i was recently discussing to afriend about the possibilities of vhs tape to cd transfer and viceversa. are those scenarios possible and if so, by which mechanisms do they come about?
i will appreciate anyone helping me settle this existential doubt.
Whila I do not know the particulars I would guess money would be involved somewhere along the line. With money anything is possible.
It should be possible with fairly inexpensive equipment. I think all you would need is a good video capture card and a CDR. You would just capture the video, store it in your favorite format (rm, mpeg,…) and then burn the files to a CD. The biggest limiting factor would be file size. If the tape is 6 hours long you are not going to be able to put that on a CD with any sort of quality (probably not even with horrible quality.) So if it is a long tape more than one CD will be necessary. You could do some nice editing before burning the CD too. Sounds like fun.
First of all, ten minutes of video=1 gig HD space. Thus, you might get about 5 minutes on that cd of yours…
This kinda relates to something I was thinking about this morning. I have a tape from 1987 that was improperly stored (read: not rewound all the way) so now the tape gets caught in domestic VCR heads and my TV/VCR combo refuses to play it. What would be a good lead for getting the thing transferred to a tape of recent manufacture without losing the tape or messing up a VCR? Or am I doomed to relive these memories in my head forever?
“…ten minutes of video=1 gig HD space…”
As I recall, I captured a lot of videos with MPEG1, 320X240X15 costing 1MB per minute. With good hardware playback, the results is surprisingly very much like standard VHS video in quality. Not the greatest, of course, but is quite useful and enjoyable. The is the way to go with CDs. If you can do MPEG2 on DVDs, that will be much better, but much more costly for capture cards, at least for now.
10 minutes of video equals 1GB?
Hardly. Maybe if it’s at a huge resolution. But, like centerline has pointed out, the MPEG1 format is great for what the OP would like to do. Just hook up the VCR to the video capture card (or the VCR to the TV, then the TV to the card), and capture the video with whatever software is provided with the card.
> 10 minutes of video equals 1GB?
No way. A DVD can hold about 9GB on a side, which would be 90 min with your formula, but the disk can actually hold about 4 hours of video.
What are you trying to transfer? Audio and video? If so, as the others have mentioned, just plug your VCR into a computer with a video capture card and digitize the video. Obviously, audio-only just requires a computer w/sound inputs. Then burn a CD-R.
Next, how are you planning to play this back?
You can save it as a quicktime, etc., file and watch it in the relevant player/browser. There is also an option to create a Video CD–basically a forerunner of DVD. Uses the same MPEG encoding, but the CD obviously has let capacity than the DVD
MPEG-2 compression averages out to about 3.5 Mbps(notice, bits not bytes). This ends up being 26 MB/minute(now its bytes) so a CD with 650MB capacity can do about 25 minutes of average footage. That is 525 lines at 30 fps(S-Vhs quality). so if you lower the resolution to 320(VHS quality) you can get somewhere around 65 minutes per Cd. If you dropped the frame rate to 15 Fps you would get over two hours per CD. But the quality would be noticeably worse(sorry Centerline, but I consider that to be well below Vhs quality, plus how did you get 1MB/minute? you sure you don’t mean per second? Mpeg-1 was a less efficient encoder, and unless you set really low color depth I can’t imagine 1MB/Min).
There are Cd’s written in Dvd format, but obviously have only CD capacity, but a DVD player or DVD-rom can happily use them.
I believe the Video CDs are MPEG 2- please correct me if I’m wrong. If you would like to be able to play back the video on your TV (as opposed to your computer) this would probably be the way to go as they sell some DVD palyers that have VCD palying capability as well as standalone units you can import. http://www.liksang.com used to sell an adaptor for your Playstation so that it’ll play VCDs.
Well, I guess things are better now since I last tried it at 1gig/10minutes. Time to hook that vcr back up & see if I can do better with MPEG.
TampaFlyer, its not so far off, a dvd is DOUBLE sided, or 18 gigs, = 3 hours.
I don’t know how much video can fit on a CD but I do know that three years ago, someone gave me a porno movie that was 1.5 hours long and was a CD-ROM. Quality was indistinguishable from a video when it was reduced to take up only about half the screen. If you made it full size, however, it was a bit grainy, but still pretty good quality.