Hello all!. I've been reading this site for a long time and finally joined since I got hooked on encoding and creating svcd's as a hobby. I can't tell you how much I have learned and still learning from here.

Ok, I'm new to this and I'm in need of honest opinions and advice.
I'll list my tools and system info in case it matters

Win98se
320megs ram
1100mhz P3
40gigHDD main
10gig slave for audio and video conversion.
Nero 5.5.56

I am using Virtualdubmpeg2 to extract audio and sync it or split mpeg's to burn on 2 disks and review mpeg2 after encoding.

Tmpgenc Plus Retail to encode .avi to mpeg2 (SVCD) or clean up mpeg's using filters.

Nero to burn
I have no dvd, my pc is 4+ years old and i'll wait for my next PC.

I love TMPGENC the quality is great, the options are good, I'd like more plugin support like VDUB but it is soooooo slow. I wanted to clean up an avi metal video using the sharpen and noise filter and it took 48 minutes to do 5 minutes of the video. Normal avi's of 700,000kb take 6 hours to encode to SVCD using no filters. Is there anything faster that will encode as the same quality as TMPGENC also with the same versatility of resolution and options for Lame mp3-MP2? Any of them free?
I also find using the Source option slider to select start and end frames moves very slow. I'll click on the slider and move it and it takes TMPGENC 10 sec to show the video and move the slider to where I stopped it. The Direct Show is bumped to 1. It doesn't like ASF files that much unless they are perfect.
Ok your all gonna laugh, but are you supposed to hear audio when using the Preview mode or the source mode playback in TMPGENC, cause I don't. I see the audio "wave" in green below the source video but how do you know how much scew to add if you can't hear it, without putting it in VDUB first.

In VDUB. I'm really confused on the Fast recompress-Normal Recompress options. If I take a file, say 7000kb, and add a sharpen filter, what is the best way to recreate the file? Can you reencode using DVIX with the filter and full processing so it doesn't come out to be 15,000kb when it was 7000kb to start with?

Thanks for the help and advice.