I picked up a copy of PowerVCR II on ebay for $10, and I am very pleased with it overall. I've been using this to convert taped cartoon shows over to VCD for my daughters, and the results are very, very good.

Video editing with PowerVCR II files is tricky business -- audio sync problems crop up when you try to do simple things like crop/edit commercials, but the work-around that I've found is to do "rough-cut" edits using the PowerVCR II "Video Trimmer" editing tools; these don't give you precise frame-by-frame control (it seems to move to keyframe points regardless of where you specify the cuts, for example), so I just trim CLOSE to the commercial breaks initially. For best results, I've been capturing in MPEG2 format at a higher resolution like 640x480, then I do my rough editing after the capture is done using PowerVCR II's built-in "Video Trimmer" editing tools.

After I've made my rough cuts in PowerVCR II, I save the merged edited file as a new file, and then I shift over to TMPGEnc for the rest of the editing process. I'm using the free version of TMPGEnc, so it won't let you edit MPEG2 files -- since I'm primarily dealing with VCDs right now anyway, I only need MPEG1 files, which TMPGEnc WILL handle. I first open the rough cut PowerVCR II file, then I use TMPGEnc to convert the rough-cut MPEG2 to a VCD-compliant (352x240) MPEG1 file (which TMPGEnc WILL do also). Since my original PowerVCR II capture file was de-interlaced thanks to the registry hacks I've applied, I select "Non-interlace (progressive)" as the Video Source Type under the "Advanced" tab on the TMPGEnc “MPEG Setting” page. I've also found that since I’m converting MPEG2 files to MPEG1 format, I can’t detect any noticeable difference in the resultant VCD files when I use the fastest option for the “Motion search precision” under the “Video” tab on the TMPGEnc “MPEG Setting” page. Note that most TMPGEnc guides recommend that you use “High” or “Highest” for the “Motion search precision” setting for the best quality, and while this does make a HUGE difference in AVI-to-MPEG conversions using TMPGEnc, my tests have shown that the higher settings don’t result in any higher-quality images when you’re doing MPEG2-to-MPEG1 conversions for MPEG1 VCD-quality resolutions.

After you complete the MPEG2-to-MPEG1 process using TMPGEnc, you can then do your final precise frame-by-frame cutting/editing on the resultant TMPGEnc-generated MPEG1 file using TMPGEnc’s “Merge and Cut” MPEG tools without running into any resultant audio sync problems.

I have tried doing this with a straight, unedited PowerVCR II MPEG2 file, but I still ran into audio sync problems, so it seems like it’s important that you do the “rough cut” edits in PowerVCR II initially.

Using this technique is a bit time-consuming to some degree – it takes 30 minutes to do the video capture for a 30-minute cartoon that we’ve taped, for example, then it takes 10 minutes or so to do the “rough cut” edits using the PowerVCR “Video Trimmer” editor, and another 30 - 35 minutes to do the MPEG2-to-MPEG1 conversion using TMPGEnc, and another 5 - 10 minutes to do the final precision editing using the TMPGEnc “Merge and Cut” function. Overall, though, this is still quicker than doing an AVI capture and using TMPGEnc to do an AVI-to-MPEG conversion (the AVI-to-MPEG conversion process typically takes a couple of hours on the “High” Motion Search Precision setting on my 1.1 GHz PC, which is required to produce decent quality video. In comparison, the two-step PowerVCR II process that I’ve described herein produces VERY good high-quality VCD files that look almost as good as the original source when viewed on my TV. In this respect, I’m very pleased with the PowerVCR II product – I haven’t yet been able to perform an AVI video capture and then convert it to VCD MPEG1 format with anywhere near the video quality that I am obtaining using this two-step PowerVCR II method.