I was just playing around with my Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP (now called WinFast PVR I think) and found built in settings for recording TV optimized Pocket PC Windows Media. It is the WMV format which isn't great, but its VERY easy. Just record and move to your PPC or you can do some simple editing and remove the comercials.

I'm going to update the software later and see if they've added more PPC templates.

good idea! I've got the same tuner card. What I did at one point was create some templates in virtualdub, and used some job control program, so all I did was save the video (which was in mpg1 format) and loaded it into vdub via the job control program and clicked go and let it convert. At the time I had my tuner scheduled to record the news in the morning, so that when I got up I just loaded the file into vdub and let it encode it to divx. I was only doing this because I was trying to get full screen (320x240 landscape) on my axim.

However, for some casual viewing, using winfast's template is probably the easiest way to go, since your capture is already axim-friendly.

I just wish I had more control over the settings. It won't let me do anything with the WMV audio and and there are only 2 PPC templates for the video.

Or if it would allow me to capture mpeg-1 with the setting I like. Divx will do that, but the files are too big.

well you can create your own templates with media encoder i believe, but you don't have the kind of control you do with virtualDub. You can always do a standard mpg1 capture and use vdub after that. you can save your preferences in vdub so that you just have to load your preference file to get your settings and then encode away.