i can hear it
I went for a haircut this morning. Its not the best one i've ever gotten, but not the worst either.
I returned to my quest to capture audio & video from the VCR using my PCTV-Pro TV capture card today. After several more frustrating hours of still not getting any audio whatsoever from anything I captured, I finally figured out the missing piece of the puzzle. For reasons that still fail to make any sense, using my soundcard's 'Audio In' plug just doesn't work, while using the soundcard's Microphone input does work. I also had to go into alsamixer and designate both the 'Mic' device and the 'Capture' device as 'CAPTUR' by hitting space when each was selected. After doing that, I was able to produce a short captured AVI that had sound in perfect sync with the video.
After some brief googling, I found this great page on how to use mencoder to convert video to different formats. The default that xawtv was giving me was using about 1MB/s, which is just crazy. The following command reduced the size of my movie by about 70% with no noticable loss of quality (heck, this is from analog VHS, so the quality isn't all that spectactular to begin with):
mencoder genius1.avi -o new-genius1.avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame