I am capturing video from existing VHS tapes with the Plextor PX-TV402U. I am making materials to use in college lectures under the educatinal fair use guidelines.

I can't spend all class on 30-60 minute tapes when I only need short 10-12 minute segments (not always contiguous) and especially want to skip the more dated parts - so many educational tapes are dated. I also like to insert text with comments or instructions for active viewing.

Anyway, I want to capture in a format that gives me a video library (source) of reasonable quality, and also easy to edit. I want to save the projects I produce in a lower quality format that is good enough for playing clips on the classroom projector using RealPlayer - I'm not interested in making quality DVDs or anything.

I have been using Plextor's setting of "DviX(R) amd MPEG-4" format with "MPEG-4 MP2 Ep (Extended Play)" profile. I am not exactly sure what the combination of these settings means, but it does seem to result in 1/3 smaller files than when I captured in MPEG2. The extension given is .avi

Using the WinDVD CReator software that came with the card, I don't seem to be able to edit/assemble and go back out to this format. I can get some MPEG4 or DVI output options, but they are a lot larger. I think the frame rate is the same but the resolution may be upped a bit.

I also see some Windows Media formats that result in really small files (like 1/10 the size - or smaller). I can likely use this for in-class viewing, but I don't want to save edits of my source material in this format. Maybe I need some other editing software. I tried some shareware MPEG4 splitter/joiner, but it would not read the .avi files I captured.

If anyone is familiar with the Plextor card and the capture format/profile options and the write to disk formats, I would really appreciate some guidance on the best formats to use for:

1) capturing source
2) editing source library
3) produced clips for in-class use (here low quality is OK)

Thanks for reading this far