VHS to DVD converter

Gdetrailer wrote:


There are a lot of commercial movies which will NEVER,EVER be released on DVD. In fact there ARE many movies along with broadcast TV shows which have never been released to video of any type..

I can give one good example of that.. Ever heard of WW and the Dixie Dance Kings? It was a "B" movie staring Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed.. NOT RELEASED TO HOME VIDEO.. I have a copy on VHS which I recorded from broadcast back in the late 1980s.

This appears to be a DVD of that movie: http://www.santaflix.com/wdida.html

Lasmith58 wrote:
As stated earlier, the DVD will only have the quality of what you start with. You do want to convert your home movies for sure as the information on the tape will deteriorate just sitting on a shelf. All VHS tapes are in an analog format and won't look good on an HD screen. If you don't mind watching your DVD at VHS quality, then go ahead and transfer as the DVD's definitely take up less room.

While it is true that the quality of a VHS to DVD "transfer" will never look quite as "good" as a straight up DVD, there ARE REASONS as to why one would go through the work to do this.

There are a lot of commercial movies which will NEVER,EVER be released on DVD. In fact there ARE many movies along with broadcast TV shows which have never been released to video of any type..

I can give one good example of that.. Ever heard of WW and the Dixie Dance Kings? It was a "B" movie staring Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed.. NOT RELEASED TO HOME VIDEO.. I have a copy on VHS which I recorded from broadcast back in the late 1980s.

Sometimes if you know there is no other way, then transferring from VHS, SVHS, Beta, 8mm video, Hi8 video, 8mm film, Super8 film, 16mm film, 35mm film and so on just may be the ONLY way you will preserve what you have. All of the above formats have "flaws" and the media they are on ARE deteriorating.. Salvaging them before they are completely useless is a good plan just in case it is never released on DVD.

Sometimes folks are merely trying to preserve their own HOME MOVIES which from the 1980s and up are typically on VHS, Beta, 8mm video and Hi8 video. If you plan to wait for Hollywood to release those on DVD you will be dead, your kids, grand kids, great grand kids and so on will all be dead. Basically your home videos will never be put on DVDs unless YOU do it.

I have so far transferred upwards of 200 hrs of my own personal "home movies" from the 1980s and up with another 100 or so hrs to go to DIGITAL FORMAT which I now have as a backup on several hard drives.

Yes, it is a lot of work and yes, the quality is not as good as DVD but they are MY "memories" IN VIDEO and history which my kids and future grand kids will have to look back on.

Heck I have several hundred reels of Super 8 film to convert that my Dad took from 1960's up to 1980s.. And that film is deteriorating.

Even still photos are important, I spent nearly a year scanning in 1K plus slides that my Dad took from 1950s up to 1980s..

As far as converting analog to digital goes, by far the easiest is a standalone DVD recorder. They are starting to get hard to find since most manufacturers have now exited the market.. You can typically find a Magnavox brand at Walmart. These are as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. This is not the best way to convert quality wise since DVD spec is a highly compressed MPEG2 format but it will get the job done.

VHS has some stability issues which can make analog to digital transfers quality issues or even fail to work altogether. You may need some additional hardware called a Time Base Corrector (TBC for short) which stabilizes the sync signals.

For better quality transfers some folks will use a capture card to a PC which saves the capture in a "lossless" format which is not compressed. This is more expensive route, takes more time, will require a pretty steep learning curve but when done right will be rather close to DVD "quality"..

For the OP, if you are serious and want much better advice then perhaps you should take a look at VIDEOHELP.COM there you will find helpful folks who are serious about getting the best quality transfers.

We bought a Sony VRD-MC6 DVD recorder from QVC for around $200. We needed it to take all the old VHS home movies and transfer to DVD. Very simple, just took time to do it.

They are running much more now, even on Amazon.

Check a thrift store such as Goodwill as I've seen many of these VHS/DVD combo recorders available. I bought a SONY one touch VHS to DVD for $10. Another Philips recorder that has component video inputs for $5.

As stated earlier, the DVD will only have the quality of what you start with. You do want to convert your home movies for sure as the information on the tape will deteriorate just sitting on a shelf. All VHS tapes are in an analog format and won't look good on an HD screen. If you don't mind watching your DVD at VHS quality, then go ahead and transfer as the DVD's definitely take up less room.

Bobbo wrote:
I just bought THIS to copy my VHS to DVD. Just got it a couple of days ago, still in the box.

If you price having them copied, $200 is cheap.

I'm curious do you have to hookup this receiver to the TV to copy VHS to DVD.

Most folks probably did this 10 years ago, like me. Your tapes may not look too good anymore.

We just bought the Toshiba from Amazon to convert home movies. Just dug out the bin of VHS tapes from the crawl space yesterday. Will do it this week. Was like 185 bucks including 50 blank DVD's. I paid WAY more than that 20 years ago for my Camcorder. I figure if I waited any longer these units won't be for sale anymore. Plan on passing it along to sisters and brothers so they can do the same.

I am guessing you have VHS home movies that you have taken and want to preserve, rather than converting commercial movies.

I had some of our home movies converted as we no longer had a VHS player a couple years ago. I had a service do it as I only had a few to convert and did not want to buy a converter to do it. But I spent nearly as much having it done anyway. But the resulting DVDs came out great.

I just bought THIS to copy my VHS to DVD. Just got it a couple of days ago, still in the box.

If you price having them copied, $200 is cheap.