It accepts both composite and S-video, and produces a variety of video formats that its software captures to your hard drive.
The big advantage is that video encoding is on-board, so it does not use your computer’s processor for that intensive task.
Most video capture cards and devices rely on the computer’s processor, making it almost impossible to use the computer for other purposes while capturing video. This device and a few others on the market avoid that limitation. I’ve had no trouble running all my usual computer tasks (WinXP Pro, typical photo editing and/or desktop publishing) while this was encoding and recording a tape in the background.
Once the video file is produced, you can manipulate it and/or burn it to disk using standard video editing software, as simple or as complex as you own or desire.
ETA-- it will also burn the captured file directly to disk if you wish, but I usually prefer to edit with my own tools. Everyone’s MMV.
I just got a DVD recorder (Samsung DVD Recorder DVD-R120, about $100 at Best Buy, probably cheaper now) and plugged my VHS player into it. Seems to work fine for me. For best results of course, use best quality/least compression, although the trade off is it takes up more space on the disk.
Some of this depends on the condition of your original tapes. In my experience, the cheap devices do fine with tapes that are in decent shape, but don’t handle problems very well. If all of your tapes are well preserved, they’re probably fine. I have a wide variety of tapes, some in very bad shape, so I went with something a little more powerful. I use a Grass Valley ADVC-110 (which is one model up from the Canopus model aceplace57 has – Canopus was acquired by Grass Vally) along with a Panasonic AG-1980 VCR, which is a prosumer editing VCR from the 90s. The biggest thing here is that the VCR has what’s called a TBC (time base corrector), which helps it handle tapes that don’t have a consistent control track (common in older VHS tapes). The TBC in the AG-1980 isn’t terribly sophisticated, and it won’t handle the worst cases, but it’s much better than a VCR without it, and in my experience can deal with some pretty bad tapes. It’s also fairly affordable on eBay.
ETA: IMHO, even though you want something simple, I think it’s better to go through your computer and save the video to digital video files than to record directly to DVD Video. It’ll make long-term archiving easier. In 10 years, will most people even still have DVD players? Do you want to have to go through this process again when the medium you record to becomes obsolete. Computer files in a standard format will be about as future proof as you can get.
OK by “just” I meant “minimally” not “recently”. It was a few years ago.
Mine didn’t have any problem, but I suppose, whatever solution you end up with, you should research the VHS copyright thwarting signal messing-with that goes on, I assume in the VHS player itself…
To hijack… anyone have a good solution for VHS tape that were ‘eaten’ or otherwise mangled slightly?
Keep in mind that when dubbing tapes that there are a couple of factors that affect audio synchronization. It’s been a while since I did this sort of thing for a living but I think my facts are still straight.
First, unless you’re using some sort of time code, there will be some variability in playback. This is going to apply to pretty much all VHS to DVD dubbing jobs. It normally is NOT a huge deal.
The second issue might be - NTSC video, though it often is said to run at 30 frames per second, actually runs at 29.97 FPS. Over time (like a 2-hour VHS tape) that can be significant. Most video capture cards (I think) take this into account and allow you to pick whether something you’re importing is at 29.97 or at 30 FPS. Check your settings to see if you have an option to do this, and see if it affects your video capture.
Macrovision. VHS-era Macrovision worked by varying the lights levels in the unseen elements of the NTSC signal, causing the recording decks auto-gain controls to freak out. I’m not sure that it would affect a DVD recording. If it does, look to see if you can turn off auto-gain.
You could try to manually roll the VHS reels and see if the tape is actually folded over - if so you could try to unfold it/flatten it out. Otherwise, you could unroll enough of the tape so that you could physically cut out the damaged portion and then use scotch tape to tape the clean ends together. If the tape is eaten, the damaged part will probably be very easy to differentiate from the good portions.
I managed to get the tape reel back in the cartridge, and the reel doesn’t have any actual breaks, but portions of the tape have residual crinkles which cause less than perfect playback (especially with a VCR that will only show a blank blue screen if the signal isn’t perfect), and I’m also afraid that the crinkles could cause the tape to get eaten again if played. I’m looking for the best way to flatten out the tape without further damaging it…
Well, you certainly can physically. It does cause a momentary bit of interference to the video signal (but it was bad at that point already).
I have actually heard one person claim that he got good results from ironing the crinkled portion of the tape with a steam clothes iron!
I expect you would have to use it at a low temp, and move the iron over the tape quickly. Some experimentation on a blank tape or worthless one first might be a good idea.
I’d copy the tape over to a brand new tape or to DVD ASAP just to make sure you don’t lose the tape if it gets eaten again - it certainly is at much greater risk of getting eaten again in the future.
You’ll get a glitch regardless, since you’ll lose sync at the moment of edit, but there’s no way to completely avoid that given a non-pro setup. It wouldn’t be the prettiest thing you ever saw, but it would work. I’m not sure if they make editing blocks that would have the right angle to match the angle of the helical scan; in any case all that would do is minimize the glitch. It would end up looking like a hard crash edit, and you’ll lose sync for a second or two, but not more than that.
That might work - if I were to try it I would also use a thin towel or something over the tape to sort of diffuse the heat even further. Testing it out is a good idea, and I wouldn’t do this if the tape were playing at all right now - I’d only try that as a last resort. In any case making a new copy should probably be the first thing you do after you get it to play again.
You could also try pulling the crinkled portion of the tape out of the shell and just setting it under something flat and heavy for a day or two to flatten it out.