straight to dvd quality

[thebigman]

Is the quality from straight to dvd as good as other methods ie to hard drive first or is it poorer

[heinz-oz]

That very much depends on what you do, how and on what equipment. Is the water straight from a tap better than from a glass?

Generally speaking, No, there should not be a difference, provided your equipment is up to it.

[DVDDoug]

Maybe...

In general, you are safer going to hard disk (in AVI/DV format) first.

MPEG encoding is CPU intensive. (Stand-alone DVD recorders have hardware MPEG encoders.)

I assume you're talking about analog capture. If the CPU can't keep-up with the real-time streaming video, or if it get's interrupted, you'll get a glitch or a dropped frame. It's not that the the CPU isn't fast enough on-average. But, Windows is a Multitasking operating system, and it's doing stuff in the background even if you are running only one program.

IMHO - Real-time analog capture is tricky enough without real-time MPEG encoding or real-time burning. If you do the MPEG encodeing later, the CPU can take it's time, and even if it's interrupted you won't get any problems.

And, you can't use 2-pass encoding in real-time.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't try it... It may work fine for you and your set-up. Just don't be surprised if there are "issues".