Suggestions on VHS to DVD conversion (computer) setup

Ok,
Can someone give me a good suggestion on a PC setup for VHS to DVD Conversion including software (I already have DVD-Lab Pro2, DVDshrink, gspot, Adobe Encore, a few others in testing and/or trial modes). I have successfully copied the Full Curious George movie back to a Dual-Layer with no problem. I am now looking at what is needed to copy from VHS to DVD. My Lite-on 5005 Recorder sucks in this fashion as the DVD that it ends up with is not totally compliant to the market. I can't get the DVD (VHS SnowWhite to DVD) to work on my Panasonic, Cyberhome or Mintek machines. I can, however, get the Curious George movie to work on all three which tells me of a DVD Standard Problem. Thus, I am looking for hardware/software to move to instead of the DVDRecorder. Any Suggestions? (preferably USB 2.0 or Firewire PC).

thanks

Why not just transfer the DVD's you record on the LiteOn to your PC and re-author as you see fit?

Chances are good that you will not improve your image quality, and will certainly spend a lot more time on it, not to mention completely tying up your PC with capturing and converting.

One thing that will help a bunch, is to only use Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden DVD's. As Dan said, if you don't require a bunch of editing and special effects, it is best to transfer direct from avi to your dvd recorder. If you really need to do frame accurate editing, and want to play, then look at getting an internal capture card that will handle avi and mpeg2, or look at the many external devices that will do the same. If you are wanting to make personal copies of vhs movies that you own, you will need something to bypass macrovision. There are also many devices which will do this. You need to decide exactly what you need and want to do. The software you have is very sufficient.

any capture device you get thats usb 2.0 will do the trick...they all do a pretty good job..i use a haupaugge 150 for vhs stuff but there are cheaper devices at say..best buy or circuit city that do the job as well

go here and review which one seems right for you

You can always do what I do.

Use the Litey 5005 to make the inital copy, an duse whatever is the cheapest DVD blank media you can find (20-30 cents worth per disc or get a rewritable) and then us eyour regular burner on your PC to imag ethat and re-burn it on better media with the -ROM option, and you will result in a superior copy with a better end medium which will last longer and have greater compatibility.

It will also save you money on not having to buy any more accessories.

Unfortunately VHS looks like shit and if you have some spare time you can clean it up greatly using Avisynth along with plugins. Unfortunately MPEG-2 isnt a suitable format for this kind of operation since its lossy. Grab a good TV-card such as Leadtek TV2000 XP Expert and hook it up to video using perferably S-Video (if possible) otherwise composite. Record it in full DVD resultion and 48 000Hz 16-bit stereo sound using a lossy format such as HuffYUV (you need quite a bit of disk space free). Grab a copy of Avisynth and read the documentation. Grab TMPGEnc Plus or another encoder of your choice that supports Avisynth and start encoding. :-)

FVIW here a sample of what I mean, this is a screenshot of old swedish cartoon.
The source is an VHS-tape that roughly 15 years old recorded off an analogue TV-source. You can imagine that it didnt look great but after a bit of abusing it looks pretty good. I have to admit though that it took quite a while to render on my AMD XP 320+ (non Athlon 64). For the record I used 4 filters to clean it up.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention.
If you have a somewhat new video card you might already have video input capability.
//Danne

will my hauppauge capture in HuffYUV?

could u point me to a guide for this complicated conversion?

thanx

Which model?
The PVR models can only capture in MPEG-1/-2 but I guess its better than nothing.
You can find information regarding Avisynth and where to download here:
http://avisynth.org/ - Use the links and read
http://forum.doom9.org/ - Loads of information regarding Avisynth and its filters. Use the search button! =)
http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/ - List of plugins

In general, if you want to remove noise/smooth I'd recommend FluxSmooth and/or PixieDust keep in mind that they may be very slow and also that smoothing means less details so you have to in many cases try different combinations.

Regarding my previous post... "using a non lossy format such as..."
//Danne

You are probably right as this might be the best method since my 5005 already has all the firmware upgrades. I will try the same video (Snow White) tonight with a -r and then pop it into DVD-Lab Pro and tell you how it comes out.