So I'm done capturing 10 minutes of footage from the canon hv20 and press 'stop' it says one moment please encoding footage.

And nothing happens. Nothing at all. It just freezes.

I have a good PC, I have updated windows. Why??

I have had that happen. When you close HDLink, did you check to see if the file was there?

Try capturing just the MPEG file and convert in a second step. Does that work?

Nope, nada don't work. BAdly frsutrating.

Submit a trouble ticket to cineform.

When I first installed Cineform, I had a similar issue. Cineform would freeze during capture using firewire. I tried rebooting and check connection, still NG.

I ended up uninstalling Cineform and reinstalling and it worked.

Try using the free utility HDVSplit. If that works to give you M2T files, use HDLink to convert them to Cineform. If that works, at least you have a workaround until you get it figured out.

As Steven Thomas discovered, sometimes it is just an install issue. If you can't capture M2T files, something is very wrong. Please try an uninstall and a re-install.

Will try this. Don't I loose my activation when I uninstall?

No, your activation will still be on the computer unless you take specific steps to de-activate.