G450etv newbie help

[dettox]

Bought my eTV card. Works well. However my main use is to put VHS tapes on to CD. I've saved quite a few as mpeg2s on my hard disk but would like to use the new window media 8 encoder to squeeze them on to CD. It only accepts AVIs. Is there a nice simple way of converting my mpegs (video & sound) to do that?
I think in future I'll get a larger hard disk & save as RGB.
Any pointers? Thanks in advance!

[Dr Mordrid]

Don't save as RGB. Get another capture program like AVI_IO and capture them using it. This will allow you to use the eTV's YUY2 capture mode.

YUY2 is the basic capture mode of the eTV and delivers better quality. RGB is derived from it and so is slightly degraded vs. YUY2. Additionally YUY2 permits the use of larger frame sizes and uses a lower data rate than RGB (21 mb/s vs. 27 mb/s for RGB) even though it's a "cleaner" source.

Why Matrox won't put YUY2 into PC-VCR is anyones guess.

AVI_IO (or VirtualDUB) will allow you to use YUY2 as the capture "Format" and the codec of your choice for "Compression". The PICVideo MJPeg codec ($18) comes to mind as it can be adjusted for a wide range of compressions.

You can also capture YUY2 compressed with DivX if you really want to save space. IF you use VideoStudio to capture you can also do MPEG-1 as well as MPEG-2.

There are more options all the way around by not using PC-VCR.

Get these methods down and we can teach you more, Gr****opper

Dr. Mordrid