VHS to DVD couple of questions

[buick]

Lets first say I have been trying to do this for a few years and haven't follow threw but need to get it done. I have several 15-18 year old vhs tapes (family films all in SLP mode) that are getting in pretty bad shape and I need to get the digital. I'm looking to just retain best quality without wasting a bunch of space (garbage in garbage out). Back when I played with this in the past it seemed that converting to svcd retained about the same playback quality as playing out of the vhs player. What I was using in the past was a JVC HR-S9600u for my player and a jvc dvd recorder setup to dump around 2:45 hr of record time onto DVDRW disk then dumping the vobs on the computer to edit. If I recall I used some converter software to convert vob to svcd but have also tried just using the vob's . I used tmpgenc dvd author to do my authoring and saved to dvd. That all being said what would you recommend to do? I really don't have a problem if you recommend some other capture device or other process if you think it would be better or easier.
1. Should I remove the dvd recorder and use some other way to capture to computer?

2. Always looking for easy to use software to author files, motion menu's would be nice and must be able to do chapters and menu's,transitions and work with large file sizes

3. I personal play everything on a media streamer but want to give dvd's to kids for christmas so I would need to stay with dvd format.

4. Bit rates or capture size?

5. Everything was 4:3 format all my sets are 16:9 but the kids sets are 4:3 (not sure worth messing with any conversion)?

I'm always open for suggestions on what has worked for others
Thanks for any help you can offer.

[yoda313]

Keep tmpgenc dvd author unless you want a more professional tool - tda should be all you need for a personal project if this is what it is for.

Get quality blank dvds - taiyo yuden or verbatim to be safe.

bit rates and capture size don't matter as much with harddrive space being cheap. Your capture size could be anything you want. But you will have to ensure your final mpeg2 output for authoring will fit on either a single layer or dual layer dvdr so you may want to avoid max capture sizes unless you want to do a lot of editing. If you do edit a lot then capture at your highest bitrate and convert to dvd from your edited file.

If they were 4:3 originally they will be captured in 4:3. No need to change anything at all. Unless some are letterbox widescreen. If they are you can use crop tools to make a 16:9 dvd. But if they are all full screen 4:3 you don't have to do anything to them.

Edit - besides if you try to force 16:9 from 4:3 you will either have it really small inside of black bars to preserve the ratio or everything will be stretched and warped to fit a 16:9 screen. Either one is useless in my opinion. Keep it 4:3 and it will look just fine - you will have the pillar bars on the 16:9 set just like when you watch 4:3 material on a 16:9 set - those are just empty spaces on the sides since there aren't any information to fill that. Don't try fooling with it since you won't get good results.

Edit 2 - you could capture directly to the computer and save time with the dvd discs and that process.

HOWEVER if you continue using the dvd recorder to capture first it gives you the flexibilty of recording to disc and editing later without taking up a lot of harddrive space with a captured file if you aren't going to be working on it right away. You can just do the realtime capture to the dvdr and hold on to the disc until you are ready to edit and finish it on the computer. That way you don't waste hd space until you are ready to work on it. But its your choice - capture directly to the computer or to the dvd recorder. Either is just fine.

But if you captured to the computer first you could capture to something like a dv-avi codec (13gb/hr) in a lossy format for better editing rather than the somewhat restricted vob capturing you are doing with the dvd recorder. But either way will work.