I have been working for a LONG time to have ability to get editable recordings from TV. I use Beyond TV software (latest 4.1 version) with Hauppauge btvand250btv tuner card that has hardware encoder which creates what all seem to verify is a rather standard MPEG 2 file. The latest Sonic MyDVD can allow editing for a DVD authored burn but that does not create an actually edited file of the MPEG2 itself. My goal is simply to edit these for later incorporation in video movies I make. Currently I use Movie Maker 2 or Adobe Premier Elelments 2.0. MM will now receive these MPEG 2 files but does not output to MPEG so using it to edit would require converting to WMV or AVI first or outputting to one of those after… both of which options either add a lot of time and / or involve compressing the file another time which adds loss. Adobe Premier Elements 2.0 begins to accept these MPEG 2 files but then hangs in the process it refers to as “Indexing. I know that Premier states it accepts MPEG2 format but actually is very limited to certain types. If I could work on these files in Premier… I could edit and save them with no loss from further compression.

Questions:
1. Any way to know what MPEG settings Premier might accept and ways to adjust to it? I know that It’s best just to convert to AVI first as PE isn’t MPEG friendly… but it would be nice if just dropping a small file into a larger project.

2. Does it sound easier to just work with an MPEG editor? If so, any recommendations for one that will allow editing clips and saving without re-compressing?

3. What about a card that captures in full AVI (not DivX)… would that be better? Work with a Beyond TV type program?

4. Any other suggestions ?

The two computers I can work with are set up as such:
1. Desktop PC - Dell Dimension 4550, Pent. 4 2.53 GHz, 1 GB RAM, XP Home SP2, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420
2. Notebook - HP dv8000- AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor ML with 1MB L2 cache (2.2 GHz) (X86 based processor), 200GB HD (100 X 2 – 4200RPM), 1 GB Ram (1024 MB 333MHz DDR RAM ( 2 Dimm), Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (appears built on XP Pro), , ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200M IGP with 128 DDR,
Note: HD is slower (4200) than recommended for Premier (7200)

The info I have on a test MPEG file is using VideoInspector tool –

[Video]
Resolution : 720x480
Codec : MPEG2
FPS : 29.97
BitRate : 6836 Kbps
Quality Factor : 0.68 b/px

[Audio]
Codec : MPEG Audio 1 layer 2
Number of channels : 2
Sample Rate : 48000 Hz
BitRate : 128 Kbps