I was considering purchasing a HP dc5000 to convert my vast VHS collection to dvd. Has anyone had experiences with this product? I have a Pentium 4.. 2 Gig processor with 512meg of memory, but just a 80mb hard drive. Also, a Nvidia 64MB DDR Geoforce3 Ti 200 video card, if that comes into play. Does this seem to be enough to do what I am wanting to do? I was really curious as to whether I could store a VHS tape on that small a hard drive. Also, I was going to add a TV card to tape television perhaps also. Thanks for any help.
Not sure about the HP stuff but my vhs transfers are in mpeg2 format and they generally come in at 3-4 gigs. Now after any editing I author these to a DVD volume so they can be burnt to disc. This dvd volume adds another (roughly) 4 gigs. So you end up with a mpeg2 file AND a dvd volume of the same movie taking up 8-9 gigs of space. Both of these file types can be tested on your computer to see if they work. If everything is ok you burn to disc and can delete or save the aforementioned files. Realize though, that these file sizes are dependant on length of movie, capture bitrate & resolution, and file type (mpeg or avi). So then, an 80 gig drive with 20 or so gigs of free space is adequate for messing with 1 maybe 2 video jobs. Also, keep the drive defragmented for better performance and increased success rate.
to tw66-an 80 megabite hard drive does seem to be kind of small since you may want to store the movies on your hard drive from time to time,your best bet would be a 40 or 60 gigabite.
