T1B

Looking to xfer about 20 hours of old family videos from VHS to DVD. Anyone tried this?
I see a number of businesses offering to screw me over/help, and also some do it yourself programs.
I have 3 weeks to get this done. Easy, difficult? Time consuming?

Easiest way would be with a VCR/DVD recorder deck set to highest quality.

What are you putting together?

I do VHS and TV rips to .mkv and .avi container formats all the time. What is your budget?

When I was lab tech at the college I had a Panasonic that worked great. Not sure of the model. Very easy to make DVD's from the VHS tapes. Only problem I had was a lot of the scientific tapes were protected. That is not an issue with your home tapes.

Oh yea ... forgot to mention, cant just buy the vcr/dvd recorder. Some of what I have is on VHS , but most is on Sony 8mm.
Wallyworld and a few other places are wanting $20.00 per tape , which is fine, I really don't care what it costs with in reason. $100, $200.00, whatever.
More concerned that I dont really trust those places, and that what I have is irreplaceable.
I saw this ---- http://www.bestbuy.com/site/VHS+to+DVD+ ... lp=10&cp=1 on the website for Best Buy. Looks like it may be worth looking at, if it wont take umpteen years to do.

kcdave wrote:Some of what I have is on VHS , but most is on Sony 8mm.

Do you mean Hi-8 Digital?

What model machine did you shoot this on?

Did you try restoring to a previous date?

Check your pm's, dave...

I bought VHS/DVD combo several years ago...had a bunch of hockey, baseball and football games on VHS that I wanted to convert to DVD. It's a fairly painless process but it had to be done in real-time. I'd work on transferring a tape during the day while I was at work or have one done overnight. I don't know if they've got any quicker solutions or the technology has improved. Funny thing is that I've not watched any of my DVDs since. My latest thing has been transferring recorded stuff from TiVo to my computer and convert into a smaller file. I went to TiVo just because you couldn't keep your stuff from the DVR you'd get from the cable company.

We bought one of those converters a few months ago. I think it was either a Samsung or Akai. Two drawbacks...most if not all commercial VHS tapes are copy protected...and the low quality of those old tapes really becomes apparent when we play them back on the large screen HD TV.

I also bought a USB record turntable a couple of years ago thinking I was going to digitize all of my 100s of old LPs. Unfortunately it's not like copying a digital file - you have to play the whole thing, pick up and drop the tonearm, start and stop the recording. And no matter how good of shape the record is in for some reason it doesn't sound so hot as a digital recording. So...it's a pretty decent turntable but so far I've digitized a grand total of...0...LPs.

Mikey wrote:We bought one of those converters a few months ago. I think it was either a Samsung or Akai. Two drawbacks...most if not all commercial VHS tapes are copy protected...and the low quality of those old tapes really becomes apparent when we play them back on the large screen HD TV.

Yeah, I had a few movies on tape that had that issue...mostly older ones that you can probably buy for dirt cheap on DVD...a few bucks or so and if quality matters, you're better off just buying the DVDs for a couple bucks. I have movies like Caddyshack and Slapshot still on tape...if I ever get the itch, I'd probably just look for them on the discount bin and pick them up for a buck or two when I see them.

The converters can't save your video quality...at least not on my converter. The only reason you do this is to get rid of those clunky tapes before the erase on their own. You just have to deal with the quality (or lack there of) from your old tapes. I've got tapes from the 1997 Red Wings run to the Cup...it's just good to have that stuff safely moved onto DVD, quality be damned.

All good. Bought the gizmo from Best Buy. Loaded the cd, plugged box into pc, plugged cam into box, pushed play, pushed copy, 2 hours later it was done. All in all, very happy with the quality also considering its from a 8mm tape recorded almost 20 years ago.

kcdave wrote:Looking to xfer about 20 hours of old family videos from VHS to DVD.

Congrats on getting your 80's porn collection user friendly.