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Hello
I've been killing myself looking for a decent mpeg2 software to convert my vhs to dvd. I've tryed power vcr 2, win dvr, pinnacle studio 8 SE. If anybody can help me out. I'll greatly appreciated.

What capture card are you using? To be honest, usually the best capture software is the stuff that comes bundled with your card. I experience all sorts of weirdness when I tried other software capture programs with my Leadtek XP2000 deluxe. Oh, and don't capture directly to MPEG2, capturing with compression can be a ugly thing. I suggest using the huffy codec (you can find it at www.videohelp.com in the tools section), which is lossless (not losing any quality from your tape) and THEN convert the huffy .avi file to MPEG2 using TMPGEnc (you can even add filters in at this point to clean up some of that analogue yuckiness like grain and ghost tears). This takes a little bit more time (or a lot of time if you have a weak computer) but it is very worth it if you want to get serious results transferring to DVD. If you need any more help just ask

Capture: I output the VCR into my Mini DV camcorder, output to firewire input on the computer. I use Nero Vision Express2 to capture the video & to author the DVD movie.

The Mini DV camcorder just digitizes the analogue video/audio on the fly.

A 1 hour video will take abou 25GB in raw form on your HDD.