution ?
Or is MPEG1 always worse than MPEG2 ?

Should I match VirDub's capture resolution to the camera's resolution ?
I have been capturing to 480 x 576.

[Bravoxena]

I'm guessing that your camcorder is at least VHS quality. But I believe that Standard VCD is a bit worse than VCD so I would recommend XVCD or SVCD as your best bet.

[hustbaer]

with a good software-encoder, MPEG-2 will always be better than MPEG-1.
(of course only if the resolution, bitrate and so on are all equal).

for capturing i'd always use the maximum height - just like you already do.
the width is far less critical, you can try to go down to 352...
for the best results however, capture at full resolution, uncompressed (or with lossless compression like huffyuv).
then you can apply spatial-soften, chroma-noise removers and all the fine stuff and after that use bilinear or bicubic to resize the video to the target resolution...
but only capture at resolutions that your system can handle without dropping frames...

bye,
--hustbaer