VHS to PC - best equipment?

Hello,

I'm looking for some help. As part of my job, I need to convert some old VHS tapes to DVD. We really want to do this internally and not send the videos off to external companies.

I got our IT dept to buy me a Belkin High Speed USB2 Video Cerator as seen here. You will see that the reviews of this are terrible, and I have not got it working yet 6 months down the line.

I'm not being daft and making a simple mistake - I have done a lot of video editing in my time and have a degree in multimedia. I think really the equipment is just rubbish, or it's to do with an anti-piracy signal in the VHS recorder.

Has anyone had any success converting VHS to CVD, and if so, which equipment did oyu use?

Many many thanks. :bowdown:

I capture with a tv card, using optimal quality, then either convert to avi/dvd, using agk or winavi

I'm using a Lifeview FlyDVB-T Duo Cardbus to convert videos to DVD. Not the best setup in the world, but we were limited in our choices of hardware at the time. Software is Ulead DVD Movie Factory.

There is an external USB LG DVD burner on Scan that includes capture hardware. Don't know what software it uses, but it looks to be a pretty straight forward setup to use.

I have a standalone DVD recorder that is the best way I have found of transfering VHS to DVD, otherwise on a PC it's video capture that can be a tad hit and miss as well as the card costing a fair amount for a decent one, the DVD recorder is probably as cheap and quicker too, check this out: http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=766 , it's decent (I own the previous model), fully featured and a complete bargain at under £70, plus it plays divx too!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by philipbain

I have a standalone DVD recorder that is the best way I have found of transfering VHS to DVD.

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That's what we did for our home videos... got a Samsung combo (DVD recorder and VHS all-in-one), and it has a one touch copy function. Works like a charm with pretty good quality DVD file output.

Going through a PC just creates extra hassle tbh...

depends what you want to do.

The conversions i was doing wouldnæt have worked very well with a setup like that (although would have been easier) We have several tapes for one job and some of them have less than 30min of footage at the start, so doing it manually we can put multiple tapes on one DVD and add menus, titles, chapters etc.

Actually worked out why our setup was so unreliable recently. The laptop died. Tried the same capture card and software on my own home and works laptops and it was fine. The spare one kept giving weird errors. Yesterday morning i restarted it to try and run a checkdisk. it wouldn't boot. A new one is on order :) the screen was cracked anyway, hence why it was the spare.