Clip help

[vodkafish]

I was looking for a simple capture card to grab some clips from old VHS tapes, and record a few things from my dvr.

At the store, I saw the Adaptec Videoh DVD (not media center). With rebates, the thing came out to $99, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Well, I came back here and saw not-so-great reviews, except for those who use Movie Mill, which I cannot (new chipset most here say is the problem).

Sonic myDVD is very clunky (I've never had anything run so slow on this machine before [2.4 p4, 1g ram]), but it did work for me.

While it's nice to have all these clips now, my main goal is not to make DVDs currently (I will down the road, but that's secondary). I simply want to make some clips available online, which means I then have to convert all clips to something else (either divx or wmv I guess).

So - I'm looking for opinions about what I should do. Should I keep this thing, make my clips, save em for a later date and convert one by one to something else? (btw - need suggestion about what to use to do that, looking for something simple) - or should I just scrap it (attempt to return) and pick up another direct to mpg device?

[SenorDogoLoco]

vodkafish,
You are doing the right thing digging into the reviews on this forum. Keep reading the Capture section to figure out what is right for you. It took me several months, dozens of hours reading and bad experiences with 3 "cheap" analog capture devices before I realized I had to make a little bigger investment in my project to get the quality I wanted.
Good luck.

[vodkafish]

Thanx man, I always try and read around first, but I realize you may always miss something.

I don't mind making these short clips to store as mpg, and then convert whichever ones I want to wmv/avi, but as many have written, this software is awful.

Was your project similar to mine, and what did you wind up deciding to go with?

[SenorDogoLoco]

My project was similar, but my goals may have been a bit different ... to do reasonably high quality conversion from analog tape to DVD. Creating video for the internet is much different from creating high quality DVD video.

I eventually went with the Canopus ADVC-100, based upon the reviews on this forum ... the reviews will tell you a lot more than I can.

[vodkafish]

Aww crap, now I'm reading about it, and it seems just as easy to plug in, and that there's more software choices (which is really my only problem, the video itself looks great)...

Perhaps I'll buy & return...

Any comments from anyone?