I currently see a need for a machine that would transfer VHS format to CD format for increased storage life and convenientance of storage room.
There is one. It’s called a computer. 
Not compressed, figure ten minutes of video =1 gig…
Compressed, mpg3, maybe an half hour per cd. I forgot.
You could get a dvd writer for $800 & use blanks [$20].
& both sides of it.
Get a video input & output video card & a large HD & very fast computer if you want to put them on cd.
when i digitize VHS, i usually bring it in at about 150kb/frame.
that puts 10 minutes at about 2.7gb, if i multiplied correctly.
16 minutes of digital video, compressed in MPeg-2 will take a gig(VHS quality).
Let;s face it, it’s not worth it currently, money-wise, time-wise, or convenience-ise.
-Sam
Well, my first pass at this was apparently lost in the ether.
First of all, do you know what CD format you would prefer? Where do you plan on doing your playback? I’ll assume, for the moment, that you’re talking about DVD (but the basic premise applies to pretty much any CD format).
First you have to translate the video from VHS to a digital format. This most likely requires (1) a computer (2) a video capture card and (3) compression software.
High quality, full size video capture is not cheap. You need a fast computer, a big hard disk, and video capture hardware. Depending on the quality you require, this capture hardware can cost anywhere from about $300 to $5000. For the low end you can expect lots of frame dropping and spurious ‘artifacts’. The expensive models have high speed buffers and real time digital filtering that will get you your best copy. Unfortunately, even your best copy will not match typical DVD quality and probably won’t even match the VHS quality. Once you’ve captured the raw video, you’ll need to perform some sort of compression on the raw video. This can take some time, even for very fast computers. Once you’ve converted to a compressed digital video format, you simply have to write this to your CD. If your CD format of choice is DVD, then you’ll have to get a DVD writer connected to your computer. These can cost anywhere from $700 to a couple a’ grand. It’s an expensive proposition.
There’s several places here in my town that will do all of this for you. Look in your yellow pages under “Video Production Services”. I’m sure this is more cost effective than doing it yourself. If it’s just a few mainstream movies that you’re trying to convert, I can almost guarantee you that it will be cheaper still to just go purchase the DVD - plus you may get some DVD-only features, to boot.
no, joeyblades. you can ave higher-than-dvd quality when using a video capture card.
they just cost a lot.
i don’t know why you think it would be less-than-vhs quality. that is ridiculous.
Kilgore you wrote:
I don’t see how this is possible. The VHS is transferred from a master source. The master source is normally a digital one, these days - particularly if the DVD market is to be targeted. The conversion from digital to analog is a lossy process. At the very least, the conversion from a high quality analog master to VHS quality tape is also extremely lossy. Now you take this already lossy source and convert it with an analog to digital capture and you get more loss. Finally, this raw digital has to be compressed to DVD - again more loss. A comercial DVD will be generated from the master with much higher quality capture equipment than your average video capture card if it’s an analog master and much more sophisticated compressors if it’s a digital master. To put it bluntly, I think you’re wrong, however I am willing to accept evidence to the contrary, if you’ve got some.
Again, there is loss in video and audio fidelity both from the playback mechanism of the VHS player, from the transmission media, from the capture hardware, and from the compression algorithm (possibly some other sources of loss, as well). A copy can never be as good as the original - basic physics.
no, joeyblades, you are right.
i thought you were talking about capturing in general, as in video cards can’t capture higher than vhs qulaity.
my apologies.
of course it will be lesser quality than the original vhs.
How does that make any sense? The VHS mechanism is exactly what the person uses to view the tape. The output is a function of the media and player. That said VHS tapes suffer badly from wear and tear when played over and over and they age terribly. Making a digital copy is a very smart way to avoid those troubles because they age gracefully, copy perfectly, and play with little to no wear depending what media you’re using (optical vs. magnetic).
In a very very technical sense that has nothing to do with how people use technology your statement makes sense, but is academic. The question that hasn’t been asked is can the person tell the difference between the high-quality digital copy and the analog original. Heck no, we’re talking about humans here not robots. Its one thing to be lossy and another to be lossy noticeable.
JoeyBlades is exactly right. Of course, if you can make a “high quality digital copy”, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and the original- by definition, “high quality” means just that. The problem is actually making the high quality recording. It can be done, but JoeyBlades mentioned many of the elements conspiring against it.
As an example, I’ve got a Sony camcorder with S-video output, that looks extremely good played onto my S-video TV. When I try to capture video onto my laptop (which has streaming s-video capture hardware and hardware compression), the picture quality is about the same as VHS on the slow (lowest quality) speed. What happened? Well, since the camera output looks great on my TV, it must be crappy analog electronics in my video capture card, or the video compression is set for too low quality, or I have some other arcane setting in the video capture software set wrong. In preview mode (not streaming to disk, just viewing), the picture on my laptop looks pretty good, so it’s probably not the video capture analog electronics- it must be on the digital side- probably the compression cranked up too high.
Unfortunately, I can’t change any of those settings- if the compression is set any lower, I can’t stream to disk, so for my system the digital side is the weak link 
Arjuna34
Horselover,
You wrote:
It makes perfect sense. Any transfer from any media is going to suffer some loss. In every generation of copy, that loss is cumulative. To demonstrate what I mean let’s look at the entire process from VHS playback to DVD record to DVD playback (simplified). Let’s create a few labels:
From VHS player:
Lhf = loss due to tape head fidelity
Lt1 = loss due to transmission media (cable)
To DVD recorder:
Lad = loss due to analog to digital conversion
Lcp = loss due to digital compression
From DVD player
Lda = loss due to digital to analog conversion
Lt2 = loss due to transmission media (cable)
So in typical VHS playback on your TV you will always see some loss due to A and B. We’ll represent this mathematically as L1 = Lhf + Lt1. If you transfer this information to a computer and DVD writer we have L2 = Lhf + Lt1 + Lad + Lcp. Now you want to playback that DVD the total loss, L3 = Lhf + Lt1 + Lad + Lcp + Lda + Lt2.
Now does it make sense?
This is mostly true, except for the part about “copy perfectly”. This depends on which copy you’re talking about, the specific digital format, and the copy mechanism used. For instance, if we’re talking about copy from the digital master to a comercial DVD, there is again loss because the digital master is saved at a much lower compression rate than the DVD. If you’re talking about copying DVD to DVD, there could be troubles here, as well. Most DVD manufacturers are designing in ‘barriers’ to either prevent copy or insure low quality copy. There are ways around this, I’m sure, but they are probably not worth it unless you have a life of piracy in mind.
I think the average person WOULD be able to detect the loss in quality between a VHS and a DVD that had been recorded from the VHS. However, you are right. The VHS tape will continue to degrade introducing more loss over time. But then, I never said the conversion shouldn’t be done, only that it was expensive and it wouldn’t be quite match the original fidelity.
Hey guys, how about DV camcorders? Connected to the computer you should get a perfect copy! Does anyone know how much HD space they use with their extreme resolution?
well, handy… when i digitize video from DVCAM and miniDV, i usually bring it in between 200kb/frame and 250kb/frame.
Thanks KT.
rec.video.production newsgroup has a thousand messages on this sort of thing & how to do it.