Can I copy VHS Movies from a VCR

corvan · Post by **corvan** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 1:47 am

I Have Some Older Vhs Movies I Would Like To Convert To Dvd. Can I Hook Up My Vcr To The Video Studio Se Capture Wizard And Copy My Tapes. Would I Just Connect The Yellow, Red And White Inputs To The Front Of My Vcr?

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 1:58 am

You need some means of connecting your VCR to the computer.
Some users connect the VCR to their digital camcorder and then connect the camcorder to the computer.

Other users install a TV card and connect the VCR to that.
Then there are other devices that you can purchase designed to do a similar job as the above method of looping through a camcorder.

I prefer to use a TV card because it remains useful even after you have copied that last VHS tape to DVD. The TV card will effectively turn your computer into a television set with a built in video recorder that can be programmed to record things weeks in advance, series links etc.
Very similar to a Sky+ box or TiVo.

With the TV card you also get teletext and a TV remote control.
In fact My second computer is in one of our bedrooms and performs many tasks thus keeping the bedroom rather tidy. It is our
Television Set
Video Recorder
Radio (The TV card includes FM radio)
DVD Player
Internet
Computer
Banking
Office suite
Music Centre
Games Machine
Photo album
And a few other things that I simply can't remember off the top of my head.

ruggy1 · Post by **ruggy1** » Mon May 07, 2007 12:51 pm

You must have a very special TV card Steve, my experiences have been bad , so I bought a Canopus AV/DV converter - no more problems with Out Of Sync voice and video. The Canopus device promised to 'lock' audio to video, which it has without fail for the last year or so on hundreds of tapes- even on bad VHS tapes. I could never rely on a TV card to do that.

Phil S · Post by **Phil S** » Mon May 07, 2007 3:14 pm

I've tried capturing from a VHS via a PC TV card. It works but the quality left a lot to be desired. It made the low quality VHS even worse. Lots of noise, colour bleed, fuzz etc.

I've since bought a DV Camcorder that will act as a A/D converter and using that the results are far superior to the TV card.

Composite analogue into the Camcorder. DV out to a PC Firewire input.

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Mon May 07, 2007 3:25 pm

Phil this is all dependent on the output setting you select from the TV/input card. If you capture in DV-AVI the result is exactly the same.

And if you need to buy a camera for this transfer, a desktop DVD recorder will do the same directly into MPEG for less than half the price.

Of course we are all here because we have and/or WANT a camera...

Phil S · Post by **Phil S** » Mon May 07, 2007 3:47 pm

Daniel.

My TV card is just a standard analogue one fed with a composite analogue signal and therefore the processing to DV is done inside the PC. I tried several settings but the results were always poor.

I've always been led to believe that if you do the A/D conversion outside of the PC and feed the DV in via firewire you get better results. This proved to be the case.

No, I didn't just buy the Camcorder for the A/D conversion but I needed a new DV one to replace my old analogue one, but when I chose I made sure that it had the A/D pass through conversion facility.