I hope someone can direct me in the right direction. I want to put all of my home videos on VCD in order to preserve them. Does anyone know of affordable software and capture hardware out there to do this with quality.

-- Kyle Kohne (kohner@hotmail.com), January 26, 2002

Answers

Check out www.vcdhelp.com for some ideas. The term "affordable" is kind of vague and what might seem affordable to me might be outrageously expensive to you. You have 2 basic approaches to consider. Capture in AVI format and encode to MPEG-1 for VCD using something like TMPGenc (www.tmpgenc.com). TMPGenc is free, by the way. The quality in going this way is outstanding, but it's very time consuming and the slower your PC, the longer it will take. Another option is to record directly in VCD format using a capture card such as an ATI card or Dazzle's DVC II. The DVC II gives you very good quality for VCD, but it can't record AVI video (only MPEG-1/2) and it can be hard to set up. ATI cards are a lot easier to work with but if recording directly to MPEG-1/2, may not give you very good quality. There are other cards out there, but I have no experience with them.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 28, 2002.