Hello all:

After many experiments and reading many guides and postings on this site, I have come up with the following settings for capturing & converting to SVCD format. This results in fairly good quality when played back in my environment (comparable, but not better than VHS). I can get about 43 minutes on to a 700MB CD with these settings. The MPEG files are usually about 800MB (still haven't figured out why you can get an 800MB file on to a 700MB CD, but it works). I primarily capture hour-long TV shows, edit out the commercials and burn.

I'm looking for any suggestions about how to further optimize my settings. I have read that SVCD can be better than VHS but I have not been able to beat my old Sony VCR yet. I mean to try DivX at some point but I really prefer to watch these on my TV, and hooking up a PC to the TV is not really an option at this point.

Your comments appreciated, Drak

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Capture settings:
480x480, 29.97 (NTSC), AVI w/ Huffy compression.

Frameserve to TMPGEnc via AVISynth:
352x240 bicubic resize, inverse telecine to 23.97 fps

TMPGEnc settings:
2-pass VBR, bps: 300 min, 2700 max, 2300 average
motion detection settings: High Quality