capturing with nero-unbelievable problem & lots of quest

[perfection]

I have two capturing software on my PC
1) HT TVR 2.0 (came with my capturing hardware)
2) Nero Visionexpress

I capture at 2550 bitrates (VBR) for SVCD 480 x 576
My processor is 1.6 Intel Pentium 4

While capturing the displayed output is jerky but the video captures well (in both programs) with minimum dropped frames and plays back smoothly with minimum.

Is this normal? Is it that the CPU cannot do a great job of multitasking (capturing and displaying) at 1.6 ? ASm i right in assuming that what is dispaled on capture is the recorded materials and not the to be recorded material?

Are dropped farmes going to affect the capture quality and its playback? or is this something to do with VBR? I can incresing processing power by changing resolutions, task bar activities running simultaneously and even windows performance settings all wii make a difference - right?

NOW THE MAIN PART
I recently inserted a Geforce fx5200 video card in the AGP slot - it has 126 MB RAM. (Earlier i had was using my on-board VIA prosavage DDR VGA card for display). Now nero capture DOES NOT LET ME VIEW THE INCOMING CABLE SIGNAL PROPERLY - IT GIVES FUZZY HORIZONTAL STRONG LINES THERENY ELIMINATING THE VIDEO VISUAL. This was not the case before. However, the capturing takes palce correctly and the playback of captured material is fine too (like before with a few dropped frames). Settings are same and the device has been configured correctly. The same does not happen with HT TVR 2 where i can view and capture (record) correctly.

I removed the AGP Geforce card and all was well. i could 'view' the incoming signal well.
What is going wrong? I have spent good money on the AGP card and use my machine primarily for capturing TV broadcasts for SVCD processing.

Please help, advice and recommend.

I would like to know some good capture software that does SVCD preset and if possible has a scheduler.

[mikiem]

When you display video on your monitor, you're most often using an overlay window, and this is where your video card & the drivers it uses come in. Make sure you have the latest drivers, search for posts and info on your *exact* make/model video card, check your capture apps like Nero for settings regarding the preview window & use of overlay, check you video card properties & if there's something there regarding overlay.

As for actual capture, you should be able to capture mpg2 for SVCD, but follow guides etc listed here and elsewhere to minimize other drains on your PC's resources. Basically you shouldn't be doing anything else when you're capturing on that machine in my opinion. CBR is easier, and all I frame cbr will likely work best, hopefully without a dropped frame, if you're willing to re-encode to vbr. Think that's best quality anyway, as encoding on the fly doesn't seem to equal the quality you'll get from something like TMPGEnc.

Dropped frames themselves are just that, video you didn't capture. You might or might not notice depending on your eyes (everyone is different). It's best not to have them, but a lot of people are satisfied with video others consider poor quality -- I think they found the majority of TVs in the US don't have the color set at all let alone correctly, and many new TVs just eliminate controls entirely. So if you're happy with it, don't kill yourself trying to eliminate all drops.

Finally, there are a huge number of variables including your capture hardware. Search on your capture device, and see what others are doing.