I have had good success with my VCDs since starting out 8 months ago but I notice as is often posted here that the quality is somewhat inferior to the original source (in my case VHS PAL). What I have noticed is that the captured AVI (704x576) is significantly sharper than the VCD encoded MPEG (352x288) when played back on the PC. Even though the source is VHS quality, around 240 lines Horizontal resolution. I know you can not improve on the source quality but I believe there may be a case to optimize the quality by perhaps encoding to XVCD or SVCD in some cases, bearing in mind the extra apparent detail associated with the higher resolution AVI against the final MPEG. I did try a short sample SVCD with the standard TMPGenc PAL template and burning as SVCD with NERO, but even though the still scenes were noticably sharper than the same video as a VCD when player back in a Pioneer DVD player, scenes with motion become very jerky. I have read a bit on the forums here and the suggestions seem to indicate uping the bitrate, however the TMPGEnc template uses a CBR of 2600 and from what I read this is suggested as a suitable bitrate. Has anyone else had success overcoming this problem?