Capture to Dvdr ok except for dark scenes

[nutstoyou]

Hi, my problem is I capture digital satellite to ultimately burn to dvdr. I can capture great 702x576 to picvideo mjpeg at quality 19 with no dropped frames. Resulting avi looks very good. Then I use tmpgenc to convert the avi to pal dvd 720x576 and the mpeg2 produced is looking great too. Finally I author with tmpgenc dvd author or ulead dvdmf2. Burn with tmpg's own burning app or copytodvd.
Powerdvd plays the dvdr fine but in both my standalones very dark scenes take on a cartoon-esque appearance, grey and grainy as if drawn in a comic. Lighter scenes are fine but I like my horror flicks so getting the dark scenes right is a must. I tried tmpgenc cbr and also 2pass vbr but there was no difference. Tried on 2 different but unbranded media both of which work fine when copying my commercial dvd's showing no problems with the darker scenes.
Can anyone shed any light (pun intended) on what I may be doing wrong?
Thanks.

[HAGGARD]

Did you tried HuffYuv Codec???
Huffyuv is a very fast, lossless Win32 video codec. "Lossless" means that the output from the decompressor is bit-for-bit identical with the original input to the compressor.

I Guess that the compressor in the picvideo mjpeg codec has some trouble with darker scenes.
Since Huffyuv isn't lossy codec it would encode better than any other (lossy) codec...

'HAG

[nutstoyou]

Thanks for your reply HAG, yes I've tried huffyuv but unfortunately my pc isn't fast enough to capture with huffy without drops (only 1ghz).
I was hoping somebody would suggest maybe a filter I could use on picvideo but it looks like I need a new pc for xmas