Thanks everyone. I decided to try the the DVD Xpress USB 2 bridge. So far it is working out fine although I needed to intall a USB2 pci card to be able to achive the data rates to record AVI files.

Not sure how you guys work but I prefer to capture as DV-AVI files (yes, I know they are huge so I bought a couple of 300GB hard drives) and edit and then export the final master avi to mpeg2.

It came bundled with 'Video Studio 8' which has an excellent converter however I still prefer to edit my AVI's in 'movie maker pro' and then compile my DVD in Video studio. Movie maker pro is so easy to use and edit with IMO.