Any decent method to capture directly to x264?

[Dstln]

I just reinstalled my old capture card recently and have been playing around with it.  Really, I have no experience in the matter as this is pretty much the only time I've gotten this card working properly   (hooray for leadtek drivers finally working I guess).  So the card has hardware mpeg2 encoding (~dvd bitrates) and can also be saved uncompressed or encoded with vfw codecs.  It seems to capture fine in both the included software and virtualdub but not in vlc (although I think I got it semi-working in the past) and I really don't know what else to try.  Basically, I'm wondering about any possible methods to capture directly to x264 so I don't need to go uncompressed or go to the vfw ffdshowx264/x264vfw routes for the best results.  Based on tests, it works fine to encoding realtime on my system with x264 vfw methods on medium settings at 640x480.

[MrVideo]

Based on tests, it works fine to encoding realtime on my system with x264 vfw methods on medium settings at 640x480.

Instead of 640x480, you should be using 720x480 non-square encodings.  You lose horizontal resolution bt doing 640x40 square pixels.

When I got D-VHS decks in order to originally capture OTA broadcasts via firewire from the STB, I ended up with a bonus feature... the ability to feed the D-VHS deck analog and have it convert it to 15 Mbps 720x480 MPEG-2 that I feed in realtime to the computer via firewire.  The only processing I do beforehand is to send it through my professional TBC in order to remove NTSC setup, as MPEG-2 video does not have setup.