VHS movies to DVD or CD now $159.99@BUY.COM - DEAL IS GETTING HOTTER!

[hconnorjr]

reading this thread, one can't help but wonder why all the hoopla about getting stuff onto discs. unless you are really squeezed for space, why not just keep the vhs tapes?

anyone know when hdtv recording stuff will be out and affordable?

 

[render]

USB capture devices are made for mpeg1 because of usb bandwith limitation.

Dazzle video creator II, which i have, is much better but it has some stinky software problems you have to figure out.

If you are interest in DVC II, then click here

 

[darrenford]

Always check resellerratings before buying from an online vendor. Tiger does not have a good rep.

 

[dimwit]

why not just keep the vhs tapes?

I have a lot of home camcorder movies when my kids were little and would like to keep them forever. However, tests show that magnetic breakdown of even the best VHS tapes start after about 10 years, and cheapie ones start about 5 years. And then there is also the wear issue (ever rent an old VHS movie), besides the possibility of breaking tape which has so far never happened.

 

[Hgabriel]

The Ulead Video Studio 5.0 is worth $130 alone. It comes with this device for free.

I like this device. I would buy one if I didn't just buy a Personal Cinema video card.

 

[IvanADS]

USB Instant DVD ignores macrovision, making this the ultimate MPEG-2 conversion
tool for most any video source, including but not limited to your old analog
camcorder, your new digital camcorder, your VCR, DVD player, DSS satellite
system, digital cable system, TIVO, Replay, video gaming systems, et cetera...as
you can capture from any device with an S-Video or RCA output.

All of the IRQ headaches and configuration issues and so on that have become
synonymous with video capture/editing, as the USB Instant DVD is in fact USB.
USB Instant DVD is revolutionary as with it, for the first time, through USB,
you are able to capture full D1 broadcast quality video (704x480 @ 30fps), and
even better, we're encoding to MPEG-2 in real time via hardware. (in
response to a previous post, hardware compression is almost always better
quality than software compression, the problem though has always been that good
quality solutions were not priced for us as consumers...that's where ADS comes
in)

Templates are included which allow you to capture in real time to VCD Format
MPEG-1 (320x240 @ 30fps at 1.5 Mb/s, allowing about 70 minutes of video to fit
on a CD-R), SVCD Format MPEG-2 (480x480 @ 30fps at 2.4 Mb/s, allowing 35-40
minutes of video to fit on a CD-R), and/or DVD Format MPEG-2 (704x480 @ 30fps at
selectable constant bit rates of 3, 4, or 5 Mb/s, allowing about 20 minutes of
video to fit on a CD-R or 2 1/2 hours to fit on a standard DVD-R). For skeptics
who do not believe that their USB 1.x on their current PC can handle this,
please note that even if we captured at 5 Mb/s, we still wouldn't be using even
1/2 of the USB potential transfer capacity (12 Mb/s).

In compairison to turnkey set top DVD-R Decks like Panasonic's E-20 or the up
coming unit from Pioneer, if you purchased a USB Instant DVD ($199 or so) and
picked up a DVD-R for your PC from HP, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Ricoh,
Toshiba, et cetera ($400-600) can publish a commercial looking DVD Movie, with
customized splash screens, custom images for your title screens & menus, custom
fonts, and so on with the bundled full version of Sonic's MyDVD 3.0 for less
than $800; however these set top DVD-Rs which cost $900-1000 (and up) do not
offer a similar solution. No matter whether you are the hobbiest archiving your
favorite episodes of SNL, or if you are a professional wedding videographer, our
goals are all the same...Go get the best possible output for the best price...

Between the price drops in DVD-R drives, and the proliferation of great
technology like USB Instant DVD, it's really a great time for all of us, to be a
consumer!

 

[cerebusPu]

this seems to be an interesting way to do recording off a TV. Id have to bring my computer over to the damn TV in the living room though. so can anyone confirm full broadcast quality mpeg2 encoding? i could make my own TIVO thing with this.

 

[cherrytwist]

I think I just found a Christmas gift for myself...

Thanks

 

[cherrytwist]

<< You should check out vcdhelp's pricegrabber section, because though buy.com's price is the lowest i've seen, their shipping is what kills you. I found my winner at provantage.com with only $6 shipping. >>



Right now Buy.com is offering free shipping on orders over $49.

 

[Dood]

Does this use proprietary capture software or can you use third party programs?

PS: Ivan...GREAT first post!!

Ann

 

[psxjunky]

GREAT DEAL !!! Ordered one !! $159.95 shipped

I was just looking for something like this. Hope the included software is really good as someone mentioned above.

Thanks !

 

[ai42]

jeez... lots of unessecary equipment

Just get a TV Tuner (ATI TV Wonder VE aprox $49)
Buy Cyberlink PowerVCR (because the ATI software sucks) another 49...

Your sound might get a little complex on the VE (as I got the wonder) but any intelligent Anandtecher should be able to figure it out. I'm recording from my VCR as I type its a great setup! Also you can watch tv on your computer cool!

And you can record stuff to your computer... wow... isn't that great... I much prefer this setup than some
USB box...

 

[vulcanman]

<<

<< can't my AIW radeon do this????? >>



Yes, it does do real-time (hardware assisted) MPG2 capture. >>



No ... Radeon cards are software MPEG2 encoders ... they will choke unless you have a ultra fast CPU ... and that too only if you dont plan to use the PC while the encoding is taking place :-(

 

[ai42]

FYI all recording software from ATI just sucks... It is terrible, I can't get more than 8 frames a second on their software on a AthlonXP 1600+, 512MB of RAM, and a 60 Gig RAID 0 HD. I installed it, just to get the drivers now.

However, Cyberlink PowerVCR (BTW same company as PowerDVD) has some good software. I can pull off full frame rate recording easily. I even moved my TV tuner card to my P3 750, and I can record for hours at a time at full frame rate on that too.

 

[Virus154]

^bump^

 

[SirDante]

anyone have some reviews or personal experience?

 

[SpeedTester]

<< FYI all recording software from ATI just sucks... >>




Hmm, thats funny my Ati Tv wonder can capture 640x480 @ 30fps without dropping a frame, Im using the latest software from ATI
and a Tbird 1.4 Ghz and W2K

 

[Relayer]

If I have an .avi file that I captured from my DV camera through the firewire port, can I convert it to mpeg2 in real time using this device????

This would save hours of software encoding.

 

[IvanADS]

Thanks Dood!

The odd thing about MPEG-2 is that although people are aware it exists, and know
that it's important, there really isn't much out there within our reach as
consumers that supports it. Let's take a look at the industry's standard for
computer based non-linear editing, Adobe Premiere 6.0. Sure it's a great
editor, but there is NO MPEG-2 SUPPORT out of the box. MPEG-2 PUBLISHING is
only made possible through third party plug-ins like those from Ligos or TMpeg
which mean encoding though software, relying on your CPU to do all the work.
Not only that but these software encoders don't allow you to EDIT MPEG-2 video,
nor can they resume after they crash in the middle of the night while you're
sleeping through the 6 hour+ render.

As mentioned above, not only is our own simple capture wizard included for
simple captures and exports (with templates to capture in the various formats -
VCD, SVCD, or DVD legal MPEG-2), but also bundled is a full version of Ulead's
VideoStudio 5. Over the years, Ulead has really been to only player on the
market that made editors that could edit MPEG-2. Sure, there are a few packages
out there who say they can output to MPEG-2, but that's all they do, just render
out MPEG-2. Ulead has a higher end editor, Media Studio Pro (MSRP full version
$495, upgrade $199), which includes many of the features that you'd expect in
your higher end editors like 99 tracks of video available, audio editing, et
cetera. ADS will have a plug-in available for this application within the
coming weeks, and as other MPEG-2 editors begin to appear in the marketplace,
those will be supported as well.

I can't stress enough, the difference between MPEG-2 encoding via hardware (real
time) and MPEG-2 encoding via software (minutes to hours to even days)...

 

[Relayer]

IvanADS

Can you turn on private messages in your profile?

Also, is the answer to my question yes?

I can encode an avi captured from my dv camera from firewire to an mpeg2 file in real time using this device????

 

[DoubleN]

(my apologies for being off-topic in this post with regards to the "hot deal", but I believe my thoughts regarding this topic are relevant none-the-less)

I spent a great deal of time this weekend working on encoding video using my Hauppage TV 401 card and figured out the following (just a sidenote, the XP drivers don't allow for audio capture so I had to do this all from my Win2k partition - if someone knows how to capture audio using a Hauppage in WinXP please PM me!!)

MPEG 1 ecoding on the fly: 320x240 was about 15 MB/Minute, so a 1 hour show before I took out the commercials took about 650MB.

Setting my software to encode using "VCD MODE" which is whatever the standard resolution for VCD is was about 15MB / minute and looked just like the MPEG 1, but proportioned a little differently.

Doing on the fly DIVX compression, the quality of the audio became the key in the size of the files. I couldn't stand the crappy audio quality, so I set it to PCM 44.1, Stereo, 16 bit, and the result was about 10 MB / minute for this type of recording. The quality of the video was considerably worse than that of the MPEG1 audio and video, so I chose to use that.

Just to see if my computer could handle it, I encoded using the raw image capture for 640x480. I didn't drop a frame, but the amount of hard drive space required was staggering! It used 9MB / second! That's about 540 MB a minute, so you could see an entire hard drive filling up just trying to record an hour of this. Of course using DIVX compression on this afterwards would help shrink the file down, but I certainly couldn't do DIVX or MPEG 1 encoding on the fly at 640x480 and the amount of space required to encode at 640x480 is just too high at the moment.

Relevant system specs:
AMD Duron @ 1 Ghz, Abit KT7-RAID, 512 MB PC133 SDRAM, Hauppage TV 401 (win2k VFW drivers), Win2k Pro
Recorded all videos to: IBM Destar 75 GXP 45 GB hard drive, 7200 RPM, 2MB Cache

In the end, I did a cost estimate and I think I'm better off using VHS tapes to record all my favorite shows, as even at the "low quality" setting with VHS tapes it still beats the PC quality hands down and I can get 6 hours taped for about $1-2. Considering that at 320x240 resloution and with MPEG 1 compression I was able to get about 1 hour of video onto a CD, this would require 6 CD's for every 1 VHS tape. I wanted to record all my stuff onto CD's and now I'm looking for a hot deal on VHS tapes...interesting how things work...

 

[WhiteMouse]

Here's my personal experience of ATI video capture:

My PC is Celeron 600, OC to 850. BX mobo. 512M PC100 RAM, 30G ATA66 7200 HD, ATI Rage Fury Pro VIVO card, running Win ME, and using ATI's MMC software.

Seems everything here including OS and software are poor, right?

But I can capture full resolution (720x480) MPEG2 video, with 0 frame drop. And my CPU usage is below 30%.

And now I only use my PC to recode TV programs.

 

[Dood]

 

[Relayer]

 

[forkd]

My ATI AIW Radeon works great at converting VHS to mpeg2.....That is why I bought it in the first place...I can also use it to record directly from the TV.
When I woke up and saw the WTC burning on TV I hit the old record button and presto....as easy as booting up and launching the program. just my 2 cents.