Transferring VHS to DVD (a beginner)

[unclebob]

Dear Friends,

I would like to transform family VHS & 8mm tapes to DVD. Some of these babies are 13 to 14 years old. I’d like to do it using my computer, but need to know exactly what I need to do it. I’ve been to a few places (like Best Buy) and talked to a few people about what I needed. All have been helpful, but unlike you guys, they might have ulterior motives. That’s why I’m enlisting your help. Internal card, external USB, editing software? I don’t know. Finances are important (cause I ain’t got much to spend), but so is the quality, cause like I said these are priceless family heirlooms. The materials that you recommend need to be easy to figure out and operate (cause I ain’t no rocket scientist). 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 30 gigs available on my Hard Drive, a 3D fx Voodoo Banshee Display Driver, and I don’t know what else. Anything you can tell me will be appreciated. Thanks in advance you guys (and gals) have been most helpful in the past.

God Bless

Uncle Bob

[jkrohn]

This is what I got and it works great. Done both VHS tapes and 8mm with wonderful success.

Dazzle DVC 150 ($150 BestBuy)
NEC 4X DVD+/-RW ($97 Newegg)

The DVC 150 is a external USB device. It has a ton of video inputs and outputs.
You plug your input source in, open the included software (Pinnacle Studio 8) and select capture.

Once it is captured, you then edit it (Very easy with this program, my mom who knows nothing about computers can do it. I taught her in one day). You can make scenes, add custom menus, transition effects, text overlays, your own music/sound effects, the whole 9 yards. Or you can do nothing, it is up to you.

Lastly you burn it. You can choose between CD, SVCD, DVD, avi, mpeg1/2 and many others. You need no other burning software, this burns it right to the DVD. I use a compression rate of ~50% (4000 bitrate or so) and I see no quality loss. With this I can fit about 120-125 minutes of VHS onto a single DVD. Works nicely.

As I said this thing is very easy to use and worth every penny to save those old VHS tapes. It took me about 30 minutes of playing with it to figure everything out (it does come with like a 200 page manual if you need to read about something) and then about an hour to teach my mom.

If you have the money I would reccomend this. The whole process takes about 10-11 hours. (2 capture, 1 edit, 7 to render and burn)

Jkrohn

I will drop a second vote for the Dazzle DVC for simplicity. It is almost point-and-click operation.

I normally would say just pick up a cheap $30-40 WinTV PCI card and use VirtualDub to capture/encode, but that is not exactly a simple process if you have never worked with video before. There are tutorials available, but you could spend several days just gathering the software and needed information.

With the Dazzle DVC, you simply plug it in, load the bundled software, and get to work.

Robert Richmond