Video delimma?

[Tired of the Bull]

After much reading about, codecs, drivers, VFW, bit rates, resolution, VBR, etc... I have a very bad headache. I'm making one last plea for help.

My Goal: I want to capture my son's VHS home movies and burn them to CD for safe storage and possibly sending to the grand parents. I want the best possible quality that can be obtained from a VHS tape.

My Problem: Using my hardware what is the best software (comercial/shareware) to use to capture and convert the video? To go along with that what is the best settings to use for the capture and conversion software? (Exact settings would be great.)

Hardware:

T-Bird 750
MSI K7T Turbo-R
Radeon AIW 32
512 Crucial 133 CAS 2
40 Gig IBM 7200 ATA 100
20 Gig WD 5400 ATA 66
SB-Live X-Gamer
Plextor 12x10x32
AFreey 50x
Other stuff that probably doesn't matter.

 

[kami]

Well, you have a decent amount of space to capture the raw video, so that's good. Sorry I can't be of anymore help But what format were you considering? I'd suggest MPEG4

And you do realize that VHS is a measly 320x240 pixels, right? So the video screen will be fairly small. You can probably blow it up but of course, you lose quality this way. I may be wrong though...and it might be possible to capture at 640x480?

 

[Tired of the Bull]

Kami,

Thanks for the reply,

The main reason for the question is that I do realize how bad the resolution is for VHS. I have read many posts where people say to capture AVI in a high resolution and the use xxx yyy settings to encode and you get the best possible quality. That's what I'm looking for. Either someone who can say use this software with these settings and go straight into this format or someone who can say first capture raw AVI with these settings then encode using this codec with these settings. Basically HEELLLLPPPPP!!!!!