I live in the UK and i go tthe above sted external tv card to capture digital tv. It captures it i very good quality but the size is huge (liek 1.17gb for 45 minutes) since it is mpeg2. I have seen very good quality captures of tv programs which are xvid or avi and are also about 350 Mb for 45 minutes. My questions are as follows:

Is there anyway of making the capture software software that came with this device use avi or xvid format?

if not, is there any way of comverting to xvid without loss of quality to about 350 MB - ( i have already tried different optios with Virtualdub but as i decreased the rate in divx or xvid the quality got much worse)

Finally, if no help with the above two, is there a cheap avi capture software that i can get? ( i know of showshifter but it is about 85 dollars which is expensive for me)

any info will be much appriciated

thanks