New member-not that educated on DVD-burning yet, and seek some advice. Not interested in copying store-bought VHS titles, but converting 20yrs worth of VHS tapes to dvd. Not knowing any better, purchased fairly simple DVD/VHS recorder, which does a very good job, but little editing options to get rid of the commercials and stuff unless I use the RW disks. Now last night I find a link on this forum to another site which says 'dont use RW media for any long term storage,' phase-change media or something to that effect, as its unclear how long the disks would last. Do I need to buy another machine, one with a hard-drive built in? DO they allow better control over the editing when using DVD-R disks? Or do I buy a dvd-drive for my computer , capture card and all that software to do what I want to do? Sorry for the 20questions, I just have a lot of stuff to convert, some of it is not stored in the best location either, and it is ruining/mildewing as I type. thks
hi i think if you want to edit a lot of the recordings then you would be better to do this on pc, there are many programs that allow you to edit stuff out frame by frame. i have a stand alone dvd recorder & the only way to edit through this would be to keep pausing whilst playing the VHS & would not be very accurate (on mine anyway). i have not really transfered many vhs to dvd (just a couple of camcorder movies). if you are using widows Xp then there is a movie maker program included, you could try using that, my father has recently purchased a "dazzle" video editing kit this includes pinnacle studio 9 software for making your dvd & a video convertor that you can plug into your pc either through firewire or i think you can use usb (not too sure about the usb). windows movie maker & pinnacle studio 9 are fairly straight forward to use & will probably give you the editing options you need. also VERY IMPORTANT- make sure you use a good quality disc to burn to as some of the cheaper discs give burn errors or will not play after 6 months or so. there is a list of recommended disc brands in dvd+/-r forums. i hope this helps
Thanks for the reply-I had decided nobody at all has taken on a project like this since nobody wrote anything. I think the PC thing would be more accurate probably, but I run Linux mostly, dont own XP. I have one partition with Windows 2000Pro on it, not sure how much drivespace is available on it, I imagine sev GB would be needed to do much video-recording. This would possibly be slow (?) process too, but I may eventually buy a pc-burner, capture card,whatever else and try it. I appreciate the tip about the blanks, already learned that lesson before I discovered this site. Have had good luck finding the MIJ Sonys at wallyworld so far, and the Verbatims at OfficeMax today. Got about 600 vhs tapes to go, so I will need a ton of blank dvds lol
hi i have no experience with linux, so don't know what you would be up against nor do i know any programs that will do what you need to do. but using xp you are correct it does use a lot of hard drive space to convert & can be time consuming. it could be an option to install a secondry hard drive & use xp to save the files there? just a thought. i assume you are in the usa & if you are, best buy usually have discs on sale for $14.99-$17.99 (50pk)this is usually a "special offer" but they always seem to have one brand name on offer. (at the moment it's verbatims) so might be a good deal to get discs & hard drive there. (i got 120gb hard drive for $39.99 after rebates) keep your eyes open & hopefully you will find a deal. sorry i cant offer you much more help than i have. enjoy ALL your burning if you have any more questions then feel free to ask & i will try & answer them for you.
Thanks-I dont plan on trying any of this in linux, while its 'getting there' I doubt there's suitable linux software to do all this. And I dont plan on spending 200bucks for xp pro either lol. I'll continue to tinker and learn...nice helicopter pic you got there. I do watch for the dvd sales, right now I got about 300 stashed.
