Q: Adaptec AVC-2310 MPG2 Capture - Need: Shrink/Fit to DVD, Redo Audio

[jpneok]

Hello, first off I want to thank everybody that has posted questions and answers and articles here over the years, I've actually been to this site many times in the past to figure out some things and now I'm finally registering proper.

I tried to make my thread title as clear as possible, for my own sake too. =)

I own the Adaptec Videoh! Media Center USB 2.0 setup, which uses an AVC-2310 USB capture device, to which I've hooked my VCR. Although the MyDVD software that comes with it is... not terribly reliable, it works for the most part and I can get audio and video.

With MyDVD (the only program that can see this capture device), there are only 3 options for quality: Best, Better and Good. I have just managed to record a 4 hour MPG2 which, except for its duration showing up as negative numbers and such, works fine, audio and video.

My gripes are that I have no choice about a number of recording options, and so I have only uncompressed LPCM (.pcm ?) audio, and at "Best" quality, this 4 hour file is 13.7GB (the lowest option "Good" would still be about 9GB) big, far too large for Nero or what I have to "fit" to burn a 4.7GB DVD.

1) Is there a way, and if so, how, to redo the audio, maybe compress it or something, I'm not really sure of the terminology. I tried the steps in the Rejig (?) guide to resize/"fit" this file to a smaller size (it just crashed btw) and in the audo demux step, the stripped .pcm audio file is 2.7GB by itself!

I also tried DVDx 2.8 which also allows you to resize/fit a file to a certain filesize, and auto-demuxes your audio, but it said either my audio or video bitrate was too high and aborted.

2) For as good quality as I can get off a VHS tape, what SHOULD audio and video filesizes and bitrates be for say, a 720x560 (is that the normal "TV" size?) MPG2 to play in a DVD player? Would using another format help without sacrificing a lot of quality, etc - is AVI better to use?

Thanks for any and all help and thoughts etc!

[trhouse]

That must be an old version of MyDVD because Sonic incorporated Dolby AC-3 audio into version 5 several years ago. Newer versions also have "Fit to DVD" as an option.