Hello, please beware for a LONG post! I'm hoping someone here can at least offer suggestions, but I'm out of ideas

I plan to put permanent English subtitles onto a movie, as well as karaoke song lyrics in Japanese. Karaoke, fading, and animation codes will be in place. Also, to make the Japanese text appear properly, I have inputted the tag {\fe128} to each line (character set). I have not added the special effects, but I have added karaoke and have roughly timed it.

This subtitle file has been made with Substation Alpha but with advanced substation tags, so the file was converted to .ass with Subresync, that came part of Vobsub. The thing is, using these special tags requires me to change the file to a .ass extension to work properly. In addition, when hardencoding the subs onto video, I believe I must use the Text Sub 2.23 filter in Virtualdub. The subtitler filter in Virtualdub will not work for advanced substation tags. I'm using regular Virtualdub, not VirtualdubMod or anything.

My source video file is an MPEG-1 file, ripped from a VCD. I have also converted the file to AVI files, both in XviD and DivX 5. So, I have 3 types of files for the same show, just in case one's quality came out better than the other when reencoding with the subtitles. Resolution is 352x240 for the MPEG-1, same for the AVI's I made.

Here's where the "fun" starts. I go into V-dub and try to hard encode the advanced substation subtitle file using the Text Sub 2.23 filter that came with Vobsub, as I was instructed. However, no matter what I do, the quality comes out AWFUL. Not necessarily the video quality (that changed a bit, but not much), but the subtitles are very blurry and pixelly. I have tried adjusting the shadowing, fonts, font sizes, font colors, and encoding bitrates. I have had the same results. This occurs with each of the unsubtitled files I made for sources, whether I encode them to DivX AVI or XviD AVI. I have also tried frameserving via V-Dub to TMPGEnc to make another MPEG-1, and got the same results in subtitle clarity.

I have tried to hardencode the subs in V-dub completely uncompressed. The subtitles only came out a tiny bit better....not AS blurry. Also, I took the karaoke tags out and just used a plain Substation Alpha (.ssa) file and used the subtitler filter in Virtualdub. Same blurry subs.

At this point I have run out of ideas. I have no idea what the source of the problem is nor do I know what to try next. I don't know whether it has to do with Virtualdub or my video source itself (maybe resolution?). Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try or what the problem is? Thanks in advance!