I want to record video from a TV or VCR to mpeg format on my PC. I also don’t want to spend a lot of money.
These are the tools I have so far:
VCR/Cable TV/DVD player
A Pentium III 600 GHz PC with 200 somthing Meg of RAM
An AVerTV USB video capture thing
The problem is that I can capture video in AVI format but the files are too huge. I’m also having problems recording with certain compression formats. I get choppy video.
Any thoughts on products, software, etc?
Well, seems to me that if you really have a 600Ghz system with only 200 something ,eg of ram, you need more ram 
Aside from that, do a google search for “mpeg recording” and see what you get. There’s a ton of prog’s out there.
Er, yes. See, what you have is a 600 Mhz processor, but anyways…
What you have to do is convert the file to mpeg, you cannot capture to mpeg, it has to be uncompressed AVI. Or at least, that’s how I have to do it. Then you save it with conversion software, if you can find some.
The best compressor for AVI, by the way, is DivX, though some people don’t like it because it can make an image look strange. And it often doesn’t play very well on some machines.
Me & Xp have programs to capture. Frankly, I bought XP from staples & free after rebate is this $50 Dazzle USB capture thingy that saves to mpeg. It said that my 20meg HD had enough room for 535 hours of video
535 hours of video on 20 megs, huh? That may be fine and good, but most people want a larger picture than a two pixel by two pixel image…
You could either compress to Divx, as has been mentioned (visit here for help: Divx.com), or use a program like Tmpgenc to convert to mpg. With this program you can even write out the mpg in VCD compliant format and burn it to video cd. I believe these programs are freeware.
Thanx. i ended up using a shareware program called iuVCR from http://www.iulab.com to record uncompressed AVI files. They are pretty big but the quality is pretty good and theres no jerky video. tmpgenc was pretty good for converting to mpeg.
msmith537, when you say mpeg, do you mean mpeg or mpeg2 or mpeg3 or mpeg-4 ?