VHS to DVD

L

leetkyle

New Member
Okay,

I need to transfer my VHS collection into a DVD collection. How would I go about doing this? What I see I need to do is:

- Buy some sort of VHS to Computer adapter;
- Transcode all videos into AVI format;
- Burn onto DVD, without losing any playback.

This is mostly music videos etc, many of which is a solid rhythm - so I cannot afford to lose any sound>video speed differences. I appreciate your help!
 
DVDs, assuming you want to use them on typical DVD players, us MPEG2, not AVI. When you capture, you want to capture in MPEG2, and not have to transcode anything. Every time you convert the format, you risk loosing more and more quality.

You're best bet would probably be a card such as the WinTV PVR-150 which has an onboard MEPG2 encoder. I capture videos from VHS using this card than burn to DVDs using TMPGEnc DVD Author.
 
avi's not a format, it's a container

and realtime hardware encoding is lossy, you'd be better off capturing to a lossless full-frame video, and using a software encoder if the quality is that much of an issue.

are these items you can't get on dvd or on the web, tho? Cause nothing you can do at home is gong to approach the capturing/encoding/deinterlacing techniques that an actual studio would use. I read somewhere that the mpeg-2 conversion that is used on feature films takes WEEKS to complete.
 
Not to mention starting with a VHS copy opposed to a digital master puts you in the hole to begin with. So the BEST you could end up with is a DVD that looks like the VHS. And i know from experience, it will find a way to look worse.

The a/d converters in consumer-grade video capture cards are REALLY poor. The colors will look really washed out, and you'll probably be able to actually see the interlacing horizontal black lines.

I've just gone through the process myself, and it wasn't worth any of the equipment i bought to try and do it.

AND ALSO, consumer grade recordable optical media will most likely stop working before the VHS original. The most optimistic estimates i've heard for writeable dvd media is 10 years, and a little longer for CD's.
 
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I suppose what you're getting onto heyman is whether it's WORTH transferring the collection at all. Personally I think it is, if only as a space saver. In 10 years perhaps VCR's will stop being sold at all, and his will have failed mechanically, but it'd be a very painless process transferring digital content to the future digital storage standard (beyond Blueray etc).

I agree though, any transferring, converting or reencoding loses quality. And a VCR isn't that good to begin with. Don't expect miraculous results. But similarly don't perform conversions when you don't have to. Hence T_O_O's advice to encode direct to MPEG2.
 
First off, thanks for all the replies! I'll take a more indepth look into the WinTV PVR-150 to see if it'll do the job. I appreciate all your help!
 
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