Hi all,

I stumbled on what I personally found to be the best settings for encoding DVD to SVCDish format using TMPGEnc 2.52.

Load the SVCD PAL template and unlock

Format: MPEG-2, 480x576 25fps (PAL)
Change to 2-pass VBR min 200, max 3200 avg depends on length, but around 1800 for 43 minutes (approx 650Mb)
I've managed to overburn to 750Mb at an average of 1500kbps for roughly 1 hour of video, quality still excellent.
Audio 160kbps stereo
Change to high quality motion search
Deselect no motion detect for still picture by half pixel thingo

No filters, no soften blocks
Encode. Takes about 10 hours on a P800 for 45 minutes. I've started batching them up as I know I'm getting a good result each time. At last!!!

In another forum condone pointed out that your dvd player might night be able to handle bitrates at over 2500 so check that first.

Cheers,

Paul