Capturing VHS to MPEG?

[MattM]

Has anyone done this? Does this tutorial work?

http://www.ehow.com/how_4559294_convert ... -mpeg.html

Thanks.

[Ken Berry]

Lots of people have done this over the years. And yes, the tutorial describes one successful way of transferring VHS to digital video. There are, however, ways of getting better quality than by using RCA cables. One would be to buy a capture device that connects to the computer via Firewire cables and produces high quality DV/AVI video. The other way would be, if you have a mini DV camcorder of Sony Digital 8 camera, to use them as a passthrough device and again capture via firewire to DV/AVI Recent versions of VS (since VS 11) have lost the ability to capture analogue source material in DV, but you can use Windows Movie Maker or a small freeware program called WinDV to capture in DV using such a set up.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi

The tutorial also assumes you have a Video Capture Card installed on your computer.
Otherwise you will need some other hardware device to convert the VHS analogue to digital Mpeg2 or Dv-Avi, as mentioned by Ken.

You don’t say if you have a capture device………
There is a product called Ezcap on the market, If your tempted take care to purchase the pukka product, there are lots of cheap copies that just don’t work.

[MattM]

Thanks for the replies. My video card is an ATI Radeon HD 5450, but it does not look like it is a video capture card.

Ken, I did do a search before I posted my question. Perhaps I didn't input the correct key words in my search, but I didn't find an applicable thread with this information.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi Matt

It does look as your card is just a graphics card and does not support video capture.

To capture analogue video (VHS) you need two things:-

1 / Capture software, you are using Video Studio, the tutorial describes using the VCL Player, by the way what version of VS are you using?

2 / A capture device, a piece of hardware that converts the analogue to digital, Ken has mentioned several types in his reply.

The passthrough option is worth thinking about. Camcorders from the US generally supported this, from the UK you would need to check.
By the way where are you in this big wide world?

Search…….
I did a search for “analogue” and found this