dobbin

So do you definately need planning permission then? bugger. Is it a lot of faff? (and does it go out of date? - if they grant permission now and the work doesnt happen for a year or so does that matter?) If you google for 'Sheffield cellar conversion' you get a company called Cellar seal, who are sheffield based and do cellar conversions (funnilly enough). Has anyone used them and are they any good?

If you suffer frequent disconnects and use either a adsl modem or a router , try plugging the router directly into the main phone point in the house. Remove any extensions you may have running to other rooms and potentially (if its really bad) try unplugging all telephones too! Obviously, you'll not want to work for too long with the phone unplugged, but if you have tried everything else then consider maybe the phone could be introducing noise onto the line.

A couple of years ago we had a problem with Pocket PC devices at work, they have the IR set to recieve incoming beams by default and kept thinking the flourescent lights were trying to communicate with them!

I think you need to split the audio and video streams out, then glue them back together when you encode em for svcd. I've got some good results with virtual dub to split the streams and Tmpgenc to reencode. I would post a link, but as am newbie I cannot (5 posts before you can link other sites, to prevent abuse), so it was at www dot videohelp dot com. Good luck!