What do I need?

[unclebob]

Dear Friends
It’s down to crunch time for me. I need to make my purchases and get going. What I need (one last time) is your advice of hardware and software that has worked for you. I’d especially like it if there is someone out there with some of the specs that are similar to mine that have had good to excellent results with the products they’ve used. I’ll reiterate that I am one who does want the best results so please whatever you’ve used to achieve results you’re happy with let me know all involved. I also ask that you be as simple in your explanation as possible, for I am unfamiliar with many of the products and terms that you’ve been good enough to give me in the past. Here is the gist of my previous posts & again Thanks.

I want to be able to transfer some older family VHS & 8mm tapes to DVD and also to copy some DVD movies to DVD (Being able to duplicate the original of either so it’s hard to tell the difference). If it helps, looking at my systems properties it says that I have a AMD Anthlon™ XP 1800+ (processor), 256 megs of RAM, I use Windows 98SE, and have about 33 gigs (of 60 gig) available on my Hard Drive, a 3D fx Voodoo Banshee Display Driver, and I don’t know what else.
Thanks for all your help
& God Bless
Uncle Bob

[phenious]

My system : AMD XP 1800+ 512MB RAM, 335GB HDD, ATI Radeon 8500, ATI TV Wonder Pro, Win XP Pro

Burner : Pionner A06 4X Dual Format -R/RW/+R/+RW Great multi fomat burner. Fast and reliable. Will be fairly cheap now $200 or less as newer 8X drives have come out. You can burn a full DVD in about 17Min @ 4X assuming all of the video that you are putting on the DVD is in the correct format and dosnt require transcoding.

Software: came with Burner Ulead DVD Factory/Stuido.

Great software that will allow you to capture, edit, and burn video to a DVD and allows you to make simple DVDs. The software came with the retail of the Pionner A06 so you kill 2 birds for the price of one This should allow you to capture and work with your VHS on the software side

Capture Card: ATI TV Wonder Pro. I am happy with its preformance and it has served me well. No problems even though some have reported having dificulties with the card in XP. I put it in and it has worked flawlessly from day 1. I suggest you look at the features of the ATI TV Wonder Pro and some other captures cards like the WinTV serrries and see which fits you best and has the best price. Like I said, Im happy with my ATI capture card.

Depending on the length of your movies and if you wish to store them for long periods of time I would recomend a slightly larger hard drive to keep all your video work on. Newegg is selling some awesome Western Digital 120GB Hard Drives with a 8MB Cache for just $85. Digital Video uses lots of hard drive space and so does DVD Burning when it makes the VOBs for the DVD.

Those are my suggestions and Id be happy to answer any other questions if you have any

-: phenious :-

[Uncle Bob]

Seems as though we have two uncle bobs

[butch81385]

i have an uncle bob....

[phenious]

allright guys lets help the guy out

-: phenious :-

[HeadBand]

you will need a video capture card to store the files on your harddrive

if you are planning on making long movies you files will likley go over the 4gb limit of the fat32 filesystem so you would need to upgrade to 2000 or xp

if you want an exact copy of a dvd you will need to wait untill april when dual layer dvd burners come out...it depends on you financial situation though if you want to get a single layer now then a dual layer or just wait for dual layer