Aha! I've already been down this path. I use a Dazzle Multimedia Snazzi card, which is a Real Time MPEG1 encoder. This card gives you the best quality Vs compression rate of all. If you digitize in .avi format. The quality will be good, but you will use up loads of hard drive space. Digitizing in MPEG, like the Snazzi does, used only about 10Mb per minute @ 384 x 288, 25 fps with 44.1KHz stereo sound, which means each episode is 220Mb long.
Also, if you have a CD Writer, you can use the software they give you with this card (CeQuadrat WinOnCD 3.0) to make up your own VideoCD's. I have made up the entire first series on 7 CD's to play back in my CDi player (soon to be a DVD), or on my computer. That way, the episodes are archived for ever (almost), and don't clutter up your hard drive.
The Snazzi card is �299 in the UK for the internal version, which comes with a colour video camera for vid/conf's, or �199 for an external box that plugs into your parallel port.
Have Fun!
~~~ Stan Marsh @ your service
http://members.aol.com/StanMarsh/index.html
arrrrrr....buba chump...... Kevin rules. Long live Kevin