Need help with Pinnacle PCTV

[wh thompson]

Please help. I have read many of the forum comments and guides and learned a lot (i thought) about capturing and encoding video. However, I am a newbie and I need help. I have a Pinnacle PCTV card and am using it to capture VHS tapes to encode and burn to SVCD. Using the Pinnacle software, I can set it at custom and mpegavi compression and capture an avi file. Using the Pinnacle TREX software, I can then encode the video to SVCD format and then burn to SVCD using NERO. The resulting video is smooth, not blocky or jerky, but the details are somewhat blurred (like a VCD).
Based on the information available at this forum, I have downloaded third party s/w btwdmdrv, and virtualdub. My avi videos captured using the huffyuv codec are much larger than the Pinnacle avi files and much more detailed. However, when I encode this to SVCD format using BBMPG's AVI2MPEG2, the result is jerky and blocky. If I use virtualdub filters to smooth, etc., the SVCD gets worse. I tried TMPGEnc but the 30 day trial ran out and I didn't want to purchase it until I was sure it worked.
Am I trying to achieve too much from VHS tapes ? Should I just use the Pinnacle s/w or do you have any suggestions to improve what I'm getting with the third party s/w ??

[fudgey65]

Hi,

Your lucky to get it working at all!!!! I have been struggling with this card for a while, soon as I install it on my machine it crashed the pc and wont restart until I physically remove the card!!!!

Will monitor your post to see if I can pick up any tips.

Good luck.