Capturing video to store on CD's

[Hi Ho]

I have some TV shows on tape that I want to put on video CD's. Are there any free programs that will capture video and burn a video CD? I have Virtual VCR but can't figure out how to capture video in a compressed format. I don't have the hard drive space for uncompressed video. I can't seem to find anything that will do what I want. If it simply doesn't exist I will buy a DVD burner and Adobe Premier Elements which I plan to do anyway but in the mean time I would like something free that would work OK.

[ogrerocks]

Have you tried VirtualDub?, orVitualDubMod?

[RJ]

I'd use VirtualDub and capture in MJPEG. Then, using TMPGEnc I'd encode it to MPEG-1 VCD format. The MPEG-1 encoding function of TMPGEnc is free, only the MPEG-2 encoding function isn't.
I just don't know about a free MJPEG codec. You also could use Huffyuv and capture at a lower resolution as you are going to create VCDs anyway (which are only 352x240).
VCDeasy is a good freeware (well, the newest version are shareware, but VCDeasy used to be freeware and the latest freeware version will do the job fine, too) tool to author and burn a VCD.

Still, the best would be to get a DVD burner and create DVDs. If you still want the VCDs, I suggest that you additionally encode the audio to DVD compliant AC3 and save them on an extra CD (or a couple of CDs).
The reason: The VCD video stream is also DVD video compliant. Only the audio isn't. So if you ever are to create DVDs out of these VCDs, you won't need to change the video stream at all, you can just copy it off the VCD and load it into the DVD authoring software. Only the VCD audio won't work, but if you create DVD compliant audio files now you can easily transfer the VCDs to DVDs later on.

RJ