Analog capture vs. DV capture: which is better?

[mpwr5]

I want to capture some of my old (and ever aging :) VHS tapes, then burn them on DVD-R's. I would appreciate any thoughts on two routes I could take to capturing the video.

One way would be to use a VisionTek Xtasy Everything, capturing analog video, using Vdub and Huffyuv to make a losslessly compressed AVI, then encode that to MPEG-2.

The other approach would be to get the Canopus ADVC-100 (and a firewire card), capturing DV. Then transcode the DV to MPEG-2.

I've heard that the Canopus product is very solid (but Visiontek's not too bad either). However I've also heard that DV compression can introduce undesireable effects, and having two lossy compressions (first DV then MPEG) is not good. On the other hand, the VisionTek digitizes inside the computer chassis, where there is plenty of RF noise.

What do you think?

By the way, the techniques to capture an AVI then encode MPEG-2 are pretty well documented on this site. How would you transcode DV video to MPEG. Could you do that with TMPGENC, or would you need to expand the DV to an AVI first?

[YngwieJM]

DV can be transcoded using tmpgenc- I do it often. I also own an Xtasy card that I use with V-Dub for analog source caps. If you have the disk space (and enough cpu horsepower) to do full-frame avi caps using V-Dub I would say that is your best bet. Many people claim that there's not much difference in quality at lower resolutions but if you can do full frame avi. (Just my opinion)