Reducing Size of .mpg Video Capture Without Losing Quality

Hi;

and I am using it to capture from VHSs and Mini DV and I would like to capture in the same quality as the VHS / Mini DV recordings.

I have taken advice a long time ago using my setup for capturing and it seems to work fine.
My capture card is a Hauppage HVR-1300 and I am using WinTV v7 as the capture software (nothing else seems to work with the HVR-1300) everything in WinTV is default except that I have setup advanced settings to Auto Convert MPEG-2 Recordings to .mpg.

I have also enabled 3rd Part Decoders (not sure why I have done this) and it is using MainConcept (HCW) MPEG-2 Video for MPEG-2 Video and Hauppauge MPEG Layer-1/2 Audio for MPEG1 Audio.

With these settings an 8 min capture is 456MB!!!

The clip details are shown in the attached screen shot but are as follows:

VIDEO
Length: 00:08:04
Frame Width: 720
Frame Height: 576
Data Rate: 8500Kbps
Total Bitrate: 8884Kbps
Frame Rate: 25 frames/second

AUDIO
Bit rate: 384Kbps
Channels: 2 (Stereo)
Audio Sample Rate: 48Khz

If I change the decoders would I get better compression? If so what would you recommend that would work with this capture card?

Many thanks

Attached Images