mpeg from VHS

good question... i wish i knew..

I have a friend doing that 24/7 (he is converting 5,000 amateur fetish VHS tapes to mpeg format...)
I will be back with the answer - need to ask him

I just did over 30 hours of footage from VHS by playing it in a VCR and running that through a camcorder via the AV/IN-OUT so I could use the firewire connection. If you don't have the firewire connection than you can use a capture card that has composite input jacks and plug your VCR right into it. Dazzle makes an external one that is pretty cheap and works decent if you need one.
The software I use is Premeire and/or Pinnacle Studio 7.0
depending on what I am doing and I usually capture the video in the highest quality possible then re-encode it to the correct compression and size I want as an end result.
Hope this helps.

I know you said "software wise" but I for some reason must start with hardware.. If you don't have any special hardware, just get a tv tuner/capture card (such as Miro/Pinnacle PCTV Studio). Those cards usually already have some proggies for capturing tv signal (hook up your vcr with the card), and most of them capture it into avi format..
Then you will need a program which will export *.avi to mpeg, try searching google for Avi2Mpeg or Avi2mpg, I'm not sure how it's called (small and free program, not much options)..
For capturing to avi I recommend you VirtualDub, it's free and has extremely many options, and it's quicker than most of other big/fancy/expensive applications. If I remember well, both avi2mog and virtualdub have batch process option..
I guess that you can also do all you need to do with a program such as adobe premiere or Ulead Video "Something" , but no need to spend a lot of money if you don't have really alot of stuff to do.

'

Toolguy,

We have the dazzle, but we were just using the software that came with it to cap out the video. So you're saying you can just cap it through adobe premiere?

toolguy... come baaaaack!

DamnFineOnline, do you need to recompress to avi (with another compression% and codec, or to mpeg?
if it's the first case, go to http://www.virtualdub.org/ and you have solved your problems..

DamnFine....I am thinking that you were asking if I can capture through Premiere, if so then the answer is yes but I capture in the highest quality and in AVI format. This is not suitable for the web unless you want to use alot of bandwith and make your surfers wait an eternity for the download. Once I capture the file I recompress it to either MPG using Premiere or Studio 7.0 or windows media format using the batch encoder that comes with the Windows Media Resource Kit from microsoft. Also if you have an older harddrive it may give you problems if you try to capture at full quality. I have a couple of machines that cause the video to be real choppy when I try to capture to them and the only thing I can think of is that the harddrives aren't fast enough to record that much data all at once since everything else is the same.
P.S. I have only captured to Premiere via a firewire connection. I am not sure if Dazzle will connect to it or not, sorry.

What kinda hard drives are you guys using to capture? IDE or SCSI? What RPM speed is the drive?