im pretty new to this capturing game and i dont fully understand a lot of things about it, im trying to copy VHS to DVD in as high quality as possible, could someone please tell me if im using the best possible settings for both programmes or if im doing something wrong in the capturing or encoding process

this is how ive done it

1) capture in virtua dub 720 x 576 resolution

2) before capturing, in the video tab i select compression then i use Picvideo MJPEG codec i configure it to quality 20, tick the 2 fields if more than 40 lines box, tick the codec enabled box and i select the subsampling 1/1/1 box, then i select the audio rate (44k/16/s) i put the frame rate to 25 for pal

in the video tab it also has a thing called compression compatibility (what should i select on this thing (previously ive just been selecting the same as i did in the other compression menu is this correct or should i be selecting no recompression?)

ok now im ready to capture, i capture and usually it captures with little or no frame loss and im left with an avi file

then i load it into tpmgenc (this is a trial version) in the other settings box, the video tab - i usually leave everything at the defaults apart from the rate control im not sure whats the best one to pick here which one should i pick for the absolute best video quality? and also what values shall i put in the average minimum and maximum bitrate boxes (if required) previously ive just been putting the highest possible value in all 3 boxes but i think this is where my downfall is

so ive got the same avi clip and i encoded them to superVCD 5 times using all the different rate controls and i set them all to maximum so ive come to playing them back and the quality is very good but you can still see little squares every few seconds and not crystal clear quality like my original videos, all 5 clips are the same file but they all look the same to me, could the quality be not perfect cos ive encoded them at supervcd and not dvd? (note i couldnt get them to encode to dvd cos it split the file into mpeg2 and a seperate wav file)

by the way, could my problem be that i havent calculated a bit rate? ive read a bit about this and dont understand why it has to be done maybe this is why the quality isnt perfect? im looking to get around about 2 hours footage on to 1 dvd

i would appreciate some pointers on these subjects and let me know if im doing anything wrong and correct me!

thanks in advance