Migrating VHS Content to Digital Formats

[ikonia]

Guys,

I've come to the decision its time to get rid of my Video VHS devices.

I'd like to get everything into the best quality digital format I can then archivce them off onto DVD's and put them on my media server.

I've got approx 40 videos I'd convert, things like the Mary White House shows, some old Robert Newman content, All the F1 series for the past 25 years, some music videos and some personal content (not porn!)

I've been looking around for devices to do this with little sucess I've been told that giving the videos to professional companies is the best bet.

I'd appricaite information on both, very much so from people who have done this task.

thanks.

[tfboy]

I'm not sure, but wouldn't be surprised if professional companies have an issue with content that's copyrighted.

If you want to do it yourself, all you need is a capture card, a fair bit of hard disk space and time.
You can either use something like a WinTV USB2 capture box from hauppauge. This has the advantage in that it has an onboard MPEG2 hardware encoder so you're recording stuff in the right format to author directly to DVD. However, as it's an on-the-fly process and quality is important to you, it may not be the best option.

The alternative is to record with minimal compression using just a simple TV capture card or your graphics card if it is VIVO. Once captured, you can edit it if required and then transcode the format to MPEG2 DVD format. The benefit of doing it this way is you can do multiple-pass encoding which will improve the efficiency / quality. However, to be honest, as your source is VHS, it'll never look superb anyway lol.

Have a look here for a decent guide: http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/start.html