MPEG2 Capture

[ikileo]

Pardon the board noob.
Ploughed through a lot of stickies and guides to get here...here goes...

Capturing Analog TV ( a damn antenna) with my Pinnacle PCTV Stereo TV Card. My country uses PAL. I used to schedule & capture TV shows on MPEG1 using the inbuilt PCTV Vision at 25fps, 352x288res. I activated MPEG2 capturing capability for the program and now can record at 720x576 res though the file is pretty big.

Reading through couple of guides from here, DivX-Digest, doom9; they recommended that I record in MPEG1 due to various problems that may arise using MPEG2 (syncing issues). How true is that?
If I do record at MPEG1, I am only able to capture at 352x288 with PCTV vision, which is pretty smal for me. And when I enlarge it, it just looks ugly. However when I capture using MPEG2, I can capture at a larger res and scale down a little if I want to.

Are there other programs that can record well and should I use them over the one that came with my card, 'cos mine has scheduling which I need. Tried VDub(had some hanging), Tried VirtualVCR (not too great either).

Oh, btw, the videos I capture will eventually be encoded into DivX or Xvid to view on my PC or to be burned on CD+Rs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. A bit lengthy but thank you for bearing.

[Stormin Norman]

Sounds like your on the right track then, no problems...then great. I would stick with MPEG2 and burn DVD's, but thats my preference. As long as your source file is good, I dont see any problem of what your doing. Might wanna check out Avisynth though, might/prolly be usefull to ya.