Well, I've been reading the site for the last few days and I have learned a lot from these forums. I'm putting together a modest home entertainment system and would appreciate feedback on what I have planned.

For each of the televisions in two rooms, I was thinking of getting a Gateway networked DVD player. It can stream mpg1, mpg2, mp3 and divx. It has component outputs, which I have learned from you guys is a step up from S-Video. I don't understand all the specs for the device but for $189.00, it looks good to me.

Then I will have an Athlon based pc that will serve the media via ethernet. I have a firewire input for capturing video from my camcorder. I will copy my DVDs to the hard drive for access by the Gateways.

One piece of the puzzle I'm having trouble with is capturing analog video from the S-Video output from my cable box. I don't plan to do any editing to video captured from this source. So I thought that direct to Mpg2 would make sense. Then I read about the ConvertX and thought it may make sense to record some shows in Divx, or at least have the option. But then I read that it looks like the mpg4 it captures has to be rendered to divx manually. And finally I read that some of you prefer to capture to DV and manually export to mpg2 for better results.

Any help on this would be appreciated very much. Feedback on the whole concept would be cool, but I especially need it for the analog capture device/method.