grainy video

Hey, A couple times now, I have used nero to create SVCD's off of movies that, on the computer, look to be DVD quality(almost). But once they are played back on the DVD player, they appear grainy and washed out. Is there any other format that might give me a better transfer?

TIA

Might just want to use a different program to do your encoding. TMPGEnc is a popular MPEG encoder in Windows. It has a 30-day trial for MPEG2 (SVCD/DVD) encoding, so you can google for it and try it out. There's presets for various types of target media.

I see, I see. Now, my DVD player also plays AVI files. Would I get better quality to just burn a large AVI onto a DVD? (I was thinking of getting a DVD R anyway)

What format are the movies in on your computer? If they're .avi's in a codec that the set-top player can read, you'd be best off not converting it at all. Just burn them to CDs and play.

Well, the CD capture software I use (Studio 7) will convert the captured video to anything you want (including SVCD) But when I go to convert to avi, the filesize is something insane like 7 gigs... I just bought a TV capture card to transfer my VHS tapes to VCD or..something. Just so I can play them on my DVD player.

Well, .avi is a video format that can accept different kinds of codecs. When you're at the screen to make the AVI, click "Settings". In there, you can specify video codec and audio codec. For video, you could choose one of the modern MPEG4 codecs (like xvid or divx, google for them to install) and audio, mp3 works pretty well. (I have Studio 7 SE that come with my firewire card, so I'm assuming these things work kind of the same...may be wrong)

You say your dvd player supports playing avi files? Check and see what codecs it supports. The newer ones coming out that do play avi's have MPEG4 decoding support, so you'd have to be sure that whatever you encode it in adheres to the standards. The two I mentioned above do under most cases, though I know you can break it with divx pro.

The default format for my AVI creation is DV, which runs 13GB/hr. For a TV capture card, it's probably just uncompressed RGB, which can be a lot more than that, depending on your resolution.