I have now been authoring DVD's now for just over a year and so far as the authoring element goes have been having good results. The 'let down' is at the capture stage. I use a Hauppage card to capture my MPEG-2's (720x576, 8000-9000kpbps) via various different capture programs such as Neo DVD, Winproducer 3 and Ulead but where I have an AMD Athlon XP 1800 (under Win XP, 512 SDRAM and a LARGE 7200 rpm hard drive) I have frame dropping - not desperately bad but there enough that I will only use homemade DVD's for documentaries not my movie collection. Can I therefore throw some questions to the community:

1)If I went to say an AMD 3.0Ghz would it stop the frame dropping or would it not make much of a difference?

2) Being non software encoding but hardware encoding would a hauppage 'Personal VIdeo Recorder' or similar dedicated HARDWARE capture card be another way to go

3) My sister has a 'Sky Box' (a satellite decoder and HDD recorder combined ) that records perfect quality video. I presume that such is also capturing to MPEG 2 format (via hardware) but can anybody confirm this and at what bit rate. Most significantly how can you transfer the video on a HDD recorder such as this in FILE format from the recorder onto my PC for authoring. Are there in HDD recorders that facilitate such DATA (as opposed to real time video via the scart) transfer?

4) Would a DVD recorder be another option but once again in what format is the video recorded - MPEG 2 and if so at what bit rate?. At first I thought about recording a movie onto a disk via the DVD recorder then transfering the disk to my PC via its DVD-Rom but is it really as simple as this.

Any advice would be appreciated