How To Record Compressed Video From TV Tuner Using VLC

UPDATE: The previous title for this question was "How To Specify Bitrate, Codec and Demultiplexing for VLC Video Capture or Recording."

I capture video from old TV tuner card - Pinnacle PCTV - using VLC. The video is from the Composite input and audio is from I guess the mixer or Line in. The command I use is:

vlc  v4l2:///dev/video0:normal=pal:width=720:height=576:input=1 :input-slave="alsa://hw:0,0"

In VLC, I have enabled the Advanced Controls toolbar, which allows me to record videos when I want to. However, these videos are uncompressed - very big and play only with VLC. Totem throws the "Could not demultiplex stream" error. I need to convert them using WinFF to reduce their size and make them playable with Totem and other software.

My question is whether I can configure the recording settings - the codecs and the bitrate, and also get the stream demultiplexed. If I pass any -sout parameter with command I get a "Segmentation fault". I use 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10.

In the past I've had the following work for me:

ffmpeg -f oss -ac 2 -ar 48000 -i /dev/audio1 -acodec pcm_s16le -f video4linux2 -s 720x480 -r 3000/101 -i /dev/video0 -sameq -aspect 4:3 -target ntsc-dvd a.vob

Of course both the -target and frame rate -r 3000/101 would have to be changed for PAL.