Capturing from VHS

[chrisrob]

I am very new to video capturing. I have a Brooktree BT878 TV card, Gigabyte 32 meg TV Out video, 250 meg ram, 800mhz athlon cpu & 40 gig hdd.

I am transferring my old video tapes to my system in order to burn to CD.
To do this I use winDVDPro and record using composite video and a cable direct to my sound card. I record in AVI format using the following settings
Video - Comp method Divx - Faster Picture
Framerate 10 seconds
Compression control - smoothness-crispness - 75
- data rate - 3001
Audio - Mpeg 4 audio 32kpbs, 32hz mono divx

The recordings are of very good quality. What I would like to do is reduce the size of the file. My files record anywhere from 6 meg/min to 10 meg/min. I have for example 3 episoedes of the xfiles which add up to 712 meg. I would like to reduce this to fit on a 650 meg CD. I have looked at some software available but am confused about what does what. I have tried a couple and doubled the size of my file - not what I intended to do.

Can anyone please tell me (in very simple terms please) what do use and how to use it.

Many thanks

Chris

[react010]

I have a PII-300 with 96mb ram and a cheap tv capture card (BTxxx Chip), and no extra hardware. For converting from VHS to MPG i hook my VHS to the composite video input on my tv card and use the WinVcr (2.0) software to make mpg's on the fly (no need to convert from Avi). The quality is very decent after fiddeling with the different settings in WinVcr: capture at 320x240 with the medium quality setting (Mpeg1), and choose CD-2x. The bitrate of the mpg files is about 3000Kb/sec and looks great on my Daewoo (DVG5000D) Dvd-player.
This player plays mpg's from cd-r without having to convert to VCD first. For me a great solution on a weak system....