I recently bought a tv box for transferring vhs tapes. Unfortunately, the quality sucks. I do have a professional vcr. I used to have a standalone dvr, which I used to transfer a bunch of old vhs tapes and it worked well, but it stopped working. So, now I'm back to square one. Here's my problem. I told a friend that I would transfer a bunch of old and rare music related vhs tapes. Because they are music, I really want the audio to come out well. I now realize that I don't want a device that hooks up via usb, because of the quality loss. I thought that it would be cheaper to record directly to the pc because if I use a dvr, it will make a dvd that I will have to then transfer to my pc and add menus, edit, and reburn. With 50 or so videos, that can be a bit expensive. Yes, I know I can just use a dvd-rw, but I'm worried about compatibility. So now I have to decide whether I should buy a standalone or capture card....unless..... Is there a standalone that will save the data and tranfer it to the HD? Quality is really my main issue. These are very old tapes as it is, and I can't afford too much loss. Any input would be much appreciated
get any of the hauppagauge PCI tuner cards that has built-in hardware mpeg2 encoders. I use the pvr150 (old but you can still find it on the internet for under 50.00). The PVR150 is for standard definition (which is all you need for vhs, you can adjust the bitrate until you get the quality you want). You will get very good quality from these tuner cards since they record/encode in real-time. The newer hauppagauge tuner cards are low/high definition, just make sure it has "hardware mpeg2 encoders". The hauppagauge tuner cards will get the video/audio from tuner card itself, so it is always in sync. Where you will loose quality is when you edit your videos, you need to use only videoredotvsuite or womble mpeg video wizard dvd. These will edit without reencoding.
