At a penny under £50 (inc VAT), Terratec’s Grabster AV 150 external USB 2.0 box looks like something of a no-brainer for anyone wanting to convert their analogue tapes to DVDs or VideoCDs.
With sockets for composite and S-video, the USB-powered box caters for most types of domestic analogue VCR and camcorder footage - VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS-C, Digital8 and Hi8 - and should even be usable with Betamax machines. And, of course, if you've got a satellite receiver or a digital camcorder with composite or S-video outputs, it should be able to handle them, too.
That keen price - which even buys a full copy of Ulead's capable and easy-to-use authoring program DVD MovieFactory 3 plus a lite (SE) version of Ulead's VideoStudio editing app - is partly explained by the fact that encoding is carried out in software within the PC, not by hardware within the Terratec box.