First, I'm a newbie... 100%, bonafide amateur. Anything I've learned thus far has been by stumbling in the dark, so please bear with me.

I've been trying to convert some video files into VCD's. I'm partial to VCD's because they're simple and they'll play on limited hardware. I'd love to use a newer MPEG4 codec, but it just won't play on a 350MHz G3. That, and it's nice to have something that will play on virtually any DVD player.

Anyway... my problem is this: Every VCD I make, without fail, ends up significantly darker than the original. If this were in print, I would say it looks like it was out of the printer's gamut... but that may be an irrelevant analogy here. It doesn't matter what the source is... WMV, DivX, uncompressed AVI, even another MPEG-1. I'm fully aware of the fact that MPEG's are lossy by nature, and thus prone to this kind of degradation, but I was hoping there might be some way to limit the damage. Thus far, I've just been using default ffmpegX settings on this. Any suggestions?