I'm going to encode several (12) video tapes from a summer trip onto my computer and then encode them onto DVD media. I've already got the TV tuner card for encoding (Winfast 2000) but I would like some suggestions for DVD Burner and media. I'm guessing on about 15 total discs (minor editiing) for about 20 people for a total of 300 discs. Any suggestions on media and price at that volume?

I've been looking at the new Sony DVD+/-R/RW drive and the Pioneer A05. The Sony seems the way to go. Suggestions?

Additionally, I have an Athlon 850 w/ 448 megs of ram (64+128+256). I've got a 120 gig USB 2.0 drive and an internal 40 gig drive with space. Sound good?

Thanks for your input.

Are you making data DVDs or ones that allow you to view on a standalone unit? If the latter, does that TV card only capture avi's from video? You'll need to convert them to mpeg-2 for DVD writing. Also make sure that a DVD player can play the discs. Most new ones will, but my old Toshiba won't even look at DVD-R media.

The avi to mpg2 conversion will eat into your cpu and could take hours to complete. I got myself the Hauppauge PVR-250 video capture card which encodes to mpeg real time - without using system resources as it has a hardware encoder. Raw avi will use huge amounts of space and the video could have sync problems if the pc can't keep up.

I have the new sony drive and its excellent - especially when burning at 4x! I highly recommend it, but make sure you get the latest firmware to allow 4x burning. It will do all discs on the market, but like I said before - make sure the player can handle whatever disc format you'll be using. Most new players can play +R and -R media, and are pretty cheap now, so go for one of these. You can test the quality first on a RW disc before using -R/+R.

Remember that working with high quality video will take up space and system resources so do chunks at a time!