I’m buying a new computer and want to be able to, among other things, convert vhs tapes to dvds, copy dvds, etc. I was orginally going to buy a Dell Dimension 3000 series computer, but they recommend the 4700 or 8400 series. I’d like an unbiased opinion as to this recommendation, and any other advice I can get on system requirements needed. Sorry for the rather vague outline of my needs, but any help would be greatly appreciated
Let’s start with what you know about computers and graphics cards, no need to tell you a bunch of stuff you probably already know.
They key points to make with a multimedia box, is the graphics card and the amount of ram you purchase or obtain later for your system. If you’re going to go multimedia crazy firewire is still the preferred method of moving lots of information form an external device to an internal component.
I contemplated trying the whole “vhs to dvd” thing a while ago. In the end, i decided it wasn’t really worth it, as i don’t have enough videos to justify the hassle, the time, or, right now, the expense. There are, it seems, a few things you need to think about.
First, you need a way to get the video from the vhs cassettes onto your computer. This requires an internal or an external (USB or firewire) video capture card that will take inputs from a video cassette recorder.
Second, you need to encode that incoming video stream so it is in a digital format when it gets to your hard drive. The best way to do this, i believe, is by using a video capture card that has a hardware encoder, rather than using a software encoder on your computer. A separate hardware encoder uses up fewer system resources and works faster.
The video that comes through such video cards/adapters usually ends up on your computer in mpeg2 format, which is, luckily enough, the format you want for making DVDs. Most internal and external video adapters come with soe sort of video editing software so you can edit the video, but if the reviews i read are any indication, this software is often the weakest part of these video card packages. There seem to be many users out there who just can’t get the software to work very well at all.
Once you’ve edited the video, you need to get it in a form that will work on a DVD. This requires a DVD authoring program that will take the mpeg2 video and turn it into the requisite IFO and VOB files necessary for playing on a regular DVD player. This usually requires more encoding. Again, many video card packages come with some form of DVD authoring software.
In terms of what type of computer you need, video processing can be quite a resource- and memory-intensive task. Most guides i’ve seen recommend 1Gb of RAM as a minimum for people who want to get serious about doing this sort of stuff.
Also, you need quite a bit of hard drive space. The video that enters your computer through the video capture device can take up as much as 12Gb per hour. You also then need enough space to edit the video and produce the output files before you erase the original video. Many guides recommend having two hard drives on your computer for this type of work. Not only does this give you more space, but twin hard drives make things faster when you’re editing, as you can copy from one drive and write to another, which is faster than copying from and writing back to a single drive.
I’m not saying that you have to have all this power and hard drive space, but working without it makes life easier, if the articles i’ve read are any indication. Most people also advised going for an internal rather than an external card, as the internal interfaces generally allow for faster transfer than external ones like USB2 and firewire. faster transfer rates leads to lower likelihood of dropped video frames and other glitches in the video.
Here’s a CompUSA page with some of the available video capture devices, both internal and external. As you can see, there’s quite a price range.
To narrow it down, look for online reviews of the products. Here’s a Tom’s Hardware review of one external video capture device. Search the Tom’s Hardware site for others. A Google search using the name of the product and the word “review” should also turn up some helpful information. I had a whole bunch of this stuff bookmarked, but i appear to have deleted them.
Good luck. If you end up doing it, maybe you can let me know what you buy and how well it works.
:smack:
Of course, i meant “makes life harder.”