Hi all. Before you start to laugh keep in mind that this was our first attempt ever to make a DvD from captured material of a standard videotape. Having said that, here's is what's happened: My brother in law Stefan his parents had a couple of home video's and old material they would like to have put on DvD since they no longer have a VCR installed. So we started out on Friday evening with the idea in mind to simply capture those couple of video tapes and burn that on to DvD. The rest of the weekend we had planned a race weekend with Bas and maybe Jaap also so that would have been so very cool :-D When I got there (at my sister's and bro's house in Wageningen) there were not just those couple of video's waiting for processing, but also three BLØF documentaries and I think one other tape with someones birthday or aniversary on it. As they were not people I know I'm afraid I really don't remember who it was about. Now I don't know exactly so I'll have to look it up but I think we were looking at about four and a half hours of video material all together. Wow ... Right ... ;-) So we had lots of capturing to do, lets put it that way, hehe. Because I first had to find a suitable program that could both capture and then burn the DvD we lost some time before we could get going but after we found one which we were happy with we started capt ... d*mnit, no not capturing unfortunately. We first had to find a way through the forest of options that we were presented with to get the desired result on our DvD. The biggest problem however started after we had captured our first block of video. As soon as I pressed 'stop' ... nothing, nada, zilch, blanc screen ... and then ... reboot! Now you need to know that if there is one thing I ab-so-lu-te-ly hate then it's my own computer system acting wonky! So after logging in again (a reboot takes about 25 seconds these days so it's not that we've lost a lot of time here ;-) I restarted the program found out that the previously captured block of video had been saved. So nothing lost, apart from the 25 seconds during booting. The computer kept rebooting every time I pressed 'stop' and we got used to it I guess. Or tired of it, I dont know, whichever comes first I guess :-) Eventually (with a few side steps and some fiddling around with VCD, SVCD, MPEG, DVD, PAL, NTSC, 4 - 8MB/s settings etc.) we had captured a whopping total of about twenty two GB!! of video material just waiting to get processed. In the process we have actually burned one DvD which to our surprise did even run beautifully on the Playstation 2, a system normally really picky about which disc to play and which disc not to. Very nice to know, but like I said just as surprising. Another 'surprising' fact is the time it needs to get a DvD compilation ready to burn, which is, to say the least, a whole lot longer than I expected! When we gave the software the green light and pressed the 'burn' button, it took my brand new P4 3.2GHz with one GB of RAM still somewhere around three and a half hours to get to the stadium where the burning could begin! The actual burning of the DvD can then be done in ten to fifteen minutes at eight speed burning I think, so that final stage is completed quite quickly. But the time it took before we got to that point ... geez ... In order to 'save' some of the race weekend in terms of time we then copied all the captured data to Stefan's computer so he can use the same software to 'build' the DvD's. Later on when he's finished doing so we can then make an appointment to burn them all to disc. By then I also should have my own DvD-R's delivered so we can finish it. Then we decided to do some Grand Prix Legends 1965 MOD racing on the new brand new circuit of Clermont Ferrand and had a really great time. What a magnificent circuit that is, truly amazing to drive. Unfortunately you don't have enough time to admire the scenery but it's so incredibly beautiful. I mean you can literally look a mile away and gaze at the gorgeous view, at some points you can see other cars drive on a higher or lower part of the track. They (The GPLEA) say they have worked on that one for nearly four years and I say it's worth every single minute of that time. A piece of art. At the end of the Sunday evening we watched a movie together with my sister who I've seen very little this weekend. Just let the computers alone for a while and relax with a good movie. The movie, by the way, was Instinct with Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding junior, to name a few. Good movie, I liked it much. Then it was time to go home and get sleep, because I had a early rise today. Erik the Carpooler ;-) was waiting for me at about a quarter to six so ... bwoah ... I had about 4 hours of sleep last night, but this time it was my own fault I guess. I'll get a bit more tonight, promise :-) DvD's are us,