Looking for capture card recommendations, new to this

[Quadzilla]

Hi all,
I am planning on transferring my collection of VHS tapes on to DVD-R. I may also do a little editing such as adding background music and/or chapters. These tapes range from third generation low quality bootleg concert videos to great quality store bought movie videos. I'm having a hard time deciding which capture card to purchase. It seems that most cards aren't without various problems and limitations. Based on some of the reviews and ratings in the "capture card” forum I've narrowed my list down to

ADS Instant DVD
Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe
ATI Radeon VIVO
Hauppauge WinTV
Hauppauge WinTV pvr
Canopus ADVC-100
Canopus ADVC-50
Pinnacle DC30 Plus, DC20 Plus or DC10+

I was hoping I could ask some questions of the group to help me make a final decision.
A few of the things that are important to me are maintaining the video and audio quality of the original tape.

Some of the tapes are in stereo and I'd like to be able to keep the stereo on the final DVD. If the
Capture card doesn’t have stereo inputs how can I get stereo sound from the tape?

If I were to have video/audio synch problems, can it be corrected w/software?

The conversion time isn't very important to me as long as I know the picture and audio quality will be good.

I'm looking to spend approximately $150 US

I’d like to record in full screen 720 X. 480 video.

It looks like the Canopus advc 50 has a great rating but is FireWire and I would have to get a FireWire adapter card (also the ADS Pyro Digital Video at only $50). How do you hook up that type of setup? It looks like I would hook up the VCR to the Canopus but where does the Firewire adapter come in? What's the cheapest I could get a advc 50 for, even used? Also, I understand this type of card would encode to AVI format and that this file would be very large. Does this file then get converted to an MPEG2 file then written to the DVDR or doesn't get converted to MPEG2 as its written to the DVD? I ask because I only have a 40 GIG hard drive.

I've also read that there is some quality loss when converting the AVI file to the MPEG2 file, is this true? Is there any way to avoid it?

Approximately how much disk space would take to record one hour of 720x 480 video into an AVI file?

Will macrovision prevent me from recording my store bought movie's or is there some way around us?

Based on these questions and my current system configuration which of the above capture cards would you recommend?
(It seems like what capture card to use is the question of the day around here!)

Thanks for all your help!

[kalyan]

4 ur required resolu.../ time avi file will not fit 40gb HDD , and u should have a NTFS file syst.. to support such big files.
so dont do avi capture do realtime mpeg2 capture.

since source is vhs only loss of img quality is negligeble.

[dilligaf]

Ive just gone through much the same selection process, Ive just ordered the Canopus advc 100 ($AU675) over the advc 50 as it has macrovision defeat capabilities (as outlined in the reviews). 1 hour of captured dv should be ~13Gb, so 2.5 hours should fit on that 40 hdd with room to spare. A firewire card is required between the dv device & the PC, mine cost $AU40 and came bundle with Ulead Video Studio 6. As kalyan said running NTFS is desirable due to the file sizes.