I feel like such a complete moron posting here - again - as I had all this down pat years ago! I came and got some finer points on how to do all this about 15 years ago, became a zen master at it - then once I'd completed all the work forgot about it. I should have taken down notes so I wouldn't forget - all I have left is a list I drew up of bit rates to save at, in two minute increments, from a bitrate of 3159 for 180 minutes of video right through to 9570 for 60 minutes (theoretically anyway). Also some notes I copied down from someone else on how best to apply the filters from TMPGEnc. I had a Hauppauge tv-tuner card to hook my VCR or Hi-8 camera to, and away I'd go. Everything that I needed to was transferred across to DVD years ago.

Recently my mother-in-law asked me to transfer an old family video across to DVD for her, but the old PC I used is long gone, including the hardware I used. I also can't for the life of me remember what software I used on my PC to record and adjust the bitrate of the incoming signal from the VCR, nor what type of files I saved to in those days (FLV, MP2, etc) only that I used TMPGEnc to process the final product and burn it - or did I use something like Nero to burn the DVD - I can't recall.

I still have the old version of TMPGEnc, though whether it would work on my PC now I'm not sure - I don't know if I want to buy the new version just for one video tape!

I bought one of those $15 USB devices to connect the VCR to my PC and it all seemed okay until I tried burning the final product - even though it was 90 minutes worth the associated program (Honestech VHS to DVD 3.0) saved it to two separate files because it claimed I had reached the file size cutoff. I downloaded OBS Studio and tried going that route, set it for a bit rate of 4000 according to that old chart for bitrates, and set about recording the tape on to my PC. It produced an MP4 file just under 2GB in size, right where I thought it should be, but when I tried used my older version of Sony Vegas Pro (which I use to work on video from my cameras) to edit the beginning and end and then burn it, it said the file size was too large to go on the DVD!

As I said, I could kick myself for not taking down notes on how I used to do all this. I'll try and dig up where I've save the old copy of TMPGEnc to familiarize myself with it again, but can someone please remind me what program I probably used to stream in and record the video from the VCR and adjust the bitrate so that the transfer would fit on a DVD - would it have been something like HEnc or software that came with the Hauppauge card?

Is OBS Studio perhaps the route I should take now to get this done for saving, together with the old version of TMPGenc to apply chapters and menu?

Thanks in advance for any help - it's been a frustrating time trying to come to terms with all this again when I'd built up so much expertise in the past.