Before I spend the money......DVD drives and capture cards?

[redlester]

I thought this would be the best place to ask some questions as I am new to all this. I have decided to go for recordable DVD now that it is relatively affordable, mainly for transferring old VHS stuff and also for backing up/archiving PC data files.

I have made the first purchase - a 120GB hard drive to go with my existing 75GB, but I still need to sort out the hardware for capturing & recording and I want to avoid expensive mistakes. So any comments/advice on the following would be appreciated:

The DVD writer I had in mind is the Sony DRU-500A as it supports all formats other than DVD-RAM. I haven't seen any negative comments on it so far....

At the moment I have a Win-TV card which can do analogue video capture but not encoding on the fly. So I need a graphics card which is able to do the latter. I do not want to have to record to PC then spend hours encoding files before writing to DVD. I like the look of the ASUS V9280S - will this do what I want? Are there any better/cheaper alternatives that I could consider? I am a bit unsure about how the VCR would connect to the capture card - my VCR only has SCART output, presumably there is a special cable required?

This may be a dumb newbie question, but is there a way of recording straight to the DVD in real time from VHS without having to first create a file on the PC?

I'd be grateful for any comments on any of the above.

[spiderman2k1]

There are alot of new program's that do encoding very fast. I do both and with DVD2one encdoing is fast then capturing. Now to author a DVD take's about 15 or 20 minute's you do this after you capture now I would rather do a encode with DVD2one it encode's in 17 minute's and make the vob file's to burn with nero. Now instantcopy 7 even make's copies with menu's take's me about two hour's for a two hour movie to encode about the same as encoding. I would only do capture if you want stuff from TV or old VHS tape's you need to back up. For captureing I love the Dazzle 2 go to this website site Dazzle 2 might have problem's with some AMD mother board's http://stop.at/dazzle2 also WinPVr 250 and 350 are very good. Also i like MPEG2VCR for video editting