VHS video capture frustration

StockportGerbil

Folks :-
I'm hoping someone else here has played the same game of VHS video conversion to DVD and AVI and has some ideas where I'm going wrong...

Following a clearout of the loft I found a number of VHS videos of family events that it's now been decided need preserving for posterity.

So I'm trying to capture the content of these videos on the computer whilst I still have a working VHS player.Ages ago I bought a USB video digitiser / converter manufactured by Belkin but only now started to use it in anger.

It comes with Ulead videostudio software; which when I save the captured files as mpgs more often than not don't play. To capture I've also tried virtualVCR, Windows Movie Maker and Virtualdub.

I've had the greatest amount of success with virtualdub, but whenever I try and user any form of audio compression either virtualdub will fail to work with an error message or the audio is totally out of sync with the video. Without audio compression the files get big rather quickly. Also it seems to operate at low resolution (320 x 24 or so0) whereas I thought PAL could support greater resolutions than that via interlacing?

Are there any other free windows programs I can try to use to capture these videos or has anyone got any clues how to get this going reliably?

I am aiming to initially capture the videos as AVIs, but to distibute the videos within the family as DVDs.

Thanks

Kevin

Nilrem

Argh I remember having problems with this sort of thing a while back.

I can't remember how exactly I fixed the audio sync issue, but from memory it involved playing around with the settings in Virtual Dub, I've got a feeling it defaults to the wrong setting for UK home video.
I think it needs to be 25fps, as if it's 24 (film) or 30 (NTSC) it's effectively trying to encode the video at one rate with the audio at another.
I suspect your capture device is probably limited to 320x240 at a hardware level, hence you cannot go higher.

I used a Hauppage WinTV 350 (hardware mpeg2 encoding) card when I did our videos about 4 years ago, hence why i'm a bit vague:)

I would strongly suggest you get the capture and any editing done as mpeg2 if that is what your capture device does, then use that to do any DVD mastering, or conversions to avi format, as if you capture it in mpeg2 then convert it to avi, edit it, then convert it back to mpeg2 for DVD you'll lose more picture quality (as you're changing the encoding multiple times, rather than once).

googler

How much are you willing or able to spend on the project?

I suggest stop faffing around with the PC, and if you merely want to transfer from your current VHS player to DVD, get a basic standalone DVD recorder.

If you want to edit, tidy, and re-order your tapes, get a Panasonic VHS/HDD/DVD machine.

Honestly, much easier and quicker all round.

Myser

MPEG-2 is a compressed video format.

It is better to capture your footage in a raw format, edit and then down-convert to MPEG-2.

googler

Panasonic DVD recorder £0.99 on eBay UK

Loads of others to choose from.