Recording artefacts upon editing.

[Freerider4]

I am using sage to record tv shows I miss as does everyone else with Sage.

I am using THE GREAT setting the dvd 2.0gb/h as I find that the DVD Standard is over kill and VCD is to low to covert to Divx if I want to keep the recording.

I have noticed that recently Sage seems to thrash the disc upon start up of recording.
This seems to result is something wonky in the keyframing at the start of the recording. I can play back the recording it glitches a bit however is watchable.

If I edit that recording (I use Womble Video Wizard which is quick and effective and does'nt re encode which is nice) however the written out mpeg now is full of blocky artefacting and the image through out this edited mpeg is unwatchable.

My solution so far has been to compress these messed up versions down in raw format to VCD or SVCD then edit the ad's and rewrite out. Then compress to divx.

This is annoying as the Divx is ultimately lower quality than I know I can get.

Has anyone any ideas why this may be happening.
What DVD qualities do most people use to avoid these types of errors or for optimum image quality to disc space?
Oh my harddiscs are defraged on a regular basis so that there is contiguos space to write data to when recording. Any other ideas?

-free4