Need Help with a Capture Solution

[Tubby]

I have lots of Hi8 videos that I am trying to back up to VCD for preservation reasons. I have a Pinnacle Studio PCTV capture card. What I am looking for is a solution to capture and burn to VCD with as few steps and as fast as possible. I do not want to burn to AVI then convert as it uses gigs of hard drive space and requires a long time for conversion. I take it there is no solution to capture directly to VCD Mpeg format? The best thing I can think of is capture directly to MPEG then one conversion to VCD but I'm stuck on which capture software to use??

Thanks for your help.

[ace-tex]

Try the ADS USB Instant DVD. It's only $175 at buy.com. It's well worth the money when you think of the time you will save, by being able to go directly from analog to VCD, SVCD, or DVD format without software capturing and encoding. This product is very well commented in the Capture forum on this site. Read the many from the various users and you'll at least want to try it.

[Tubby]

Thanks but right now I'm looking for a software solution as I have capture hardware. I'll check it out though.

[ace-tex]

Ok, then you might want to try Ulead DVD Movie Factory, 30 day free trial. Again, there's plenty of information on this site that you can read to do some research. The product allows you to capture and trim video, then convert to VCD, SVCD, or DVD-compliant files. Since you can capture in Mpeg1 or Mpeg2, the conversion is pretty fast. Then, you can Author and Butn the (S)VCD. It's a nice product, and since you can use it for 30 days for free, you'll find out if it works for you. It's worth a try. Good luck!

[Tubby]

I tried Ulead's DVD Movie Factory, actually the full version. When it installs it messes up WindowsXP and I don't like that. Right after installing Windows' Sytem Restore and things like right clicking on MyComputer get an error that say, "Can not find framedyn.dll" and the application will not run. If you ask me Ulead is being very intrusive on your system. For some reason the demo did not seem to do this but the final version does. So I don't know? Thanks for your thoughts though.