Jeremy Butler writes: >(my favorite player: Cyberlink's PowerDVD, for Windows; It's certainly not mine! It's a dreadful memory hog, saps processor time and makes Windows unstable, in my experience. More importantly (as I have a AMD XP+3400 64-bit processor, 5gb of RAM and 4 250gb HDDs in my PC, system resources aren't really an issue for me), its 'colour profile' feature seriously distorts the original transfer, especially as it's set to a mode which is euphemistically called 'vivid' by default. Try watching a '30s 3-strip feature in 'vivid' mode and you practically need sunglasses! Windows Media Player with a system MPEG-2 codec installed (if you Google 'MPEG-2 codec', you'll find lots of free ones for download), is just as good a player, it doesn't bugger about with the luminance and chrominance properties of the original transfer (well, not any more than your graphics card and monitor already have done), and it's free. If grabbing frames is your main use for PC DVD playback software, Intervideo WinDVD offers a far more versatile interface than Power DVD, pasting the frames to a visible clipboard interface rather than leaving you to hunt for them using Windows Explorer and then automatically giving them a meaningless filename. Power DVD is also a ripoff: even the basic version costs around £20, and if you want the plug-ins for Dolby 5.1 or DTS playback, you're looking at shelling out even more. If it hadn't come bundled with a burner, I certainly wouldn't be willing to buy it at anything like that price. WinDVD is about half the price, and includes Dolby 5.1 functionality out of the box. Darryl Wiggers writes: >An earlier recommendation to convert to dvd >first is not recommended as dvd is a compression >format and you want to maintain a high-quality file throughout. Unless you're starting from DVCAM or Digibeta, the lossy compression of the DVD standard won't make the slightest bit of difference to the quality of an image which started life on VHS. You're still going to get 720 x 576 pixels. Just as long as you encode at no less than an average of 4-5mbps (on a set-top recorder, that's the option which gives you 120 minutes on a 4.7gb disc), that's as much definition as you're ever going to get out of bogstandard VHS. The only other thing to note is that it's always preferable to connect your VHS VCR to your DVD recorder or video capture card using an s-video cable or Euroconnector which is wired for y/c, NOT composite. If your VHS VCR only has a composite output, then the best you're going to get out of it is roughly equivalent to 23mbps on a DVD, which equates to the 'four hours' setting for a 4.7gb disc using a set-top recorder. Adobe Photoshop has a deinterlace function which cleans up video frame grabs a little bit, but you might decide that it's not paying £300ish just for that. The bottom line is that VHS is a very low quality format, from which any frame grab enlarged to more than about 5cm square is going to look fuzzy and nasty, however you capture it and manipulate it afterwards. Leo Leo Enticknap Curator, Northern Region Film & Television Archive Middlesbrough, UK www.nrfta.org.uk ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org