I bought the Canopus ADVC-1394 card recently.
Before that I got Pinnacle DV-10 plus before this, the quality
was very bad, but I don't blame it since it's a cheap $100 analog
capture card.
So I bought Canopus 1394, hoping it can enhance the capture
quality. I chose Canopus because of the reviews from this site,
also because a friend of mine who lives in Japan also bought
Canopus. She captures analog TV video thru her Canopus card
by mpeg-2 hardware encoding, then directly convert to mpeg-1
through tmpgenc. The resulting mpeg-1 has super good quality,
despite of the small size of the file(VCD datarate). When I say super good
quality, I MEAN super good, like DVD quality. The picture is clear, bright, the letters that appear on the screen are also very clear to read.

However when I use my ADVC-1394 to capture to mpeg-2 and convert
to mpeg-1 with tmpgenc, the capture quality is horrible compare to
my Japanese friend's. The video looks dull, old, picture quality appears
vague, even when I set the datarate very high, ended up with huge file size, the picture quality is still bad.

I know that the original analog source has to be good in order to get
good capture video. But with the same video source, even my old
Pinnacle DC-10 plus card can capture better newer looking video than the current Canopus.

I used the same computer for both my old and new cards.
I don't understand why w/ the same brand card, my Japanese friend
can produce great looking(small file) clips where as I got large, dull, old, & vague looking clips.
I heard from somewhere that Japanese has good quality hardware overall, could this affect the captured quality?
If not, what can I do to solve this problem?