Quality drop of film in idvd disc image or DVD

I’ve made some films in FCE HD exported them to QT and used a idvd (6.0.3) theme to write a dvd, all I I should and have done many many times before.
All the films exported to QT are in good quality when you watch them in QT, even if you play them in IDVD they look perfect, but once the dvd is written, or even written to disc image (so it can’t be a bad dvd) there is a huge quality drop. It does not look like a high quality apple made film anymore, compare it to an old analog filmed thing with huge bad pixels blocky view, like I used a crystallize effect in imovie (but the film has never been in imovie), not smooth at all as it is playing in QT or did in FCE
It even shows bad on my tv, so not only on my 15,4 macbook or 20” cinema display
This is very humiliating when you play it to a crowd of friends
Is this a idvd 6 problem, might switching to DVD studio Pro be a solution?
I have had this problem ever since I used IDVD6, could returning to IDVD5 be a good cure?
This can not be a good direction of working…
RC
MB Pro 1,83 GHz 1,5GB Ram 120HD   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   20" Cin-displ; Lacie 120-500-600 Extern HD

A few points:
First of all, how long is your movie? The closer it is to Best Quality's 2 hour limitation the more artifacting may occur. I find that if I keep things under 90 minutes I get much cleaner results. If it is over 90 minutes I split it over two projects (this all assumes you are using Single Layer DVD/burner. DL will, of course, handle longer movies differently)
The suggestion to make sure everything is PAL is totally correct. Make sure all your FCE sequences are PAL as well as iDVD
Just to clarify: From FCE Export as Quictime Movie ... not Quicktime Conversion. You can decide to make it self-contained or not but this will not affect the quality.
Compressing to MPEG2 is certainly an "invasive" process. DVD Studio Pro and Compressor gives you more options, but for most of my movies I use iDVD and get clean results ... except, as I said, if the running time is very long.
The other thing to note here: What is your source material? Are we talking DV original? Or were the original video files another codec, like MPEG4, or MPEG2 from a DVD ... if so, you already went thru re-compression in order to work in FCE ... by the time you make a DVD, yikes. If it is all DV original, you are really only encoding once.
And viewing your work on a TV applies to every step of the process, including in FCE. While working there, use a TV to monitor your work and you will have an accurate idea to what your image quality actually is

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