I got some movies on a VCR that i want to move to my computer somehow. (for personal use)

I have a video capture card and all hardware required. I'm looking for the software - programs, codecs etc.

I like the format that most torrents come in and got some of these i'd like to use as reference for comparison. How can i see what codec, bitrate, etc a movie is using so i can pick this and know that it will work and look good. For AVI-files the bitrate is visible in explorer but it doesn't mention the codec used and i also have a lot of MKV-files that explorer can't handle.

All kinds of tips, tricks and other suggestions are welcome. This is completely new to me. How do I avoid that video/audio gets out of sync for example, many movies you download have audio out of sync so i guess this can happen quite easily.

The encoding-program has to run on windows and for playback the movies should work on at least VLC for windows.