Hi!

My main objective for using my capture card is archiving old VHS tapes. And I use 352x288 to avoid interlacing troubles.

The latest weekend I've been experimenting with DivX v4.12, and have found it very interesting and easy to use. Just downloading the bundle from www.divx.com, installing, and then the codec is available in VirtualDub.

But, I find the audio part to be a lot more complicated. I've been messing around with LAME v3.91, but so far I've not been able to install it correctly (I think...). I just want a (good) freeware codec which is easy to install, and available under audio compression in VirtualDub after installation. I guess this should possible... Or?!?

BTW... Are there any freeware "official" MP3 codec available (the audio parallell to DivX v4.12)? Or does Windows98 have built in "MP3" encoding codecs which I might as well use?!?

Also:

I'm having a hard time figuring out what kind of format I want to use for my digital videos. I can't decide yet what kind of authoring/burning software to use, and if I should go for VCD or SVCD. This is because of DVD player compatibility issues.

So... In the short run I think I'll use SVCD, to be able to play the videos on my DVD player and TV. But I would also like to store a close to perfect copy of the video files for later encoding in the future, when the world has gone perfect, and all compatibility problems have vanished... Or when I've bought a new DVD player...:-)

Anyway... I think I've made the conclusion that I want to use a DivX solution (352x288) with CQ encoding at 100% quality. On a sample file (about 2 minutes running time) I get an average video bit rate of around 3500 kbit/s. And it's almost impossible to distinguish between the quality of the source and the target AVI file. But I can also get very good results when using MPEG-1 encoding (still 352x288...) with bitrates around 3000-4000 kbit/s...

So what do you experts think? Should I go for the DivX or the MPEG-1 solution? Or maybe something completely different?!?