I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 notebook with a 4X Internal DVD+R burner and an External 16X Plextor 716A Dual Layer Combo DVD burner. My OS is XP Pro. I also have a Panasonic Analog VHS Camcorder[for playing the tapes]. I have a number of VHS tapes I have made over the years that I would like to convert to DVDs. From what I have read, I know I will need an external video capture device and video editing software, correct? Is this all I will need to transfer the VHS tapes to DVDs? I am only interesting in transferring the tapes, not editing them. I have briefly looked into DVD Movie Factory and Power Producer 2 for the software. Any Rx for either of these or some other software? I am really not sure about which External Video Capture Device to get. Will either of these software programs compress the vidoes to fit onto a standard 4.7 GB disk or do they copy on a 1:1 basis? Any suggestions here? I also have 1ClickDVDCopy and CopytoDVD software. Thanks If there are other issues, etc. which I have not considered but need to, please feel free to make suggestions. Thanks Bill1
You can either get a TBC type of device, which will digitize the video and copy it to your hard drive. You then encode it to mpeg-2 and author it, then burn. The other option is to use a hardware mpeg-2 encoding device, then author and burn. The second takes far less time than the first. They both cost about the same. Read a few of the other posts in this forum, especially the 700+ thread about VHS to DVD. You'll probably learn more than you wanted to know.
