Just crop and scale the footage to a 4:3 resolution. That's what I do with all my recordings.

leileilol wrote:

My ideal goal is to capture a pixel perfect display without a VGA capture card.

Well thats already difficult with a vga grabber since you have to hit sync and frequency perfectly.
From my experience with my vga grabber it is this way:
At low resolutions it is easy since a small shift of the sync start and small inaccuracy of the pixel clock is within the horizontal range of one pixel per line and thus not visible.
At medium and high resolutions as 1024xX 1280xX and so on you see the same effect as on a TFT with one pixel horizontal range scale offset. Now it depends on the granularity of the PLL adjustment that syncs the frequency of the sampling grabber to the signal. If the signals pixel clock is just between two steps then chances are worse to hit the signal pixel by pixel.
Still there is a trick. If you try different vertical refresh rates at the same resolution the signals pixel clock will change accordingly. So in theory you should find a pixel clock that is in sync with the grabbers clock pixel by pixel. VBE 3.0 or Powerstrip might be your friend 😉.
(Even if your grabber states 60 Hz or 70 Hz only, you may try some steps difference from this refresh rate, some graphics chips allow refresh rate changes smaller than 1 Hz. Powerstrip f.e. usually also calculates the timing values according to VESA standard timing.)

I used FRAPS before getting the VGA capture card. I do have a TV / Svid / Composite capture card but I haven't used it for anything other than console game capturing.

My experience with video card TV out has been that some cards have poor TV encoders and/or analog circuitry for it. Like with blurry VGA, NV and their partners seemed to make shitty TV output. I remember blur, luma/chroma issues and inadequate adjustment options.