Conan
I must say that although most MS products are maligned, Movie Maker is a very useful tool for the amateur (like mysef). I was able to put together an awesome 6 minute filmette of my daughter's first ski lesson, all set to music, using video captured from my tiny 35mm digital camera and pictures from the same. I've also done a lot of work with it to produce a Fleet Air Arm Taranto tribute and some stuff for my American colleagues. The best bit is that it is free! (as it comes bundled with Win XP). It won't do more powerful stuff I agree but for what it does do it is very good.
The DVD capture program I use is called maxd2a (they also do an mpeg version called maxd2m, but that crashed all the time so I gave up on it) and can be found
here. The web page does say that you have to pay about $25 for it, although you can just download the trial version which limits you to 10 minutes. I've been using it for a while and there is no time limit before the trial version stops working. I think I will actually pay for the upgrade in due course when I get more into this sort of thing.
Cheers
Oggin