Improving Video Quality of DVDs Made from Dish Network DVR-625

[RonMan811]

Improving Video Quality of DVDs Made from Dish Network DVR-625

I am new to capturing video from my Dish DVR 625 hard drive for the purpose of burning the resulting file to DVD. I made my first recording and did OK but am disappointed there was a mild loss of video quality. My goal is to minimize this as much as possible.

I'm running an ATI TV Wonder VE card that only has coax and yellow RCA inputs and am using the ATI capture software that came with this product. I'm thinking this may be the biggest area of improvement to make. If correct, what is the best product I can go with to improve my future capturing? Even though I do not subscribe to Dish Network's digital service at this point, I'd like to make sure any system improvements I make are going to work well when I move into the Hi-Def world. Another thing I'd like to consider is to have my future capture device external so I will easily be able to use it with different PCs. However, if this will compromise the quality of capturing or cause other unwanted problems, I'd like to know that.

Right now I am using the Nero Suite (Ver 6.3) for my recording software. While setting up to make my burn, I set the video bit-rate to 9.8 Mb/s. Are there significant improvements to be realized in later versions like 6.6 or 7.0? Or, is there a better product to use for this purpose?

My PC has a 2.4 Ghz processor and 1 GB of RAM so I should have ample horsepower. During the capture and then Nero encoding and burn, I shut down all other processes to ensure maximum resources for the work that needs to be done.

In advance, I appreciate any help and expertise passed my way.

[bits]

If indeed you are using Nero to encode your video then that may be the biggest reason for video quality loss. Nero is not known for having a good mpeg encoder, my experience with Nero NVE is the same as others, it is marginal.

BTW I do not think, regardless of the mpeg encoder you use, that you are gaining anything by using such a high bitrate, 6-8Mb/sec CBR is about as good as it gets for SD stuff.