Hello dear friends, from Greece I want to capture VHS tapes to a digital format and finally to DVD, and I am researching for the best way in terms of quality. First of all, my computer is a laptop Athlon 1800+ with 256MB, so I can't use any PCI cards. I can use any USB2 or firewire devices. Also, I owe a Sony IP220E digital camcorder. Having a MicroMV camcorder was not my decision (it was offered as a gift) so I have to live with it. I thought of three ways to do it: i)Use the camcorder. Connect the analog source to the SOny camcorder, capture to a MicroMV tape and then transfer the video from the camcorder to the Laptop via firewire. This will produce a .mmv file in the laptop and God knows what happens next, to create a DVD, but that is not the point now. Also, as the micromv tapes are of 60 min, I will have to do some basic editing (join two different videos etc) if the duration is longer, which usually is. ii) Buy an external box to do this job. I have found several ones using the USB2 port. I am not sure what they actually achieve of course. Of course I won't have the limitations of 60min with this way, but I will have to pay money to get one, and if it has to be good, it will probably be expensive. I have found a quite cheap one, from Avermedia, at http://www.avermedia.com/cgi-bin/products_capture_ezmakerusb2.asp which is called DVD EZMaker USB2.0 and is very cute. I like the idea but can i trust it? iii) Buy an external USB2 TV Tuner to do the same job, which will also offer me TV capabilities. Basically the same as the second. A product that seems to do the job can be found at http://www.avermedia.com/cgi-bin/products_tvtuner_avertvusb2.asp but again, I am not sure whether I can trust it. The cheapest is the first solution, which will not push me to purchase anything extra, but will force me to get involved in playing and editing with MMV format... As for capacity, I have an external USB2 hard drive, of 250GB with 2MB buffer. I appreciate any suggestions. Thank you.
You Should be able to Transfer the VHS to your PC through the Analogue inputs on your CamCorder WITHOUT Captureing to Tape First ,You camcorder should be able to Feed the Video directly to your PC without first Recording it to Tape ,This would Probably be the Highest Quality and least expensive method...I Know Very Little about the MicroMV format but I know that it is a Type of Mpeg2 Compression so after captureing the MMV Footage to your PC you should without any Trouble be able to Author the MMV files directly to DVD without any real Encodeing ,There is probably a utility that will Convert the MMV files to Mpeg2 witout any quality loss Because the 2 Formats are allmost Identical, There is Probably such a utility with the software that comes with your Camera...Cheers
Thanks Minion. This way, passing the video to the computer through the camcorder without recording to tape, is the solution I am looking at now. Thanks for the information.
