I had been seriously shopping for an MPEG-2 encoder for almost 6 months before purchasing the Dazzle DVC150. I looked at the Matrox RT line; which was out of my price range and the Snazzi PCI card. I found many negative posts regarding the Dazzle solution but I couldn’t find much of anything at all on the Snazzi. In the end it came down to what they had at the local Best Buy. With all of the issues possible I recommend purchasing it from a store with a decent return policy.

My key reason for selecting the DVC150 over the DVC100 or ADS Instant DVD is the fact that the 150 supports USB 2.0 which is reported to offer up to a 25% improvement in video quality. If your system only has USB 1.1 don’t fret you can still use the 150 and should you decide to upgrade to USB 2.0 (a matter of when is probably more like it) you will gain some improvement most likely noticeable only on fast-motion scenes.

Many of the headaches regarding the Dazzle products seemed to be installation so I was careful to read the instructions. In Windows XP Home Edition I did the following:
Install the software, reboot, connect to the internet and let the software download the updates then reboot and connect the device.

Open the Movie Star software and select the format (VCD, SVCD, DVD) and choose capture then select DVC 150 from the sources box and click record. Then open DVD Complete and create the DVD image and burn it to DVD (or CD). The quality was quite good, I was capturing from an old VHS home video which is not the highest quality to begin with, but if I want a movie on DVD instead of VHS I’ll buy on DVD. The 150 also offers S-Video connectors to obtain maximum quality from analog sources.

You can do basic editing in the Movie Star software and then ‘render’ it to the desired format (DVD, VCD, etc) but be advised that this will take some time especially if you have a large amount of footage. The version of DVD Complete is actually a little too stripped down for my liking, they want to charge you $30 for the upgrade. But it helps you get your feet wet in DVD authoring before upgrading (if you even need to).

Be sure you have plenty of disk space available, preferably about 15-20GB for each 2 hour DVD because you’ll have to have space for the original captured MPEG-2 file in addition to the DVD image. To eat up more space DVD Complete splits the source MPEG into a separate video and audio files when it converts the audio (see below for why this is).

I would like to now explain that just because the device captures to MPEG-2 does not mean that you can just burn it to a DVD here’s why: When video is encoded (converted to a digital format) it utilizes a codec (COmpressor DECompressor). MPEG-2 is the compression used in DVD’s, streaming video over the Internet may be in the MPEG-4 format and MP3’s use an MPEG compression technique. Many computer formats use a separate format for the video and audio. The DVC 150 captures the video directly to MPEG-2 but uses LPCM compression for the audio so it's converted to MPEG prior to creation of the DVD by DVD Complete. You may be thinking that this defeats the purpose of ‘realtime encoding’ but it’s currently faster than capturing and converting both audio and video to the MPEG format.

Here is a real-world example:
Captured 1 hour at DVD resolution (720x480) in Movie Star software
DVD with chapters every 5 minutes

Capture 2.4 GB MPEG-2 file - 1:00:00 hour

Preparing A/V streams - 11:40 minutes
Encoding Audio - 5:30 minutes
Building GVP - 2:20 minutes

Build DVD menus - :28 seconds
Build DVD image - 14:00 minutes
Create image file on Hard Drive - 4:36 minutes
Burn DVD (time will vary) - 9:30 minutes

DVD Complete seems more dependent on the speed of your hard disk since you're creating a 2-4GB image file.

Total from capture to final DVD 1 hour 48 minutes and 4 seconds. Note that your speeds will vary, I'm running an AMD Duron 800 with a 7200 RPM Maxtor so if your processor is faster your times will most likely be lower.

You can edit the resulting MPEG files in third party editing software but remember that MPEG is more of an output format than an editing format.

Update note: DVD Complete would not recognize my Verbatim (NEC OEM) DVD R/W drive, I downloaded the PxEngine update from Dazzle at: http://www.dvdcre8.com/updates/VeritasPXEngine358.htm
and now it works fine with the drive.

I had a problem with DVD Complete making a couple of (really expensive) coasters out of my DVD media and found that it tries to move straight from creating the DVD image file to burning and the system can't always write and read the data fast enough at the start of the burn. I create the image file in one step then burn the image file to avoid this.

The astute DVD author will note that LPCM is in fact specified in the DVD standard but the bundled software (DVD Complete) converts it to MPEG. This usually reduces the space required for the audio portion of the output file by over half.

Recommended: Yes