I am trying to take my old vhs movies and tv shows and burn them onto DVD disks for dvd players and I'm running into a problem. What I don't want is to wait like 8 hours or so while its converting video to burn on dvd, I want to do everything in real time or close to it. I have two stratigies, One is to buy a standalone dvd recorder and hook it up to my vhs, copy in real time to a dvd+rw disk, then take this disk to my computer and reburn it with new menus and chapter breaks. I believe this would completely eliminate the need to convert the video file for (re)burning the new dvd with menus. the second is to buy just a dvd recorder for my computer, copy the movie onto an external usb harddrive, then burn that big file onto the dvd. I don't want to decompress or convert or anything like you need to do with VCD files, I just want to record one huge 2-3 hour movie file, make a menu and chapter breaks, and then burn it. How can I achieve this? The reason I ask is I have over 200 tapes I want to record, and sitting through 2 hours at a time is long enough, if I have to wait for it to convert the video capture file (like converting mp3 to wav and then burning) it takes forever, sometimes doubling the entire process time. Thanks for all your help, Jm
If speed is critical (and it sounds like so), then I think the DVD recorder like you say is probably the best. I have a hardware mpeg2 encoder that can capture DV/analog video in realtime as DVD compliant streams, but you still need to author the result which takes an awful long time compared to my friend's Pioneer DVR-7000 (I think that's the model#) standalone DVD recorder (which is a very nice machine). And I believe you can set chapter points afterwards. I still think software encoders produce a better result especially in VBR, but 200 tapes is rather too many to be encoding each one of them.
