Video Format
The format or codec to use for a particular recording depends on its ultimate use. If the recording is for watching then high quality isn't too important. But if archiving home videos, high quality is definitely needed.

Watching
MPEG4
Using the default DivX (also known as MPEG4) compression settings, my hard drive seemed plenty large enough; I had over a day of recording available. I used this setting for a few weeks, but decided that the quality was not good enough. The video looked "smudged" occassionally (as if it was a copy of a videotape), especially in scenes with dark clothing. My cable TV doesn't have the strongest of signals, so the compression of DivX made the picture even worse. It was also unstable with Showshifter, which would mysteriously close without warning and give me corrupted fliles. Showshifter would also hang when trying to read in DivX 5.03 so I uninstalled DivX and have had no problems since.

There is an Open-Source MPEG4 project XVid. I haven't tried this yet because the website says that it is still considered alphaware in nature. I hope in the future, though, to use this as my MPEG4 codec.

MJPEG
I currently use MJPEG at 480 x 640 with Quality 15 for most recordings. I find I don't see enough of a difference betwenn Quality 15 and Quality 20. But the quality was much, much better than DivX. Quality 15 gives me about 14 hours of video on my HD, which has about 70GB free for video. An alternative, which I haven't tried, is HuffyUV. This is a lossless format which is supposed to each up room on the hard drive quickly. If a high quality capture is need, this may be the best option.

Archiving
My ultimate goal is to have a high quality collection of my home videos. Because of this I feel that an MPEG2 format for the archive would be best. At the moment I am of two minds: whether to make SVCD formatted CDRs and be done with them or to create short DVD video CDRs and then put these onto DVDRs when I get a DVD recorder.
It is best to record in MJPEG format, edit the video and then save in an MPEG format. This is because if one edits in MPEG, a lot of recalculation is needed to make sure the I frames are correct and loss of information is possible. For this reason I use MJPEG for the initial recording for archives.

MPEG1/VCD and MPEG2/SVCD format
I tried recording in VCD resolution and then burning a VCD a little while ago, but the video source was already too poor and adding a VCD resolution made the VCD too "blocky" for my taste; it was worse than a VHS tape. And according to the VCD FAQ, a VCD should be as good as VHS...and mine was not. I tried creating a SVCD formatted file, which was much better than a VCD formmated file. This quality isn't as good as MPEG2, which is too large for CDRs (see below), so SVCD may be the best solution for home movies. One can get about 40 minutes of video on one CD-R.
The best setup I've go so far is to do the following:
In Showshifter record in:
- MJPEG
- 720x640 resolution
- YUY2 format
- Quality 18
- no audio compression
- use the Showshifter SSF AVI format (makes managing files easier)

In Showshifter I ecompress into No Recompression - Convert To AVI format. For chunk size I use about 1.7GB/chunk for the AVI. This gives me 10 minutes and a few seconds of video per file when the recompression is done. Very convenient for editting video together.

In VideoStudio I put 4 files together to make up one CDR of video. I then create a SVCD file of just under 800MB, which is just right for a 700MB CDR (since SVCDs do not need the error correction computer CDRs need). On my computer it takes 3 times the length of the video to create the SVCD file. Because of this I tend to do all the video I want at the same time then use Nero BurningROM to burn the actual CDs. You can burn the CDRs in VideoStudio, but if you don't do it right after recompressing and do it later, VideoStudio seems to spend about 15 minutes recompressing a SVCD file into a SVCD file (!) before burning is allowed. Nero BurningROM just takes the file and produces a SVCD CDR.

MPEG2/DVD
While MPEG2 files sizes are larger than MPEG4, they also give much better picture quality that MPEG4 and a moderately better video than SVCD. I can get about 16 minutes of MPEG2 on one CDR. This is not very good except for short videos (does anyone remember 78RPM LPs?) but in the long run it may be the best step. At the moment, I am not prepared to buy a DVD± burner. A recent article has convinced me that now is not the time to buy one. I understand that many companies are coming out soon with multi-format DVD burners that do both DVDR+ and DVDR-. In a few months prices should fall and that will be the time I will take the plunge.

General Video Advice
100fps
AVS
Doom9 - Deinterlacing Explained
Luke's Video Guide
Music XP Tweaks
Nicky's Digital Video Guide
VideoGuys XP Tweaks
Video Guys Win2000 Tweaks

Capture
VHS Capture part 1
VHS Capture part 2

Deinterlacing
ShowShifter Deinterlacing
ShowShifter Forum Message, Deinterlacing

Video Formats
CDFreaks
CDFreaks: DVD Wars
Digital-Digest DVD
Doom9 - DVD format
SVCD FAQ
VCD FAQ
DVD Demystified and DVD FAQ
VCD/SVCD/DVD FAQ/Help
Video Codec discussion

Video Codecs
Diruc
DivX
DivX Fix
Divx Digest
HuffyUV
XVid


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