Converting VHS recordings to digital

I'm sure many of you also have boxes of VHS tapes of Cornell hockey games and other sporting events. I would like to get those games transferred to some sort of electronic/digital format, but for minimal money. In this week's BED, BATH AND BEYOND, flyer they advertised a "Digital Video Converter" that would convert DVR, VHS, DVD and live TV programs onto an SD card, which then, I gues can be downloaded onto your computer.

Has anyone used such a device? is it worth the $99? They also had a converter for recording cassette tapes and LPs to CD. I also have many boxes of cassette tapes that I would like to have on a CD/MP3 format. Of course, no one device does both VHS and cassette.

So I was wondering if these devices are any good and is it worth putting on my Christmas/ Wish List. Of course other suggestions welcomed because I'm sure that Bed, Bath and Beyond is probably not the best place to get these things. But I saw them and thought, Hey! I can use that.

[www.bedbathandbeyond.com]

[www.bedbathandbeyond.com]

There is a converter in Carpenter Library, go upstairs to ACCEL and ask for it.

ajh258
There is a converter in Carpenter Library, go upstairs to ACCEL and ask for it.

Thanks for the info, but that would be quite a hike from my home in South Florida.

Rita

ajh258
There is a converter in Carpenter Library, go upstairs to ACCEL and ask for it.

Thanks for the info, but that would be quite a hike from my home in South Florida.

My first thought exactly. There's a recent "how to" post I saw from Wired today that gives a pretty basic overview:

[howto.wired.com]

If you are not really familiar with the whole process save yourself a lot of trouble and just buy one of those set top boxes that you insert the VHS and a DVD and it does it for you. Although these are somewhat difficult to obtain anymore, ebay is a good option.

Using your computer would probably be somewhat cheaper but it can be a somewhat painful process since there are probably 20+ programs that can do the job along with many different configuration options. Plus you will not really be able to use your computer the whole time and each VHS takes as long as the length of the material on it to record to your hard drive.

[www.amazon.com]

Comes with S/W for editing and converts to DVD, among other formats.

Ken70
[www.amazon.com]

Comes with S/W for editing and converts to DVD, among other formats.

For fifty bucks, if you're wrong, you're only out fifty bucks. Read the comments on the Amazon page; some are useful, such as the note to write the video file to your disk as an intermediate step rather than go direct to the DVD. A lot of Pinnacle software (the Dazzle package) has been flaky in the past and yet I found it got the job done between crashes. My PC chauvinist heart says you should do it all on a Mac if you have a choice.

Use really good media since you're likely not going to remember to re-burn the DVD in 5 years or 10 years. TDK, Verbatim are good, HP if you're burning Lightscribe discs. The archive fanatics say Taiyo Yuden DVDs are the very best, in quantity they're 100 for $25. I've also heard that writing on the discs with a felt tip pen can affect longevity; don't know if that's true, but several people say it.

Most important is to get your valuable videos off tape now.

billhoward
Use really good media since you're likely not going to remember to re-burn the DVD in 5 years or 10 years.

The best media is a file on your hard drive and a backup off-site. Physical media are going the way of the dodo and, as you note, recordables don't have particularly good longevity anyway: rolling over a growing collection every few years is going to become a PITA very quickly.

I maintain my own backup (RAID at each of two physically separate locations), but individuals can obtain storage and backup services from a commercial provider for not too much money these days.

Sorry, I don't read this forum enough. Probably the solution that would present the least headaches would be to just buy a cheapish DVD recorder and feed the VCR into that. Don't have to worry about encoding, burning, etc. If the quality of your tapes is at all suspect, avoid the Dazzle or any of the lower-end (less than $200) DV capture hardware. If there's any break in the timecode during playback, worst case is it will just stop capturing and best case is the audio will be out of sync for the rest of the capture.

I'm in the middle of a gargantuan (as in hundreds of tapes) VHS digitizing project, and I tried all that crap and they're all a waste of time. What you really need, if you want to do the capture-edit-burn on your computer thing is one of these:

[www.amazon.com]

They're expensive, but they're awesome. Exhaustive image and sound control, very advanced hardware noise reduction, and no matter how crappy the tape, the sound will always remain in sync.

Alternatively, you can send me the tapes and a hard drive and I can capture them. You know how to reach me.