I want to convert some of my VHS to DVD but I dont understand a thing about it. I just want a straight dub only but if I can edit the better. It depends on the price of the equipment. For the mean time, I just want to know how do you upload vhs to computer? Once uploaded what type file will the audio/video be? For the mean time I might convert it to VCD while Im still scouting for a DVD writer. How do I avoid the sync problem or any other problem? Someone suggested to use capture card. How does it work and how about the software? Do I have to upgrade my computer, Im only using a Pentium 3 733MHz with 20G Hard Disk and Liteon CDR? Hope you can help me on my next project. I have no plans of making it a business, only personal use so I dont plan to spend too much but at least good quality conversion. Once uploaded to my HD, how do you burn VCD's? Thanks
I just tried this once, hopefully, i remember the steps correctly.
1. You will need a capture card. I have the Winfast TV2000 XP tuner card with video capture. You can use an RCA jack to connect the VHS to the capture card for the video and then a mini headphone jack to connect to the soundcard's line in (you might need a converter jack).
2. Play the VHS tape and then record it using the software provided for the capture card. You can capture it using several codecs: divx, mpeg1, mpeg2, uncompressed AVI. The Winfast TV2000 software can be configured to use additional video and audio codecs.
20 GB of hard disk would be too small, IMHO. With your processor's speed, this will be the bottleneck. You can use the MPEG1 codec, but the processor will have a hard time converting the analog video to MPEG1 on-the-fly. I have 1 P3-750 processor, and when I convert to MPEG1 on-the-fly, I get skipped frames.
To resolve this, I used the AVI uncompressed codec which use a very large amount of my hard drive. 5 GB for a 12 minute video..
By the way, you can also use a program called VirtualDub. Some say this is better in capturing videos. I just used it in capturing from TV, not yet from a VHS, so not sure about the difference between them.
3. Just in case you decide to upgrade your hard drive to a larger one, the AVI can be converted to a VCD-compliant MPEG1 file using a program called TMPGEnc (free). I prefer to use this one, though there are many more downloadable from the internet.
4. Once converted to a VCD-compliant file, you can cut the movie (if it's too large to fit on a disc) using TMPGEnc.
5. Burn the MPEG1 file using Nero (my preferred software).
I'm sure others have different ways on capturing videos from VHS. Keep them coming, as I am also just starting to learn this thing.