VHS TAPE to DVD How to

I have one like this that works well:

As to your other question, as far as I know any recently made DVD player will handle any region disc. Recent = say 5 years or younger.

John G wrote

There are a variety of ways of doing it equipment wise.

There are some dongles that you can get for not much money that you can feed the output of the VCR into that will do it too.

You can also use an analog capture card and do it that way too.

Some video cameras do have a composite input and you can feed that from the VCR into the video camera and from there into the PC and write it to a CD/DVD.

None if you know what you are doing. Just make them region free.

If your computer is WIN7 it has a DVD maker (regionless DVD)

Does your computer have RCA input jacks?

If not you will need a "USB to RCA" from Dick Smith or EBAY This one $20 from Ebay including postage

The full Ebay search

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Petzl

John G brought next idea :

Thanks for the replies I did some looking :o) while waiting and got similar answers. I know, I should have just looked myself.

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John G

a VHS player and DVD recorder.

on a pc it can probably be done using a video capture card and the bundled software, or free stuff like ffmpeg.

AIUI Typically they are uncoded, and will play in any location. special "authoring" media is needed for recording regoion coded DVDs as the CSS keys are recorded in the lead-in area of the disc..

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?? 100% natural

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Any PC with video a capture card will do. Most decent quality TV cards have a fairly good analog video input which would exceed the VHS capabilities. I would encode the videos as H264 files then burn the CD/DVD as data ones. Most (all) DVD video players will play them without problems anyway, files will be smaller and easily moveable between storage media.

Keep in mind that burned CD and DVD media have a much shorter life span than the ones you buy: in 2 to 5 years most DVDs lose their content, regardless of how they were kept (speaking from actual experience). If you choose the DVD media anyway, take a look at new developments such as the M-Disc, or backup your DVDs often.

asdf wrote

Not anymore, f*ck all do anymore.

Oh bullshit.

Look for Easycap then, a dirt cheap USB dongle. We're talking about VHS, the OP won't need HD or stuff like that, just a clean video input plus a decent software to do some motion correction and filtering which will help compression a lot.

I wish it was bullshit, unfortunately it is not.

Its bullshit. That hasn?t happened with any of the DVDs I have burnt.

+1 We converted old videos of the kids with one of those, ridiculously cheap and does a perfectly acceptable job.

Not entirely correct, not entirely incorrect either.

Recordable CD and DVD media kept in a dark dry environment will last for quite some time. Kept in the sunlight and it could be "erased" in considerably less time than a couple of years. CD-R and DVD-R media have a lifespan of ~25 years but that is when stored in ideal conditions and not subject to physical abuse. Quality of the storage media also plays a very large part.

Back in the 90s, I archived a significant amount of information related to my work on CD-R media. I used very expensive media back then. All those discs, at least those I still retain from that era, are still readable. That is due to their storage in the most ideal conditions I can provide.

I did transfer a lot of the CD-R data to DVD-R a couple of years back thereby reducing the storage volume considerably. In the near future I may commence a move to BluRay media since my PowerMac is equipped with a BluRay burner. I would have made that move much sooner but first grade BluRay media was ridiculously expensive for quite some time after I bought the PowerMac in 2005 or thereabouts.

I currently have a MacPro Server which will have 8 TeraBytes of storage capacity by month end. It will be used to house my ISO files in the future. As insurance, I keep ISO files of stored CDs and DVDs on hard drive. This is not a difficult task given the state of play with current hard drive media capacity and provides me with much more ready access to my files.

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Krypsis

Krypsis wrote

I don?t even bother with cases anymore, let alone keep them in the dark, and havent lost even one.

And so does what you burn them with too.

Mine too.

Nope, because I didn?t bother and got the same result.

I don?t bother. So mine have been around a lot longer than yours.

I'd put it on a couple of xTB drives instead.

So why bother with blueray media at all ?

For the most part, mine are stored in slimline jewel cases which are in turn stored in cardboard cartons. I had thought of dispensing with the jewel cases but I have no shortage of storage space so, for the moment, the jewel cases stay. I noticed recently that I still had a large box of empty jewel cases. These were from the CDs which contained less critical data so I dispensed with the CDs themselves and retained the cases for DVDs. That was in excess of 1,000 CDs, if my memory serves me correctly. Ah, technology advances create such waste!

I tend to use Pioneer burners these days and I find the speed of the burn the most critical issue. I never burn at full speed. With CDs, I typically burn at 8x, sometimes 16x. DVDs usually at 4x. A colleague of mine used to burn his at the maximum speed his drive was capable of. I found his disks very iffy to read on any of my drives. Never could understand why he was so obssessed with speed as he had plenty of time on his hands. Reliability of the burn was a much more important criteria in my estimation.

My archived data is critical, I'd rather not take the chance on readability down the track as the storage issue isn't a difficult one.

Not really since I kept all the CD-Rs from which the important data had been transferred. My first CD Burner was a SCSI 2x burner which used caddies. The caddies were a blasted nuisance. Can't recall what I paid for it but it wasn't cheap. The first CD reader I had was an external SCSI unit that cost me in the order of $5,000 back sometime in the mid

80s. Probably still have all the original receipts kicking around here somewhere.

That's what I'm currently in the process of doing. It was on 8 x 1TB drives. I have just moved it all to 2 x 2TB drives. Took about 40+ hours to transfer but required little actual effort on my part other than initiating each transfer and then waiting until it finished. I have another 3 TBs stored on various external hard disk drives here and I will add them to my server when I get another couple of 2 TB drives.

Note, I said I "may commence a move to BluRay media". It seems much less likely now given the price and capacity of hard disk drives, not to mention much more effort.

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Krypsis

Then keep your opinion as I keep mine. I lost about 10% in almost 300 disks, different brands and writers, all verified, most read just once or twice, all kept vertical in their box in a drawer away from sunlight.

Luckily for most of them I realized what was going on before it was too late. This didn't save the sources of a project I was working on in 2002 though: about 3 years ago they were already gone, both master and backup disk, all Sony not burned by me.

I've never been one to keep data backed up onto a single media format. I especially don't trust magnetic media for the long term. I originally hoped that optical media would be a salvation of sorts but, whilst it has a longer storage life than current magnetic media, it isn't proving as reliable or as convenient as I thought it might.

In the past I used floppy disks and tape. I think I still might have a few tapes laying about here somewhere however the drive is no longer functional and was binned many years back. Don't even know if the newer tape drives will read the old format tapes anyway.

Regardless, I transferred everything to CD-R at first, then progressed to DVD-R as the technology allowed. It was a time consuming process. I began the process of moving it to DVD-R, and had completed some 75% of the transfer, when I started having doubts about the longevity of the DVD-R medium. The DVDs did not seem to be anywhere near as reliable as the CDs have been.

With the fall in cost of hard drives, I moved much of my data to hard disks storage instead. I have found this form to be much more convenient than any removeable form of storage medium. As capacities grow, I progressively move the data to larger drives. This is so much easier than burning CDs or DVDs. Most of my critical stuff is on 6 external 1 TB drives. By the end of this month it will also be on 3 x 2 TB drives in my MacPro. That gives me 2 forms of storage media. The third will be, effectively, in the cloud. By that I mean that my MacPro will back up all its data to the server at my office in the city where it will subsequently be backed up to tape.

Am I paranoid? Definitely!

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Krypsis

I bought some CD's burnt some data to them, checked etc and the within two days unreadable. they were of some scanned images to be used the next day.

asdf wrote

Mine isnt an opinion, it?s a fact.

Then you either bought some shit media or used a shit burner.

Then a shit burner was used.

Then you had a shit burner.