Ok, over the past month I have read many of the postings on here, tried several capture cards with both hardware and software capabilities. I have used almost every program I could find, in every combination you can think of, and here is what I have come up with as my best results for capturing my original VHS tapes to VCD format for playing in a stand alone DVD player. My baseline VHS for this has been The Empire Strikes Back (THX version) and was selected due to the fact it has many sceens using both high and low action frames. I used the new ATI All in Wonder 8500 card with 128mg ram fro the hardware on the PC. The VCR was a sony and was connected through composite video routed through the Sima Color Corrector Pro Series. The PC was powered with 512mg ram and a Pentium IV processor running at 2.4gh. I used ATI's latest software for the virtual VCR with it set to capture using there predefined DVD - Highest Quality setting with no filters turned on to capture to an MPEG-2 file. I then took the resulting file (about 5.5 gig) and rendered it to MPEG-1 using the latest version of TEMPGEnc using the "VCD Film" template set to the highest quality setting. This process took about 5 hours to render. I next split the resulting MPEG-1 file using the "MPEG Tools" utility for "cut and merge" selecting "VCD Standard" for the resulting two MPEG-1 files. I burned the VCD's using Easy CD Creator 5. The captured MPEG-2 file looks to the naked eye exactly like the VHS tape (even though it was captured at DVD resolution and not VHS). The resulting VCD's look almost perfect too, VERY few macroblocks and LITTLE pixelation. The only problem I have with the resulting VCD's are that they seem to be very sharp but sometimes the image seems to have some hesitation with items moving across the screen (such as a huge star destroyer flying against a virtually black background). Does anyone have a suggestion on how to "smooth" out this action? Once over this hurdle I'll be able to save my large VHS collection from video extinction (unlike the large casset tape collection I built as a kid).

Guy