Thanks, Chienworks, that was very helpful. One more question. What if I try to transfer more than one project to a single DVD? Without a menu, how would one be able to play the different tracks? Would they play consecutively in the order you put them on the DVD?

That i don't know since i've never used one of these DVD decks. You'll have to find the features or manual online and consult it. I do have a suspicion though that they might create chapter points at every pause. If so, the viewer could skip back and forth through the different videos.

I have to ask why you want to do this ? IUnless you have some other use it would be a lot cheaper to get a DVD burner for your PC, you would also have a lot more control over the final product

They typically play consecutively. Most decks will give you chapter marks every X minutes, and then each transfer is treated as a title set. There are a couple of decks that will give you a simple menu.

be careful of these decks though. I picked up a Lite On deck as an emergency box when my JVC deck went down. The Lite On claimed to do AC3 audio - sorry, no. It does MPEG-2/1 audio which some other players can't handle. The firewire connection on the Lite On also did not work properly for accepting input.

--Scott

shmulb: the benefit is real-time DVD creation. Except for some time spent setting up at the beginning and closing the disc at the end, the process takes as long as the video lasts. You could probably transfer 2 hours of video to a finished DVD in about 2.5 hours or less. If you don't need fancy authoring then this is a very attractive method! In comparison, when someone brings me a 2 hour VHS tape now i spend about 2.5 hours setting up, capturing, and opening the video on Vegas' timeline. It takes about 11 hours to render (ok, so i've got a slow computer, but i let the render run overnight), then about 15 minutes to set up a very simple menu in DVD Architect, then about an hour to prepare and another half hour to burn and close. That's around 16 hours to transfer 2 hours of video to a DVD. With a much faster computer i could probably cut that down to 6, but no faster. if you'e got a lot of transfer to do, a stand-alone deck beats capturing / rendering / authoring / burning by miles.

Chienworks hit the nail on the head. My wife videos weddings for friends as a favor. We have one wedding on my computer now that she has compiled uising MovieStudio. It is in six separate projects totalling somewhere between one and two hours playing time. She wants this put onto DVD (probably onto two separate disks) as soon as possible and my hard disk cleaned out so she can start on another wedding that she now has "in the can." I would like to avoid the computer authoring and burning process if possible due to the time required and also because all of the potential pitfalls that I'm sure I would experience along the way.

I gather it is important to get a top quality machine and am now leaning toward the LG XBR-446. I'll let y'all know how things turn out.

Thanks again to everyone for their very helpful comments.

OK I see now how it would help. We just got a Sony ??500 DVD / VHS Combo recorder at work, I have not seen the results yet though.
I assume the encoding is faster because it is hardware encoded as opposed to software encoding, but how does the resulting MPEG compare to a MS encoded one ? Has anyone compared ?

Generally hardware encoding is considered to be inferior to software encoding. However, i'm sure they're getting better all the time as processors get faster and more creative algorithms are invented. While the difference is probably noticeable, it's probably not enough to worry about in many cases. The major advantage of PC-based authoring probably isn't increased quality as much as the ability to craft menues.