After endless hours of tweaking TMPGEnc and VirtualDub to come up with the best combination of capture & compression -> CD-R, I have now (what I believe) to be the best compromise for capturing VHS sources using VirtualDub.

My goal is to always achieve the best quality possible. Many people will suggest capturing in full resolution. Even with a large hard disk however this takes up way to much space, even with Huffyuv, and there's always the problem of de-interlacing the source afterwards (another topic alltogether).

I do all my captures in Windows 2000 using my ATI Rage Fury Pro vivo.

My video settings are:
Format (UYVY) at 720x480
Compression: Huffyuv "best" settings
Use Noise Reduction - Defaults (always use this)
Use Virtical Reduction - I use 2:1 Bicubic

The benefit here is, you capture virtical resolution of 480 but resize it to 240 on the fly, thus reducing disk space requirements, and no need to de-interlace!

Load up TMPGEnc and load an unlocked version of the default vcd template (create your own based on it).

Change the encoding resolution to 352x240, set the quality settings to highest quality (slowest).

I always make xvcd's, so I change the bitrate to constant quality (100%), maximum bitrate 2200, minimum 0.

Apply the Sharpen Edge filter, set both to maximum, uncheck "field based" since the source isn't interlaced.

Uncheck "no motion search for still picture part by half pixel" (if checked)

Encode!

Based on my own experience, this routine provides the most constant quality captures and very good looking xvcd's which are nice and sharp. Something I used to think was an impossibility.

Hope this benefits someone..

-Brad