Is it worth it to switch

[EAO]

From a Leadtek 2000XP dlx to a capture card that can process MPEG2?

I'm trying to get the file size down and TV capture at a quality that will not let me know it's not TV on playback.

I have been disappointed with the fuzzies of the MPEG2 quality coming from this card, on it's max DVD NTSC settings. The card does fine with VirtualVCR recording into .avi. If I do that, then I can't tell that my TV capture is a capture on playback. But the size of .avi files...

So is a hardware encoder like the PVR-250 (or ...what else would you suggest) going to give me quality that will keep me from knowing it's a capture on TV playback?

I'm off to check out the capture card ratings now, but if anyone would like to suggest something below $100.00 that works well, thanks in advance.

[fmctm1sw]

If you got about $100 to spend, have you thought about a bigger hard drive for those AVI files? $100 got me an 80GB driver almost a year ago. I imagine you could do pretty well with $100... Just food for thought

[EAO]

I'm sitting with two 80 gig HD's in my PC now. It does not take long to fill one up. I've been capturing .avi on one, and converting it to MPEG2 on the other. Thing is I'm capturing 4 different series of 1 hour TV shows. I have to wait until I have two episodes of the same show before I have enough to burn to a DVD - actually I'd like to try and see if I can capture 3 edited shows on 1 DVD at TV quality - but I haven't finished experimenting with the TMPGenc settings, and space is a concern.

The PicVideo MJPEG 19 quality works out to what??? (I'm not at home, and this is still new to me.) About 9 gig per hour - with extra run time to capture it all - unedited? It fills up quickly. It works well, but it takes up more space than MPEG2.

There are other shows I wouldn't mind viewing. If I could get the same quality and freeup space then I would be inclined to capture more.

I did see the VideoOh and WinTV PVR reviews, and intriging as they are, they are both well over $100.00, so I'll pass for now. I may consider a new video card late next year, and I'll look into ATI then (currently a Geforce 3).

I suppose that I could buy a 250 - 300 gig HD, but those are definately more than $100.00. Don't get me wrong. This should be the biggest problem I have in life. , so I'm not complaining. I just wanted to see if there was a fast easy solution, that I had not read when searching this forum.