for me there are 2 ways to come to a final DVD: 1. when I wish to digitalize a videotape I first have to start XP and use my Terratec Grabster 250 (I bought it before I stepped into Linux). I record the videostream with VIRTUALVCR using the HuffYUV codec into an external firewire drive - 90 minutes video result in roughly 70 GB. Then I change to my openSuse and do the encoding in Avidemux, using a 2-pass encoding - up to now I used ffmpeg, but after reading some posts here I will maybe do some further investigations using something different... this pretty timeconsuming encoding process (1 hour movie = 4 to 6 hours encoding, depends on filter usage) usually runs over night on my old Asus Laptop with AMD Athlon 64 1.7GHz - maybe on my new Thinkpad it will run something faster - no experience yet. anyway: result is a mpeg-file to be converted into a DVD structure. 2. through my Terratec Cinergy2 USB I record digital TV , the recorded transportstream can be transformed and demuxed by ProjectX, resulting in a xyz.m2v videofile and a xyz.mp2 audiofile, which then has to be merged by mplex in order to get a mpeg-file which then can be converted into a DVD structure. I build my DVDs with "tovid", what is my favorite! I never succeeded using any graphical tools up to now. Creating a menu using "makemenu" (incl. background picture and -music), then creating the .xml file using "makexml", then creating the DVD-structure using "dvdauthor" and finally create an isoimage using "mkisofs", finally burning the DVD - all this feels so easy to me to handle on the commandline, that I am not willing to invest time to explore different approaches... hope this helps :-) best Susanne -- Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen! Ideal für Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer