Recomeded settings to convert VHS tape to AVI

[mikeOmatic]

After 2 days reading i give up and find the need to post to you. I find that there are to many options offerd for the various formats and was hoping that someone could just tell me what settings they would use and i dont have to calculate and make disicions. Hardware specs i will give to you further on.

I would like to bin thouse old movies on VHS tapes and get them into 2 different digital formats. Take a note that I do not have to edit them. Thus all these edit steps we can leave out.
The length of the movies are +- 100 minutes and colour.

1. Onto a blank DVD disc so I could play them on a normal DVD player and have them as back up. Disk size 4.7GB i guess. They are DVR-R but I can buy new ones
2. In AVI format (I dont think that is DV-AVI) so they would be around 700mb in size. This so i can have/ and watch them on my laptop. Also if i want to i could store one on a normal CDrom.

Hardware:
1. Laptop ASSUS with mobile pentium 1.86Ghz, 1Gig Ram, ATI Radeon X600 Graphics card, Onboard sound card. 80gig hardrive 5600rpm FAT32, soundcard on motherboard, DVD rw writer
2. External HD 600GB 7200rpm NTFS (lots of space left) USB2 conneted
3. (now the sad bit) EasyCap device.
As i read that you guys dont know the specs, here they come:
- Capture video and audio through USB2 iinterface
- Suport Brightness, contrast, Hue and Saturation Control
- Can capture sound without soundcard.
- Complies with Universal Serial Bus Specification Rev. 2.0
- Suports NTCS, PAL Video format
- Video input: One RCA composite in, One S-Video Composit in
- Audio input: 2 phono L/R input
- Suports high quality video resolution, PAL: 720x576 @ 25fps
4. VHS Hifi Video recorder. Connection out Phone LR Stereo, Scard out
I have connected a adaptor to from Scart > S-Video lead.
5. Yamaha dolby seround sound stereo (for listening that is)

Software
1. EasyCap drivers and all
2.Unlead VideoStudio 10 SE DVD
3 Windows XP Profecional SP2 (I have created a VIDEO PROFILE as described by u guys)

Things i got confused with: 1million, but i will list only a few.
I have been playing around a bit but at times the image was still stagering.
I got confused in Tutorials with the settings in >File>Project Properties and on the Capture screen > Video, Audio capture properties. Could they be the same?
Would it be better to capture the video in a not loss format on the hard drive and then convert it to the needed formats for DVD and AVI, so the Laptop or the EasyCap device does not get to much work to do. I realy do not mind to do it the slow way(read longer time or 2x do over) so the end quality will be better?
Codecs, pic one for me please.

I hope i have not left to much space for u guys to give me different posibilities. PS hope there are not to many spelling mistakes, my english reading is no problem.

Oh and send me some asprine too, ill send you some choclates back

Thansk Mike, Belgium

[sjj1805]

The easy way is to invest in a TV card. If this is a laptop then you can get an external USB TV Card.
Go for one that has an hardware MPEG encoder - this means the TV card will do all of the hard work for you rather than relying upon the computer to try and convert the tape to digital 'on the fly'.

The TV card will have its own capture software with various preset quality settings such as standard play, long play, extra long play and so on.
You choose the setting to match the length of the item being recorded.

You can then use VideoStudio/MovieFactory/DVD Workshop to convert that MPEG file into a DVD that can be watched on a standalone DVD Player.

MF4: Create DVD from Hauppauge TV Card

For the next task - creating an "avi" file that can be kept on your laptop.
You can then convert that same MPEG file to the DivX / Xvid or MPEG4 formats which have a file size of about 700 MB per hour.