I have some movies I’ve made on VHS tape, and I’d like to get portions of them onto YouTube. To start, I have a dual recorder, so I have the ability to transfer the tape onto DVD.
So what do I do now?
If you don’t have a direct video input on your computer, the best bet is to start with a VHS -> DVD transfer.
Then you can use any DVD ripping software to transfer the DVD video to standard video files. It’s possible that you can transfer the *.VOB files from the DVD directly to your computer, but IIRC that doesn’t work for all DVDs. In any case, you will still have to transcode the files to something a little smaller, so it’s probably easiest to just rip from the DVD directly to some more efficient/lower quality files on your computer.
Note that youtube only allows 11 minute or shorter videos unless you’re a partner - which is not automatic. Other sites such as vimeo.com allow longer videos, so they might be a better choice if your video is long.
If you do want to split the video or select portions, you can probably do that also with the DVD ripping software, or use virtualdub. Virtualdub is free. I’m assuming you’re using windows.
Once you’ve got the file(s) of the right size, you can upload them to youtube or vimeo or whatever via the browser, or use any upload tool provided by the site.