KVCD: no success? quality worse than original?
 

OK, after countless hours of reading the forums here and at vcdhelp.com, I finally was able to burn my first KVCD. The process went like this:

Started with an xvid (AVI) of Animatrix.
Extracted audio (WAV) with VirtualDub.
Converted audio to MP2 with Headac3he.
Created an AVS Script using Moviestacker and the optimal script for Avisynth 2.0 posted here.
Opened the AVS Script in VirtualDub, and frameserved this to TMPGEnc to create an M1V file (352x240, 2500Kbps, CQ 70).
Used bbMPEG to mux the M1V and the MP2 file to create my MPEG.

This process worked fine, and the results were OK (more on this in a second). I was able to fit the whole movie, 1hr 40 minutes, onto one VCD with room to spare.

Now, here come the questions. Hopefully a few of you can answer one or more of these.

1. The quality in the above process was worse then my original process, which was to just load the AVI up directly into TMPGEnc and then encode it using the standard KVCD templates. However, when I loaded the AVI directly into TMPGEnc I used the Noise Reduction feature, and when I frameserved with VirtualDub and the AVS Script I did not. I thought that the AVS script would 'clean' the movie better, and that I wouldn't need to use the Noise Reduction. Should I always use Noise Reduction in TMPGEnc? Could something else cause the loss in quality, like the act of frameserving itself?

2. Is there a way to create chapters, preferably without using VCDEasy? I have the last freeware version of VCDEasy, and I know it supports this, however I can't get it to work. I created chapters every 5 minutes (to ease the pain of fast forwarding), and then made the resulting BIN / CUE pair in VCDEasy. I then burnt this BIN / CUE using Nero, the burn image process. However this won't play in my standalone player (Philips 724). Burning just the MPEG as VCD (non-compliant) as I mentioned above works fine. So, is the chapter information written to the MPEG file itself, or some of the other extra files that make up the VCD structure? If its written directly to the MPEG, I think I could use ISOBuster to extract the modified MPEG from the BIN file and then burn that as VCD in Nero. If not, is there another easy way to create chapters? Or is it worth it to keep trying to determine why the burned BIN / CUE won't play (whether the issue is with VCDEasy / Nero / Philips 724)?

3. The Philips 724 won't play the KVCDx3 (528x480, 2500Kbps), so I though I would compromise and take the lower resolution with the higher bitrate. So I modified the standard KVCD template (352 x 240, 1800Kbps) to 2500Kbps. Will this have any effect on the quality of the movie at this resolution, and if so how much? Would I be better off trying the 352 x 480 resolution?

Any help I could get with these few issues would be great.

Last, but not least I just want to say thanks for everyone who has posted their techniques and tips and questions. I've read so many different forum posts and articles, that I'm sure pretty much everyone here has helped me in one way or another. Also, thanks Kwag, for making all of this possible.