Originally posted by: Peter
Nevermind the quality ... resolution and sharpness on VHS is so poor to begin with, it won't matter.
Something simple, like Leadtek's WinFast VC100XP, will do. This is a pure video digitizer, the MPEG-ization into DVD format will have to be done in software. This requires a halfway strong CPU and a fast and big harddisk. Advantage: You're free to choose your conversion parameters - playtime vs. quality, resolution, sharpness.
The exact same applies to any TV card you buy, as long as it has a composite and/or SVideo input.
Alternatively, you can use a USB video input dongle. These do the MPEGization in hardware, with little CPU load, and you'll never have to store the uncompressed video. Drawback: You can't tune the MPEG parameters much.
Then there are VHS tape players with direct USB output.
And finally, there are standalone VHS/DVD combo players that can copy tape-to-disk on the fly, by the push of a button.
Originally posted by: jkresh
the main question you need to ask is how important is quality. A card with mpeg hardware encoding will be the fastest option (your cpu should also be fast enough for realtime encoding to mpeg 2) but if you import the video in raw (lots of space) and then encode later the quality will be better (with a good codec package) you will also have the option of mpeg 2 or mpeg 4 or other formats (dvix,xvid...). Your vhs should have composite or ideally svideo out, so you just need a card with composite/svideo in (if you have a high quality vhs player iwth component out that might give you better quality but component in on the pc is hard to find (hauppuage makes an hd pvr that has mpeg 4 encoding in hardware). Anandtech did some reviews of tv tunner cards (with hardware encoders) around 1-2 years ago, not much has changed since then on analog tunners so those reviews might be a good starting point as to what to buy if you wanted to go with something with hardware encoding.
Originally posted by: Modelworks
The best card to do this with is actually the cheapest:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16815100120
$17 shipped.
Has drivers that are solid in Vista/Winxp/32 & 64 bit
Svideo and Composite inputs.
I use it with virtualdub and dscaler, both free software
Originally posted by: axisaxis
Originally posted by: Modelworks
The best card to do this with is actually the cheapest:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16815100120
$17 shipped.
Has drivers that are solid in Vista/Winxp/32 & 64 bit
Svideo and Composite inputs.
I use it with virtualdub and dscaler, both free software
This has live capture and everything else needed? If so I think ill order this like tommorow. Thanks! Was about to spend a 100 bux on a WinTV card
Originally posted by: taltamir
if those are family movies... its important to keep them intact.. I recommend that you capture them to a file on the PC, then make parity records of them (par2), and then make some back ups of the movies and the par2 files.
Originally posted by: axisaxis
Originally posted by: taltamir
if those are family movies... its important to keep them intact.. I recommend that you capture them to a file on the PC, then make parity records of them (par2), and then make some back ups of the movies and the par2 files.
Couldn't i just make copys of the raw avi data?
Originally posted by: axisaxis
Originally posted by: taltamir
if those are family movies... its important to keep them intact.. I recommend that you capture them to a file on the PC, then make parity records of them (par2), and then make some back ups of the movies and the par2 files.
Couldn't i just make copys of the raw avi data?
Parchive (or parity volume set archive) is a Sourceforge.net project that was created in 2001 to design and implement an idea by Tobias Rieper and Stefan Wehlus for a parity file format.[1] These parity files use a forward error correction-style system that can be used to perform data verification, and allow recovery when data is lost or corrupted.