I am doing a personal project that entails doing some captures from VHS video tape and I want to output the result to DVD. I have seventy eight 23 minute clips that I need to encode, hopefully using as few DVDs as possible.

Here's my system specs:

Hardware:
1.8GIG P4 on an ABit TH7-II
512MEG RDRAM (800Mhz)
Dual 60GIG 7200RPM Western Digital Caviar drives
ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon (32MEG)

Software:
ATI MMC (included with video card)
TMPGenc Plus
DVDit PE edition

Using ATI's MMC I have had no problem capturing straight to MP2. (following a demux/conversion to correct the 44.1Khz audio that MMC captures) In this method I have been able to burn a DVD with 'average' quality video. However, I keep thinking I can do better.

So what I'd like advice on is how I can capture to AVI which I would then manually convert to MP2. (using TMPGenc) I don't have a problem changing the settings and such, but I don't have any point of reference, so I have no idea what codec to use, what settings work best, etc.

I'd appreciate any advice on how to set up for a capture that will give me a good quality base for which to encode from.

Regards,

Savant