Item obtained, Thanks.

[blacktights]

Basically looking for a bit of advice here. I have a load of old vhs video's, mostly when my kids were , well, kids, some old music videos etc. I have a couple of old vhs video players \ recorders, that work fine and I fancy trying to convert the vhs tapes to dvd. I have found lots of 'tv tuner' cards , which offer video input via svhs and rca phono, but wonder if anybody out there has done this and what results they have had, and if they can recommend a decent card to do this. I have seen the usb plug in devices and I don't really want to go down that road, any advice, info, greatly appreciated, thanks,
Stephen Spielberg.

 

[hamster]

Personally I found it a hopeless task as the PC MPEG encoding made it very slow and laborious. You have to drag it all onto the HDD, then recode it and author a DVD. I bought a DVD recorder which did a much better job. SOm of the modern DVD/HDD machines can take it onto the HDD then burn a DVD in a few minutes

Even then you can get a problem with the Macrovision copy protection on the VHS pre-recorded tapes, and you might need a Macrovision removal box.

 

[blacktights]

Cheers for the information. I have to be honest, I don't have hundreds of vhs tapes etc, maybe half a dozen, so how long it takes wouldnt be an issue. I did one or two with the stand alone dvd recorder but I couldnt create any menus of any real significance, basically just the raw footage of the tapes etc. I used to have a macrovision box, back in the days of motorised satellite, but luckily managed to obtain all my favourite movies on dvd, in one way or another, ahem. Thanks for the information though, all the best.

 

[IDB1]

I used to have a little converter box. . plug any source in and save it to the pc..
Less than a tenner off ebay.. can't remember what it was called though

 

[IDB1]

Not what I had (mine was bought used), but. . . .

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/USB-Transfer-...nnectors_RL&hash=item3a59a6cee7#ht_3465wt_827

 

[blacktights]

tv tuner

Yes, know what you meant here, have seen those, seems the USB types are the latest, but really wanted to avoid any more 'plugin' devices, just too many as it is to be honest, but thanks.

 

[hamster]

Cheers for the information. I have to be honest, I don't have hundreds of vhs tapes etc, maybe half a dozen, so how long it takes wouldnt be an issue. I did one or two with the stand alone dvd recorder but I couldnt create any menus of any real significance, basically just the raw footage of the tapes etc. I used to have a macrovision box, back in the days of motorised satellite, but luckily managed to obtain all my favourite movies on dvd, in one way or another, ahem. Thanks for the information though, all the best.

Yep, the menu creation on them is pretty hopeless. :roll:

The problem then is having to transfer and edit up all the videos (frankly i don't have the time) so I gave up, ripped the whole lot to MPEG-4 and stuffed it onto a NAS RAID server. The Netgear Stora is around £150 and seemed good value.

 

[blacktights]

tv tuner

All sounds a bit technical for me,, basically just wanted to transer a few videos etc, ,, seen a few tv tuner cards on ebay, the older pci types, but think might be worth a go, thanks a lot for the info.