XVCD Questions - Am I doing this right?

[gschilling]

After a weekend of playing with my new AverDVD capture card, and Ulead software, I've successfully captured, encoded, and burnt a home video for the first time onto a CD-R to play in my Toshiba DVD player. I'm very happy with the quality of the XVCD format, better than VHS definitely. I'd like to walkthru my process, and ask if you have any advice on whether I should be doing things differently.

1. Capture
I'm connecting my Sony Hi8 video camera to the AverDVD card, and using the Ulead DVD Movie Factory software to capture in DVD-Video format. The MPG that is created is about 1.5GB for 30 minutes of video.

2. Encode
I'm using TMPGEnc to create a non-standard VCD file. Some of my settings are a little different than one of the XVCD guides posted in this website, but basically I'm using a bit rate of about 2500kbps, and audio is 44100Hz, 224kbps. This takes about an hour on my Pentium4 1.8GHz computer, and the resulting file is about 650MB. I'm just wondering if I'm using the best encoder, and the right settings.

3. Burn
I'm using Nero, and creating a non-standard Video-CD file so that I don't get re-encoded down to 1150kbps. File burns fine, and plays great in my DVD player, but I don't have too many options for menu creation in Nero. Just wondering if there's anything else out there that can support XVCD.

That's about it. If anything jumps out at you as not being the best way to do something, then your expert advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Gene

[Vejita-sama]

If you're capturing to MPEG why are you re-encoding with TMPGenc? If you plan to encode with TMPGenc (and have the HD space) I would capture in either uncompressed avi or with a 'lostless' codec like huffyuv. This should result in better quaility encodes.

The general rule of thumb is to capture at as high a resolution and bitrate as your system can support, edit as necessary, then encode to a lower resolution/bitrate.

[gschilling]

The MPEG that is created when I capture is very high quality, 8000kbps. An AVI would be way too big I think. I tried once and the file was almost one GIG for less than two minutes. Either I did something wrong, or the AVI files would be unmanageably big. It would be easier if the Ulead software was able to capture in XVCD format.