Thanks for the reply. I'm already using an ATI All In Wonder 128 already to capture. My plan is to use a 60gig hard drive for doing the recording. So 15 minutes per gig is probably not enough of a compression. That is why I was looking for an Mpeg solution. Quality of the video is not a high priority for this. I am using it for Engineering testing purposes. The company I work for has developed a 6 disk DVD player for automotive purposes and we are testing this unit and it is currently having a mechanical failure during a 15 hour cycle test. We want to record video during this time to see, what is happening to the unit during the time of failure, so we can correct the failure.

Thanks again,
Brian Franz

Yeah, that's a good suggestion too. We kind of thought of that one. A few problems with that. We wanted to let this thing run overnight, while no one was there. Plus we need the ability to run this in "Slow Motion", so we can analyze the failure. And the other problem is: Have you ever tried to find a 1 minute point out of 12 hours of VHS tape. That would be very tedious for someone to sit there and scan through that. Almost as tedious as watching it record for the entire 15 hours. Having it on a computer so you can jump along a time line would make it easier to find.

Thanks for the suggestion, we may use it.
Brian Franz

Ok, let's say we devise a device that can detect when the DVD player fails (ie jams), I still have the problem with slow motion. 6 hour VHS is not very good on a frame by frame slow mo mode, too many white lines.

I'm with ya so far though. I'm hooking up 4 VCR's that go into auto record one after the other and I could probably engineer a device that would record the smpte timecode spot on the tape, when the DVD player puts out a failure mode signal. Keep going McGuiver!!! :-)
But alls I really need is a simple piece of software that can record Mpeg video.