Agreed. In many cases, the VCR couldn't even track properly. Besides, if someone's going to complain about the "blockiness" of what was an exceptionally bad picture to begin with...well, I don't think anything's going to be good enough for them.
True enough, indeed. And I completely understand the encoder having trouble with a bad, old source. But what really irks me is that it appears to have been done with a very low-quality encoder; ie: DVDShrink, or the like. Personally, I would have used Cinema Craft -as I do for all my backups- and pass it to the maximum - when you're dealing with a shitty source, it is very important to retain everything possible. The blockiness is clearly the fault of the software used, and not the source or the person doing the work. And that's a damn shame.