Dear Friends, Here’s the long and the short of it. I want to be able to transfer some family heirloom VHS tapes to DVD’s. I also want to be able to copy some DVD movies to DVD. I gather from questions that I’ve asked that the best way to do that is to copy these mediums to my Hard Drive and then transfer them to a DVD disk. What I believe I need (and you can help me with this) is a DVD +- Burner, something that will enable me to connect my VCR to my computer, and software that will enable me to edit & enhance my VHS tapes and in some cases compress my DVD’s so they will fit on a regular DVD disk (and if you have suggestions on which disks work best, that too). I’m a poor workin stiff so I want the highest quality for the lowest price. If you guys (and girls) have some ideas, some names, and or some prices (and maybe where to purchase) I’d really appreciate them. How to’s will help as well. Whatever you can give me I’ll take. Thanks Uncle Bob
Hi Uncle Bob Most, if not all of us are "poor workin' stiffs" so you are in the best of company. You need two major components to do what you want: 1. A DVD burner and one that caters for the two DVD standards (+ and -). A good buy is the Lite-on 811s which you can probably buy for around £125 (inc VAT) if you live in the UK. It will come bundled with the necessary software to burn DVD disks (probably Nero). 2. A video capture card (PVR/vivo) which will accept both composite and SVHS input. Most if not all such cards come bundled with Video capture/editing software. The WinTV card is good, but can be troublesome to set up correctly; Leadtek male good combination video;graphics cards based on the nvidea GForce chip. You should arm yourself with a other video goodies such as TMPGEnc (the basic package is Freeware and you won't have to look too far to find it on the Afterdawn pages. Cost of the video card will depend on the depth of your pockets. One thing to bear in mind: capturing video of quality requires considerable processing power (CPU) and you must consider fast, big capacity HDDs (nothing less than 7200rpm and 80Gb). Incidentally, if you are running WinXP, it comes with its own video capture/editing software (Moviemaker); it's not great but at least it's there if you want to use it. My recommendation would be to stick with the Video software that accompanies the pvr/vivo video card. If I can be of further help, let me know. Regards Dave
