SVCD & DVD quality issues

[OutSiderBR]

This is for the greatest gurus I had the opportunity to know and read in this site. I am a Linux newbie, though I use it for more than 6 years. I have a smathering of slackware, my preferred distro, and know some of the ways to configure and install progs in it.

I was recently trying to convert a .AVI film to DVD and was really startled by the fastness with which the conversion took place (am I being pedantic?). I then took a 3 mins sample and converted it with TMPG, with TMPG and the Avisynth filter LimitedSharpen (by Didée) and plain mencoder. I found the qualities quite comparable on my TV set, though the mencoder file was bigger.

Questions now :

1-Is really mencoder quality comparable to TMPG (my best choice) ?
2-Would transcode do better ?
3-Is mencoder speed really much faster than TMPG's ?
4-Is there another application that does the same with a friendlier GUI (tvid has too many dependencies) ?
5-Are you stressed with all these noob questions ?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Outsider

[wmcbrine]

I have not been able to get MEncoder to produce MPEG-2 output that works properly on all players. But where it does work, the quality is impeccable; and yes, it's very fast.

I use mpeg2enc from the mjpegtools instead. It's not fast, nor does it have a friendly GUI (though there may be an add-on package for that). But the quality is good, and it works everywhere.