I have a very special 20 year old video tape that I recorded off the TV, that I would like to transfer to DVD or data disc as an mpg or avi file. It is a 6 hour tape of an old PBS garden series called "Victory Garden" from the early 90s. Therefore I cannot use a company to do the job for me due to copyright. Is there any way to do this without using a DVD recorder, a vcr or a PC? I'm looking for a gadget that I can just put my tape in and a disc and the tape will transfer to the disc without complicated confusing connection cables, capture cards and the like. It's too confusing. I recently spent 500 dollars on an MP4 recorder (Archos 605 Wifi with DVR Station) but it will not hook up to my VCR successfully and I've read the instructions completely and tried all manner of creative connections. Nothing works. Advice please?
There are many ways to do this, but since you dont want to use a PC, VCR, or DVD Recorder you just cut off your options at the knees. The easiest way I know how to do this with using the above mentioned devices is to purchase a DVD player/VCR combo with the ability to transfer the VHS contents to DVD-/+R. Of course this may require multiple DVD's and it may not work right if the tape has macrovision on it. This is the way I would recommend to go about doing the transfer. Considering you have a DVD burner on your desktop PC I would recommend you purchase a TV tuner card with video input really anything with a video-in port would work. If you don't want to muck around with installing PCI cards get a product like one of these (Product 1, Prod. 2). It is essentially a USB Video capture card. You could also get a PCI TV tuner card like this one or this one. They would do the same thing as the USB stick but require you to open your PC up and install the card to a available PCI slot.The way you would use it to capture you vhs video is to first get a/the VCR Cat5e connetions. They look like this... You would plug in the USB TV stick to a available USB port and then connect the USB stick and VCR via the Cat5e cable. One would then use a program like VirtualDub to record the playback the USB stick is recieving from the VCR. This would give a AVI file which you could then burn to DVD, shrink/reencode and burn to DVD, archive for backup purposes,etc. The process is very similar when using a PCI based TV tuner card.
I currently have a ATI capture card similar to the ATI card I linked to. I got it as a gift and it works fine for me, but if I could choose any card I would have gone with a Hauppage.
i have Hauppage pvr500 mce kit. i have some issue with it. but overall real nice piece. it works well with mce and nero. the main reason i bought it was to do vhs tapes to dvd.. and thats my headache...
If I have time I plan to do a VHS to DVD or a general purpose video capture to DVD guide and submit it to AfterDawn.
Peainapod and born2ride: Since you have ATI cards you might look at www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/atimpeg/atimpeg.htm for macrovision hacks under macrovision. A program has been written that defeats it depending which ATI card you are using. Since I use Happapage and it is not affected by macrovision. There are a number of guides which are out there for programs that lead you step by step to a finalized DVD from either VHS or Beta tapes. One program I highly recommend is DVDLab. You can find the guide to this at http://forum.videohelp.com/topic220092.html My association with Afterdawn has been the answer to the conversion of my tapes to DVD. An outstanding forum. Thank you.
