Please Critique my xvcd

[Farmerbright]

First off, thanks to everyone who ever posted a guide to this site. They have been extremely valuable.

I made my first xvcd and I was pleased with the results, but I wanted to make it better. I captured a "Live at the Bluebird Cafe" show from hifi vhs in virtual dub at 352x240 using the Huffy codec. I then converted to mpeg1 with tmpnc with the following settings:4:3 aspect ratio, framerate 29.97,cbr of 1950, motion search at highest quality, noise reduction, softened block noise with 40 for both.

It turned out well, a little color bleeding from being 2cd generation. And there was a slight blockieness over seams or edges (like a guitar). I captured between commericals and then encoded. The last I reduced the bitrate to 1850 and could not distinguish a difference.

Any suggestions on how I could improve?

Farmerbright

[Poplar]

HiFi VHS? Is that equal to SuperVHS or close to it? I think you should capture at 480X480 or 352X480, i.e., the SVCD/CVD route.

[Farmerbright]

hifi is just stereo, not svhs. I've just got a 475mhz computer and I get dropped frames like crazy if I go to 480x480.