Whoever tried to produce MPEG videos with Linux two years ago had to use the Berkeley tools. With these programs you had to split your video into single frames, then encode every frame and finally merge them to an MPEG stream. The sound had to be converted into MPEG and both streams had to be merged. Meanwhile, there is a quite comfortable alternative that also produces MPEG videos. The video is recorded with Bcast2000 and saved in the Quicktime format.
Broadcast can record pictures and sound coming from a TV card as many other programs, too.
Other programs like kWinTV save the video signal in the AVI format, but Broadcast uses the Quicktime format. This can be done because the Quicktime libraries areunder the GPL license. Too bad that this maximum data flow can be reached very fast. With higher resolutions, your recording is not free of errors. These errors are usually missing frames in the stream.