The
ATI 600 USB card does record PAL.
I suggest getting it from
Amazon.com, regardless of you current location:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...SIN=B00138EOH8
Don't let the photos fool you -- it's more than just a coax TV PVR stick. It has a breakout wire for s-video and composite connections. You use Catalyst Media Center for MPEG-2 capturing. (It also offers MPEG-4 capturing, but I strongly suggest against capturing to MPEG-4.) And then you can use VirtualDub for lossless/uncompressed AVI capturing.
I need to create a guide for VirtualDub + ATI PVR cards, because the settings for PAL are not entirely obvious -- but it can be done, yes, absolutely. I plan to upload an ISO file that you can burn to DVD (use a DVD-RW/DVD+RW so as not to waste a disc!), to test it on a PAL DVD player connected to a PAL TV set.
TMPGEnc DVD Author can "merge" videos, simply by using authoring tricks -- namely putting both videos in the same track, and then you can use the built-in editor to trim some parts. It's supposed to be frame accurate, however there can sometimes be offsets, so watch for that, if it's important. Note that you'll have a chapter mark at this break. You must also use matching MPEGs (same bitrate, resolution, PAL/NTSC framerate, etc), else you'll trigger a full re-encode to one or both lips -- not good. That's true of any MPEG editor, of course, you must use matching clips to do a stream copy edit.
Your existing software may work for basic MPEG recording, AVI recording, some limited editing (cut/merge), and authoring.
TMPGEnc Plus is not a bad encoder, just really slow. It does, however, have some unique restorative filtering abilities! (I've not used them as heavily in recent years, due to new VirtualDub filters and my expanding knowledge of Avisynth scripting. But still useful from time to time. Used them exclusively for several years there, 2001-2004. Need to re-publish that guide, it was removed in the 2005 crash.)
All VHS tapes are interlaced, period. The TBC won't change this, however it might change the exact field order. It won't change TFF to BBF (or vice versa), but it may shift the interlaced image by one field. You might just be noticing this effect. I don't see it often, but I do notice sometimes. Being a retail tape, it might just be making the telecine (added interlace) more obvious. I'd have to know a lot more about your workflow, previews, software, etc, to know exactly what you're seeing. But that's one possible option.