Digitizing VHS Tapes?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

>         ----CJ's Reply----
>         Your software may be a bit slow then when it comes to
>         recording and you will need to get a different program if you
>         ever plan on viewing your movie AV sinc problems. I use an
>         external TV card and the program that comes wiht my tv card
>         doesnt have any problems when recording. so, you may either
>         want to check your software preferences to take of the 0.9sec
>         delay. but if there isnt an option to do so, then i would
>         recommend getting a different tv recording program. and if
>         that doesnt work, then blame it on your tv card :P

Ah, so it's the software encoder that sucks then, great, so my PC's
performance is not at fault :-)
Now, I use XawTV to view TV and record it, so XawTV is at fault then.
So, what other (open source) programs are available to record a video
stream ?
I am willing to experiment with alternatives if there are any to
XawTV...
I tried "Zapping", another TV viewing app, but I am not sure if it can
record, and never use it because it hangs the CPU and it's very slow to
switch channels. I tried "TVtime" but it never worked, never managed to
watch TV with it.
Maybe there is some good/efficient command line utility that does only
video recording, and no TV viewing, just recording, but does it well ?
I looked in HAL device manager, there are two devices associated with my
TV card : /dev/vbi0 and /dev/video0, but I don't know which one to use
to record the video stream... don't even know why they are two distinct
devices to start with...

--
Vince