Dear Friends, I would like to transform family VHS & 8mm tapes to DVD. Some of these babies are 13 to 14 years old. I’d like to do it using my computer, but need to know exactly what I need to do it. I’ve been to a few places (like Best Buy) and talked to a few people about what I needed. All have been helpful, but unlike you guys, they might have ulterior motives. That’s why I’m enlisting your help. Internal card, external USB, editing software? I don’t know. Finances are important (cause I ain’t got much to spend), but so is the quality, cause like I said these are priceless family heirlooms. The materials that you recommend need to be easy to figure out and operate (cause I ain’t no rocket scientist). If it helps, looking at my systems properties it says that I have a AMD Anthlon™ XP 1800+ (processor), 256 megs of RAM, I use Windows 98SE, and have about 30 gigs available on my Hard Drive, a 3D fx Voodoo Banshee Display Driver, and I don’t know what else. Anything you can tell me will be appreciated. Thanks in advance you guys (and gals) have been most helpful in the past. God Bless Uncle Bob
Well your System is Not at all Ideal for what you want to do...Video files take up huge ammounts of Space and 30 GB will barely hold an Hour of Video in the Highest quality pluss you should Be captureing to a seperate Dedicated Large Hard Drive ,Generally 80gb is good starting amount if you have a lot of video to transfer and it should be a Fast drive at least ATA/100 at 7200RPM ,I have 280gb with over 200gb reserved For Video Capture..As For Video capture Devices the Best one for captureing from old Analogue Tapes would be something like the Canopus ADVC-100 which runs about $250 ,a good Cheaper solution would be to get a Simple PCI TV Card ,But one of the newer ones that have a 10 Bit decoder chip like the MSI TV @nywere or the Pixelview play TV, these cards Run about $70 ,..Most External USB Devices aren"t very good yet and Most stuff you find at a Computer store or BestBuy won"t be very High Quality..For capture software it would depend on what type of Capture device you have.Most of the better Companies have retailers on line that sell there devices you can get some good deals on ebay also.......Cheers PS:Another problem you are going to have is that Win98SE uses a fat 32 file system that has a File size limit of 4gb and most captured Movies will be Much larger than that so if you Plan on Captureing Video you should upgrade to Win2000 ,WinNT or WinXP as these systems support NTSF which does not have a File size limitation.... _X_X_X_X_X_[small]It"s better to be Pissed Off than Pissed On!!![/small]
I have to agree with Minion on this. Your system is in serious need of upgrading before you make the attempt. The other thing I will agree with is the issue with the USB devices. I tried several and found the quality to be poor. I ended up buying a stand alone DVD recorder. It's quick and easy; just like operating a high end VCR. I do re-encode the discs and re-burn them on my PC before I give the discs out, but for your own use a stand alone recorder should work just fine.
Or if you still want to use your current computer and DVD burner, you can buy a Hardware based encoder!! Most encoders on the market right now are software based and require high end systems. With a hardware encoder you can get away with less computer requirements because the specialty chip on the card does most if not all the work. I have bought I DVD Movie Creator A&D from http://www.cestuff.com and after a little setup time I have transfered camcorder tapes to DVD without spending $600 for a stand alone DVD recorder. I hope this helps. Kurt
