Hi ozjeff99,
WinDVR is very good. It's about the best real-time software encoder I've seen. Better that PowerVCR. I like the quality much better. You can capture MPEG-2 at a very high bit rate, and then transcode to MPEG-1 with a KVCD template. The results are pretty good
I'm not using this capture card anymore, because I now capture with the Panasonic DMR-E20 to DVD-RAM. Then I take the DVD-RAM to my PC and transcode. Nothing can beat that as a real-time hardware encoder. I haven't seen any hardware cards that approach the quality that Panasonic has achieved with that machine.
-kwag