A friend in the office has quite a few VHS cassettes that she wants to convert to DVD. Would it be feasible at all to hook a VCR to a DVD recorder and record the tape as if it was recording TV?
She asked because someone had told her there was something in the machinery of DVD recorders or VCRs that stops this
Short answer: Home movies are fine, Hollywood movies are not.
There are copy-protection schemes in place to thwart making a DVD copy of a copyrighted VHS tape, and defeating these will get me in trouble with the board.
Quite a few models of DV camcorders have ‘pass-through’ technology, meaning you can plug the VCR output into the camera, and the output into your computer for burning to your hard drive, and then to DVD. You do need a big hard drive, though.
Alternately, you can just record the movies to Digital8, and then hook them into a burner as well. This works as well, but seems to be better for things like home movies, as you can’t fit as much onto a tape.
We’ve used it to back up our old, out-of-print VHS movies to DVD, for home, personal use, in keeping with fair use.
The thing is I’m not too sure how technologically savvy my work-mate is so I was wondering if it was a simple case of plugging the VCR to DVD recorder with, say, a SCART lead.
Where are these devices to allow backing up of VCRs anyways?