VHS to DVD capture and burn questions

[Hawk]

This is probably basic, but I’m just not getting it.

I wanted to transfer "Tales of the Gun" from VHS tapes to DVDs. I got a USB composite / "S" video capture gizmo bundled with Pinnacle nagware.

Software capture settings have three presets, the highest (DVD) of which generates an MPEG-2 file that takes up most of a 120 min / 4.7 GB DVD with 45 minutes of VHS output.

If  I’m not missing my guess, I’m getting a high quality rendition of a cheesy VHS output which looks, unsurprisingly, like cheesy VHS when viewed through the DVD player.

However, the other software presets significantly degrade the capture to well below VHS quality.

Shouldn’t I be able to get 4 episodes of 45 minute “TV quality” burned onto a single DVD? Or at least the 120 minutes the DVD is supposed to be good for? The "custom" option only adds MPEG-1 to the options. This, or forcing the capture to fit, provides a really nasty output.

So what am I missing? I can get the quality but only at the expense of a file that seems way bigger than it needs to be. And if I ever get around to transferring some of my 120 minute tapes, they won’t fit on a 120 minute DVD.

The machine is over a year old but doesn’t seem to be having an issue with dropping frames at DVD settings through USB2: AMD 3500+, NVidia 6800GT WD Raptor drives.

TIA

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

MPEG video can be compressed at varying rates, depending on which point in the quality vs filesize curve you want to operate.  It sounds like your software only offers you 3 of the many possibilities, and none of those three are what you want.  

Two options come to mind:

First, you could dump your current software and replace it with something that does what you need it to do.  

Second, you could record your VHS tapes as MPEG files at the highest quality level your current software allows, then use another piece of software to downsample the files to whatever specific size you need.

[Hawk]

Thanks, that's it exactly.

The crippleware that came with the capture hardware is intrusive enough I won't miss it. Didn't know it was nagware when I bought it.

Any recommendations for software? Either complete or compression / burning only?