After a lot of reading I settled on this TV tuner/capture card. I know all of my issues stem from having no foundation in recording knowledge. So even when I read a tutorial, it's still using words that I have no clue about. Anyway - enough whining.

I want to capture and encode slightly below average quality VHS tape. I can capture with the winfast card, and play it back on PC. I am using MPEG2 high quality with a 640x480 setting, 6000 kbs, ntsc. Audio is CD quality PCM.

Unfortunately my DVD player is a panasonic cv51. It will play vcd, but not svcd. I wanted to use the svcd trick - which should work with this player. Here is what I don't get (first on many things :P ) When I try to use MPEG tools in TMPGenc, the program always crashes at about 5% conversion. Every process that can be shut down, is shut down. The HD has been defragged. I have tried various virtual drive settings along with the XP default. No luck.

What's weird is that I loaded the winfast capture into Nero, and it told me that the format was not a standard svcd. It asked me if I wanted to convert to 480 x 480. I told it OK, and it did it. Still haven't played it back.

And I still haven't had time to see if I could take this svcd and change the header using TMPGenc.

Why doesn't winfast support a 480 x 480 setting? Is it just because? Why did TMPGenc - guessing - run out of memory? As you can tell, I have no clue what I'm doing. But it's still sort of fun to slog through it.