Well the Best way would to not capture to Mpeg at all and capture to Uncompressed AVI or some Low compression AVI format like HuffYUV and then use a standalone encoder to Encode the Captured File to Mpeg2...This way you can use a Much Lower Encodeing bitrate than if you were to Capture to Mpeg2 and fit more Video on a DVD....
Mpeg2 Capture Software is not very efficient with bitrate so you have to Use a Much Higher Capture bitrate to achieve the Same Quality as if you used Half the bitrate with a Good Standalone encoder....
With a Good Standalone encoder you can get better quality useing a bitrate of 3500kbs than if you captured to Mpeg useing 7000kbs.....
Also how Much bitrate you use would depend on the Quality of the Video Source and the Quality of your Capture device and of cource the Quality of the Capture software you are useing.....
So if you still want to Capture to Mpeg2 then experiment with small captures at different bitrates untill you find a good medium between Quality and File size....
If you want to try to get Better quality then Capture to AVI useing the HuffYUV codec and then encode the Captured file to Mpeg2 useing a Good encoder Like TMPGEnc or MainConcept but captureing to HuffYUV AVI will need about 30gb per hour of Full resolution Video and on a seperate Hard drive.....
Unfortunately, I'm using a TDK indicapture device.
This currently limits me to the bundled software ShowBiz(not so good), or WinDVD Recorder(much better). I haven't found other software that recognizes the device.
From what I can tell, neither of the above software captures to AVI format, only to Mpeg2.
The video source is mostly commercial VHS tapes in good condition, so I am assuming the quality there is reasonably good.
Since I have about 80Gb HD space to spare, increasing the Mpeg2 capture bitrate to 8000kbps (or even 10000) is no problem.
The problem thereafter is when I use WinDVD Creator or TMPGEnc DVD Author (with optional AC3).
WinDVD automatically compresses the output VIDEO_TS files, of a 2 hour movie, to fit a single blank DVD (4.7Gb), which is not what I want.
Whereas TMPGEnc does not (overly) compress these files, which is what I want, but the audio is then out of sync with the video.
Any further advice would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. I wish I had found this site BEFORE I purchased a capture device. I would have saved up my cash a bit longer & purchased one of the Canopus devices.
Incidently, is the ADVC-1394 basically an internal version of the standalone ADVC-100?
Well in that case you should use the Max bitrate you can so that the Movie fits on to a DVD-R without haveing to be re-compressed...
If you get a bitrate Calculator it will tell you what bitrate you should use for the Audio and Video so that a certain Length movie will fit on a DVD-R....
A 2 Hour movie would need a Video bitrate of 4850kbs for Video and 192kbs for audio and the captured file will fit on a DVD-R without re-compressing it...
If WinDVD creator still re-encodes the File when authoring to DVD then you should use a DVD authoring Program that doesn"t re-encode files Like "DVDLab"....
Something like the ADVC_100 or the ADVC-1394 or the Canopus ACEDVio would have been a Much better Choice in Capture device and Yes the ADVC-1394 is an Internal version of the ADVC-100 and so is the ACEDVio accept the ACEDVio is a Bit cheaper but Produces the same quality and has most of the same Features.....
