what file type/settings to use with TV capture?

[hobbystuff]

I am sure problem I am having are related to my lack of CPU.
I have a Leadtek Winfast 2000 TV deluxe card.
64 MB video card
900 Duron
16-bit sound
768 ( 3x256) SDRAM

I have tried every possible setting- my hopes were to us like a vcr to catch my favourite shows and burn to cd or dvd and watch later...
Easiet would be to captur in SVCD format and burn - but quality is just awful. I have to set around 1500 kb/sec in capture to get one hour onto cd.
Then I captured as MPEG2 (dvd) and got huge files.. this is sort of okay but can only watch on one dvd player in the house ( one of them won;t accept DVDRW's) and files are huge.
Have I played around with all kinds of settings and am now almost resigned to capture in divx- I can't even capture in high resolution because picture comes back jerky and out of synch- I thinkthis is my CPU, but I have seen tons of posts from others with less or similar and they aren;t having problems. I just captured one hour of CSI
(divx 352x240 PCM audio) and went to use TMPEG to encode to SVCD , a 900 MB divx file will take 11 hours. This seems too long and too much work to me. The quality of these produce bit lower than VCR, sometimes with slight synch problems.
It there a "sweet" spot of some sort I should be aiming for ? I have new baby and time is limited on computer- I have all ready spent hours on this and getting frustrated. I don;t mind the re-encode that much but must be a better way.
If you are familiar with winfast PVR- you can caprute on pretty much any format/codec/bitrate/audio you can think of and tweak settings ad infinitum. I would really appreciate some help.
Thanks!
Lisa

[FulciLives]

If you can capture MPEG-2 DVD format with your current system (which your post seems to indicate that you can) then your only problem is that you need more DVD players since only one of your DVD players support DVD-RW/+RW

Buy a portable if you have that many TV's in the house that you use ... that way you can take it with you from room to room and TV to TV.

Either that or only put roughly 30 minutes per SVCD disc. At the MAX SVCD bitrate of 2520kbps video and 224kbps MP2 audio you can get 30 minutes on a single 700MB 80min CD-R

And at that bitrate level it will look much better than when you use 1500kbps

- John "FulciLives" Coleman