ATI drivers and MMC upgrade cause poorer video capture ?

[tigerman8u]

yesterday i upgraded MMC 8.1 to MMC 8.8. i also upgraded to the newest driver version. since upgrading, my video in tv tuner and in captures are of a lesser quality. videos seem to be grainier and colors seem to be off, especially in skin tones, the picture is also darker. i've used tint, brightness, contrast, etc. but can't seem to get the picture quality i had before. i use lordsmurf's guides and got excellent quality before with D1 and 1/2 D1. i'm using the same guides with the new versions. Any help/suggestions greatly appreciated before i decide to reinstall the older versions.
ps. i followed ati's guide on unstalling and installing the new version.

[lordsmurf]

Downgrade again. I've not tested 8.8 yet, waiting until after Christmas, and even then, doing it on a secondary machine.

Maybe. Hearing too many bad things about 8.8 to want to mess with it. What I have (8.1 and 8.7) works fine, not seeing a reason to update.

[tigerman8u]

thanx lordsmurf
downgraded and reinstalled mmc 8.1 and all corresponding programs and drivers from my installation cd. everything better now.
i tried mmc 8.8 to see how the mpeg-4 worked. after doing a couple small tests i loaded the files in avicodec. the results showed divx as the encoder and 3000k (3mb)b/s bitrate. this resulted in a very large file for mpeg4. i was having better picture quality and smaller file size using xvid as encoder in mmc 8.1. however this could be due to the poorer quality i was getting with mmc 8.8. unfotunately mmc 8.8 wouldn't work for me untill i upgradad the drivers. kept saying incorrect version.
another funny thing that happened when i upgraded was my cordless mouse started acting up ie clicking and scroll button not working properly. since downgrading it seems to work ok so far. sounds wierd and don't know if drivers could of been causing a conflict.
anyway happier camper now. again thanx