In order to earn more brownie points I promised the wife I would investigate getting our home VHS tapes onto disc, via the hard disc of my PC, so I can burn them on SCVD or DVD (when I get a DVD burner)

Has anyone done this or got any links so I can find out what I need

Cheers Chris

I'm on with the same project now. I've just installed a tv card in my computer and am going to get a scart converter to connect it to the VCR. I can then burn it direct to dvd or dump it to the HDD to edit.

yours, Pete

The best way to do this is not with a TV card but an analog capture card. the TV cards tend to capture at low quality and use software to compress. try a Pinacle card, this will come with capture software that will help you prepare a DVD. also you need to look at your hard drive space, at high quality capture you use about 1 GB per minute at full rate so a second drive on a high speed interface isimportant. but an even better option is contact your local photo proccessing place and you will find that most offer a VHS / Hi8 to DVD transfer facility. usual cheeper and less time consuming than doing it your self.

It's just something to do in my case, not really expecting anything brilliant from it Simon. I bought the card primarily for radio and tv use and the dvd thing was an after effect. This will burn direct to dvd without using HDD as storage so I can record to dvd rw from tv when I get it sorted. Looks o.k. so far.

yours, Pete.

P.S. They aren't the kind of "home" videos you wouldn't want the neighbours to see are they?, probably rules out the Photo processor option.

[Edited on 30/1/04 by Peteff]

No unfortunately they aren't that sort of video! just the wedding video and the kids birthdays etc. I could take them down a shop but they are on such a mixture of tapes I need to edit them.

PC world sells

PINNACLE
STUDIO DC10 V8
ANALOGUE VIDEO EDITING

for £70.00 which seems to do the job. I'll shop around a bit first . Any better recomendations appreciated

Cheers Chris

you can buy dvd video recorders in comet for about 250 quid now

atb

steve

Don't bother with the Pinnacle TV Rage, you have to disable everything else twain (camara, webcam, scanner) to get it to work - bloody pain in the ass.

The TV card was £36.42 (Leadtek) and works o.k. Quality isn't that bad, you don't need a dvd burner for vcd just a cdr by the way, but I have heard not all dvd players will play them. I don't think that's too much to lay out and if it doesn't suit you still have the videos.

yours, Pete.
P.S. My scanner and webcam still work so it doesn't affect twain.

[Edited on 30/1/04 by Peteff]

a TV card is not really the thing for this because the capture capabilities are not really up to it. All they do to watch TV is overlay the picture on top of a black box drawn by the software. They don't actually do any processing on the picture.

The card to get for this type of thing is the Hauppauge PVR range. These have dedicated MPEG hardware onboard (the 250 just and encoder, the 350 with encoder and decoder). This means all the number crunching for the recording is done before the video gets into the PC. This solves all the problems of syncronising the frame rates and multiplexing the audio and video together. Also, the format they record is the same as is used on the DVD so no need to do any further (time consuming) processing on the file before it can go onto the DVD.

I keep meaning to buy myself one as they look like a superb bit of kit!

Scan sell them for £80 for the 250 or £120 for the 350.

Chris (Engineer for the BBC! )