Pinnacle doesn't like 23fps clips, which is basically anything ripped from American/Canadian TV (like, say, all your House episodes (and half of mine)). And I'm using WMM at the moment despite the whole imported/not imported messages, so nyeh.

All I can think of is to take a look around here. There's no concise guide, more of a general consensus that this program is better than that one, another one is less buggy, and so on.

Hope that helps :)