coping videos to a computer

village_life

hi

ive got various VHS video's that i want to get rid of and put on my PC

is it possible to relay video into a PC and then copy the content - aside from the legalities....

penrhyn

Yes via an adapter and some software, but its probably easier to get a DVD recorder and dump the recordings onto disk.

Ditto

It would be a lot easier to buy the dvd version of them as the quality of the copied video would be bad. Plus factor in the time/money spent converting the video to run on your pc.

I'm assuming the videos are of old films, which would mean that the dvd version would be cheap. HMV are having a sale on at the moment...

Ditto

Aldi sell dvd creator kits for about £10.

mr_fishbulb

If you have a divital camcorder another way is to plug it into the video, record from the video to the camcorder, then download the camcorder to the PC and burn a DVD.

Sput2001

mr_fishbulb wrote:

If you have a divital camcorder another way is to plug it into the video, record from the video to the camcorder, then download the camcorder to the PC and burn a DVD.

Some digital camcorders allow you to use it as a digital-to-analogue converter, so you can plug your VCR into the camera (using, say, a scart-to-composite connector), and then connect the camera to your PC (e.g. via firewire) and then capture the video directly onto your PC in "real time" without having to record and then playback.

You can then output to DVD pretty straightforwardly. I've carried out the whole process a few times using Ulead's Videostudio software, but there are others...

As has been mentioned above, the video quality isn't going to be all that great. At best, it'll be no better than the original VHS recording you've copied. If you can buy the films again on DVD then that would be the much better option (you can always hunt for them on ebay). Obviously this isn't an option for home videos etc.!

Gibblestick

The quality of the image will degrade slightly during the conversion, even using the best solution, the more you skimp, the worse it will become. However, the bigger issue is that TV quality images on a PC monitor look aweful. It's all down to the fact that TV pictures are fairly low resolution and TVs "blur" the image to look better. PC monitors are all crisp, making the image look really bad unless it's in a tiny window.

ringer

Got to agree with James's Dad, search out out cheap DVD versions of your old VHS tapes.I started to back up my old tapes,but it really wasn't worth the time and hassle. You have to copy them in real time,and the quality of VHS really is poor compared to DVD.Check out some of your older tapes,the picture quality does deteriorate over time,