VCR to Computer-Attachment?

Factual Questions
1

I tried to find something in search, but drew a blank.
How do I record from my vcr to Computer? I don’t think it has an rca atachment (I’m at work, so I can’t check.) At any rate, if I don’t record, I may want to stream to my VCR. Ergo, the question is how can I record VCR to computer, and how can I stream to my computer from vcr where I may record if I so choose?
Thanks,
hh

2

You need a video capture card; you can either get these as PCI cards that you install inside the machine, or external USB units.

3

Aha! Thankums!
hh

4

And they are often bundled with some kind of editing software allowing you to trim, clean up and caption the captured footage, before burning to DVD or VCD or something.

5

Will a tuner card work?

6

I think so, provided it can be tuned to the channel on which the VCR outputs its signal.

7

I’d make sure any tuner I got had hardware mpeg-2 video compression. Maybe things have changed in recent times, but when I tried capturing video from a VCR using a TV card that didn’t have hardware compression, I got pretty dodgy video.

Of course, there’s about a thousand other settings I might have messed up and it was on an older machine, so take that advice with a grain of salt.

I currently have two tuner cards in my machine with hardware compression and it works like a breeze. I’m even able to watch a recorded program while recording two others simultaneously and my machine doesn’t really work up a sweat.

8

Yes, but it’s just about the worst possible way to do it–RF is subject to all sorts of environmental noise, particularly in the neighborhood of all the digital hash found around a computer. Some tuner cards do have a composite video input, and so can act as a capture card, as well.

9

AFAIK, the best signal you can get from a VCR is S-video, followed by composite video, (medium quality), followed by modulated RF (the worst quality). Video-capture cards I’ve seen have both S-video and composite-video in.

I am not aware of any non-professional VCRs that have DVI, HDMI, or component out, but I wouldn’t say it never happens.

One you have your capture card working, it can be as simple as hitting Play on the VCR and Record on the capture software.