PVR-250: Getting started on VCD/DVD authoring?

[Sinspawn]

Hello Doom people.

I recently bought the Hauppauge PVR-250 Hardware MPEG Encoder along with a LiteOn DVD-burner. I have a lot of VHS tapes which I want to digitalize to VCD/DVD, so here is a couple of questions:

1. Is it possible to use VCD MPEG-1 files (1150 kbps) on DVD-R (4,7 GB), if yes - is it DVD-compliant?
2. What is the best software for splitting and burning your VCD captures. I'm thinking about a software that will open my MPEG, and let me quickly seek through it and place "chapterflags", so if I open videocapture.mpg I can place e.x. 5 flags throughout the video, and have the software automaticly burn it as 6 chapters, making it easier to flip through the content. I would prefer a software which will let me quickly seek and then manually fine-adjust frame by frame seeking, and have built-in burning, instead of just exporting a lot videocapture001.mpg, videocapture002.mpg, videocapture003.mpg, etc... files which I then have to drag into Nero or Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2 SE..

Thank you very much. :)

[jshumate]

1) Yes, VCD compliant video is valid for DVD. Please note that the audio must be 48 MHz, not 44 MHz as with VCD. Technically, MPEG audio is NOT valid for NTSC DVD as the only audio track. All the DVD authoring programs I have seen will let you get away with it and it probably will play without any problems in standalone DVD players, but technically if you only have one audio track on a NTSC DVD, it's supposed to be either PCM (WAV) or AC3. MPEG audio is valid for PAL DVD as the only audio track. This has to do with fighting between Philips (Europe/PAL) and Dolby (America/NTSC) over the audio specifications for DVD in the early days.
2) My personal recommendation for a video editor is MPEG2VCR, which is available at http://www.womble.com. It's not free, but it is really good. As for your question about chapters in DVDs, any decent authoring program should let you set them where you want. While I'm not sure of any that offer exactly what you are looking for, I think several come close enough for your needs. I've only worked with DVD Maestro and Scenarist and those select chapters by having you input the times during the authoring process. I'm not sure I understood your question, but if you are asking "Can I edit video and put special marks in the video so an authoring program will place a chapter at those marks?" then the answer is no.