I am considering buying a base ($499) Mac Mini solely for DVD authoring. I recently bought a Neuros MPEG4 Recorder as an easy way to digitize my VHS collection of stuff recorded off television. I have various video input cards for PCs, but I find them all to be of poor quality. There’s almost always either a picture full of interference, volume level problem, or audio sync issue.

I would like to convert about 200 VHS tapes to DVDs using the MPEG4 encoder to capture the video. My DVD authoring software must be able to convert MPEG4 to the proper DVD MPEG2 format without me having to fire-up another program. I would assume iDVD fits this requirement?

If I bought the base-model Mac Mini without DVD writer, would I be able to author a DVD with iDVD and then burn it on my PC somehow?

I’m not against using an all-PC solution, but they all really suck. The Ulead stuff is cheap but buggy and I don’t recall if it converts on-the-fly. DVD Lab won’t convert video formats on-the-fly either. Are their any other easy choices for the PC?