Hi I need help determing how to take my store bought VHS tapes and recording them to DVD. I have read that you legally can make one copy. I intend on storing the original VHS in the garage attic for safe keeping. After reading some of the postings I concluded that you can use a Hauppnauge PVR-150, 250,350 or 500 board to capture the analog video via s-video. I purchased a Haup PVR-150 PCI board. I have a Sony RDR-VX515 DVD / VHS combo player that I am taking the S-video out and into a Sima SED-CM Copy Master in order to clean up the VHS Signal. From the Sima I take a s-video cable to the computer and into the Hauppnauge PVR-150. I am using a HP Pavilion with a Pentium Dual Core Processor running Vista Premium 64. The video graphics is a intergrated system from Nvidia. I have attempted to use Cyber Link DVD Suite Deluxe that came as the bundled software with the PC. I am able to capture a video signal but the playback on the PC is jerky. Frames freeze from one to another. Also when I attempt to record I get the copy protection warning. From what I had previously read, either the Hauppnauge or the Sima would remove the signal and neither one is doing so. Is it the integrated video driver ? I am new to this and only experience that I have is from what I have been reading on these postings. Can anyone help ? Thank you very much, OldMedia
I've been researching this myself. I have large collection of VHS tapes I want to convert to digital files (e.g. DVD, avi, mpeg). I want to do it as easy and quickly as possible but also try to get the best video quality I can. From what I've seen the best option is NOT to use a cheap USB capture device because the encoders are typically too slow to keep up (i.e. dropped frames, sync problems) or the encoding produced is low quality. So in general its better to use a hardware based encoder to convert analog-to-digital. That means using a commercial DVD recorder or a converter box from Canopus. The latter is probably too expensive and not as robust (i.e. can use for other things) as DVD recorder. So you playback your VHS tapes from VCR into a DVD recorder (or use a VHS/DVD combo) and record to DVD. Then from there you can rip the DVD to hard drive using AnyDVD or DVDFab. This provides a cheap/easy method with good quality capture. However there are two cons -- (1) you end up burning lot of DVDs and (2) you have to spend extra time ripping to hard drive. For (1) you could use rewriteable DVDs but their capacity is limited (e.g. if you want to record 6hrs of VHS on one DVD you must use DVD+R DL). For (2) you could try using something capture devices like ION's VCR2PC or Honestech's VHS to DVD but like I said above these typically produce low quality and error prone conversions. They may be better options if you just want to transfer video clips for low quality use (e.g. youtube postings).
I should also add here that its better to use seperate VCR and DVD recorder. Why? This way you can defeat Macrovision protection of VHS tapes by inserting a TBC-1000 between the VCR and DVD recorder to eliminate the Macrovision distortion.
