US to UK vhs tape conversion

pappa_golf

friend has a load of American (USA) vhs tapes,


apart from sending away for conversion , is there any way to view first , then convert to DVD , using basic equipment

Moto2

Buy a very cheap NTSC VCR off eBay?

Nilrem

First things first you'd need a VCR that can cope with NTSC tapes, the good news there is that towards the end of the VHS era there were such units on the consumner market (I think my last one had it).
The bad news is that they were fairly rare as it was an unusual feature from memory, and mainly in later models.

Once you've got such a player you should be able to use a USB video capture device with SVHS or composite input to get the output from the VCR onto the computer, and such devices usually have a program to do DVD creation with them (or you can get third party software either free of paid for).

The problem will be getting the VCR that will play the tapes, as you're unlikely to find one new now and second hand you're not going to have the full specifications available (I suspect you won't even find many manuals online).

The big but however is, that if the tapes are commercial ones/pre-recorded they will almost certainly have Macrovision which will stop you recording the output unless you can find a macrovision remover (or one of the rare models of VCR that didn't support macrovision - I think by the mid 90's it was a basic part of the output circuits).