Best capture/encode techniques/tools?

[Darek M <darek@xxxxxxx>]

Hey guys, I'm fairly new to the video capture business and am having 
some difficulties. Maybe some of you could share some of the tools and 
settings that you use to capture under Linux.

I use ffmpeg under Slackware to try to capture some video from a VHS. I 
have a P4 1.6GHz processor and a 7200RPM, 60 Gig IDE drive with a 
Pinnacle PCTV.

I can see pixelation in the resulting mpeg, so I crank up the video bit 
rate (up to 1500) and I still see some pixelation, and at that bitrate, 
I seem to get frame loss. I tried compressing the video stream with 
MPEG4 (thinking that I'm limited more by my drive than the CPU), and 
there is little visible improvement.

Are there better tools or methods for capturing video? Perhaps my 
ffmpeg settings are misguided?

Currently I use:
nice -20 ffmpeg -b 900 -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -s 400x300 -ab 128 
/back/temp.avi

Any help appreciated.