Converting VHS to DVD

[jkrohn]

I have settled on using a capture card then burning to DVD.

This way she can use the camcorder as well as the VCR.

I do have a few questions about it though.
1) I am guessing this all happens in real time? (The capture/conversion to MPEG-2). Which is nice and slow.
2) What are some reccomended capture cards for this? Quality is a pretty important issue.
3) Does picture quality improve (or is it worth it) to use the high quality RCA cabling.
4) How many hours of VHS should we expact to fit onto a single DVD?


Jkrohn

[Siliconjunkie]

1) All depends on what you tell the software to do.
2) Really, the best thing to use is a camcorder with firewire and analog inputs.
3) See above. Best option.
4) Phen would know this, but I think about 1.5

I did a bunch of research on this a while back. The best option is a camcorder with firewire and analog inputs. It will do a very nice analog to digital conversion and you will get a superior video in the end. And, it will prove much more useful in the long run.

There are also a number of "bridges" that do this. But I read alot of mixed results on them.

[phenious]

You can fit as much video into a DVD as you want to be honest. The main thing you have to do is find how high of a bitrate you want to use and then run your captured video file though a program like TMPGenc to put it into a Mpeg2 format with the right bitrate. Using a full quality DVD bitrate and such you can get 120min of video but I think it would be a waste as the source is a VHS which will mean it isnt the best quality anyways. Then comes the part that you wont be looking at the video up close and personal on a $8,000 TV to see the difference I would play with the compression ratios and see what is acceptable. I try not to go below 2000Kb on my bitrate.

-: phenious :-