Convert VHS to digital ?

There are a number of ways to do it...

Get something like Dazzle's Hollywood Bridge or Pinnacle's Studio Deluxe. Those 2 are probably the easiest way, but it'll cost you about $250-$300 for the hardware. I just bought the Hollywood Bridge today to convert a truckload of vids for relatives and myself to digital format. I haven't tried burning them to CD or anything yet...

Oh yeah, and make sure you have a ton of hard drive space...

 

Hmm... now that I think about it, you may be able to use a cheaper TV Tuner card to record the output straight to your hard drive, then use something to burn it, although I haven't tried that.

Maybe someone else here has...

 

i tried what DoD described, but it was unsuccessful... a mere few minutes of recording video via a tv tuner card took nearly 2 GB of hd space! maybe i had a poor tv tuner card (cheap AVerMedia AVerTV card)... perhaps higher quality cards would yield better results... and yes, I did try to lessen the video quality and resolution, but to no avail!

 

I have a TV card and I've routinely recorded things from VHS to my pc. Only small segments though. They do tend to take up a sh*tload of space. You can tweak with the video quality to try a squeeze the most (or least, in this case) out of your HD though.

 

You can go to http://www.vcdhelp.com. It has all the info you'll ever need.

I've done it a few times with 8mm video from my analog camcorder. You'll need a fast hard drive and lots of disk space. I have a 1.1 Ghz machine with an 80Gb, 7200rpm hard drive, and capture with a WinTV card (which is separate from my video card). A WinTV card is about $50 for the cheapest one.

You may also be able to burn the video to a CD and watch it on your TV through your DVD player. But not all DVD players can do it.

 

The quick and dirty way would be to record it off of the screen with a pc camera, but that will have some ugly results. Kinda like the bootleg movies you may have seen. I would not recommend doing this. If you go out and buy a DVD recorder, you would just feed the RCA out from the VCR into the DVD recorder and copy the tapes to DVD, much like copying VHS with two VCRs.

 

I'm using the Dazzle DVC80, and it works pretty good...

After experimenting with it for a while...I've managed to cut back the sizes to about 25 M per 3 minutes of video.

Definitely make sure you have everything as tweaked as possible, 7200rpm drive...Ultra ATA 100 (Preferred) I run mine on ATA66 and it seems to be ok, I just make sure nothing else is running at the same time (esp AV).

 

Hey DARO, come to think of it, you probably wouldn't need something like the Hollywood Bridge to do what you want. The reason I got it was to import video digitally to my hard drive, edit it, then send it back to a VCR or burn it to DVD or CD. You basically just have to get it onto your hard drive, then let software do the rest... one of Dazzle's lower-end products may do it for you. Check out www.dazzle.com. Also check out their competitor : www.pinnaclesys.com.

...thanks Rockets2k for reminding me with your post

 

You might want to check out Dazzle's Digital Video Creator II (DVC-II). It's the same price as the Hollywood Bridge but encodes directly to MPEG-2, as opposed to DV.

Since it compresses in real time, you don't need nearly as much hard drive space. It really excels at high bitrate caps (outstanding), but does an adequate job making VCD-compliant MPEG-1, too (suitable for your old video tapes).

I use a combo of the DVC-II, some registry tweaks, and TMPGEnc, and get outstanding quality captures in minimal time. I personally prefer it to the Hollywood Bridge...

For a great source of more info on this sort of thing, check out http://www.vcdhelp.com. There is something for newbies and seasoned vets there; reviews, how-tos, and a great forum...

Good luck.