New to Capturing - What format

[shankomatic]

I just purchased an ATI 8500DV Video/Capture board.

I would like to capture, then conver the captures to SVCDs.

If I capture as an AVI the file looks great on playback, but if I attempt to run it through Tmpgenc it looks terrible. What is the best way to maintain most of the quality of the AVI file.

If I capture directly as a MPEG2 the quality is farily decent. I run the MPG through DVD2AVI and through Tmpgenc to create the SVCD formatted MPG file.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions that could help.

[hwoodwar]

It seems to me, that you are encoding twice. If you want to capture directly to MPEG-2. Why not capture to MPEG-2 with an SVCD template/profile. Then just drop the SVCD compatable MPEG-2 file into whatever program you use to burn SVCDs. You should have an SVCD template/profile in the MMC that came with the 8500dv, if not then just make a custom template to SVCD specifications.

Now if you want to capture to avi and then convert to an SVCD compatable MPEG-2 file, I suggest you capture to avi using the HuffyUV codec. Then import the avi file a TMPGenc SVCD template, set motion search precision to high, change rate mode control to 2-Pass VBR, 500-1000 min, 1800-2200 avg, and 2520 max video bitrate. I know these settings will give you a good increase in quality from your previous tries (AVI-MPG that is.)