I'm making DVDs from VHS!

Cafe Society
1

Several years back, I got a video capture card and a device to record from my VCR. It was problematic from the start. The supplied video drivers caused the picture to be obscured by a white bar, and the sync was off. There was no authoring software that came with it, so I had to go onto the web to get proper drivers and a bunch of freeware for editing and demultiplexing and encoding, writing the discs, etc. I managed to make a series of SVCDs that play in the living room DVD player. I didn’t have a DVD writer then; they were still a bit too expensive. Anyway, I sort of gave up on it.

A couple of weeks ago, while looking for something else, I saw a video capture device that was regular $200 on sale for $50, after rebates. It’s made by Plextor (the CD/DVD writer people). It has a TV tuner and recording facilities to act as a digital VCR, and you can connect a VCR or camcorder to it. It does on-chip encoding of every format and quality you could ever need, in real-time. It’s USB, and comes with WinDVD Creator and Ulead VideoStudio 8. I haven’t installed Ulead yet.

It worked right out of the box, with no driver issues, and the sync is perfect. I’ve played with it for about a week, and I’ve figured out how to do nice edits, and compile a DVD, make the menu with scene titles for chapters, etc. It does all kinds of dissolves and wipes and rotations that I’ll never use, but it doesn’t fade to black, or in from black. I would have thought that would be a popular option. The picture quality of the disc, when viewed on a TV screen, is as good as could be expected. It’s no better than VHS, but no worse. The tapes were recorded at SP or LP (I avoided EP where possible due to the poor quality). It records in several DVD formats, but so far I’ve only used the 2-hour DVD setting. What the instructions don’t tell you is, that after you hit the Go button to make your DVD, it will take up to several hours before you get a disc. It renders the video first, in slower-than-real-time. But the results are nice.

So I’ve transferred all of the Ren & Stimpy episodes to the hard drive. It’ll be a 3-disc set when it’s finished. (Volume 2 is rendering now. Very slowly.) When I first got a VCR in 1991, I started taping all manner of music programs and videos from Much Music, concerts, groups appearing on Letterman, Carson, Leno, Arsenio and others, documentaries, TV programs, movies, and like that. Most of them have never been repeated on TV. I wound up with over 200 tapes. Now I get to transfer them to a modern format that will last as long as I will - no matter that the format may already be obsolete. It works, same as my turntable.

I’m glad the technology to do this has improved so much since I was last into it. With the software, you really can’t mess it up.

Have any of you ever tranferred video to DVD? Made a home movie? What programs did you use? Do you ever watch them now?

Oh, and could anyone explain to me what video rendering is?
(The Church Of The Dangling Participle is where I want to go to.)

2

Linly to this wonderful device?

3

Here ya go. It’s at tigerdirect.com.

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It’s the encoding or transcoding into the MPEG2 format for the DVD. It’s very CPU intensive due to the necessary compression.

5

Thanks. And you’re right, the CPU is running at 100%.

6

I’ve done nearly 3/4 of my girlfriend’s collection of mostly-classic-era VHS tapes.

Canopus ADVC card, newly-acquired Sima GoDVD card to straighten out the video signal as need be, and iMovie HD + iDVD on my G4 PowerBook. Software is part of the Mac OS standard install.

Pretty much effortless.

I would pay a resonable price ($40) to Apple if they’d come out with “iDVD Pro” though:

• instead of sticking you with those mostly horrid templates for making DVD menu screens, let you design your own templates

• when you “share” from iMovie to iDVD, let you choose where to save the project instead of dumping it into ~/Documents

• user-friendly method of putting plural number of movies on one DVD without having it just play the next when done with the 1st; i.e., a better option than just treating Movie 2 as a separate chapter

• you really should be able to change the “project” type from dual-layer 7 GB DVD to standard 4.3 and vice versa AFTER starting the project. It’s not like you’ve encoded anything before you burn or save as diskimage.

Still, for free bundled sw, both products certainly do the job. I can digitize a movie or generate a DVD from it in the background while posting to the Dope in the foreground.

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Where I said that the video rendering could take “up to” several hours, I came in to say that it took five and a half hours to process a two-hour DVD! I think making DVDs will be an overnight process from now on. As I said, the results are worth it.

Even though the CPU is at 100%, I can still use a browser and work on my database.

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About an hour after I made my last post, my computer suddenly died. Now, when you hit the power button, it beeps at you and doesn’t start up. I don’t think my CPU could handle the strain of running at 100% for hours, and it burned out.

Looks like video creating is going to cost me a new computer.

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Sorry, fishbicycle. You did, however, tempt the gods with all the “hey, watch this!” talk, as many a show-off egg-juggler might attest. It could only end in tears and omelets.

More seriously, let the girl cool, it might be a heat switch was tripped and it’ll come back to life in a while.

10

Um, I have a VCR and a DVDR recorder. A 90-minute move takes 90 minutes to record. Am I missing something?

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Your DVD recorder has dedicated hardware for compressing the video in real time. fishbicycle is compressing it using software.

12

Fish, check your PMs, and get back to me please.

13

That was my thought. DVD recorder/VCR combo units also copy VHS to DVD pretty painlessly. Is using a computer to do it just a “thrill of the challenge” kind of thing?

14

Well, a DVD recorder probably costs more than $50 and fishbicycle already owns a computer.

15

USED TO own a computer, apparently.