How much HD space do I need to transfer 8 hours of VHS?

[thotholicious]

Hey, I need to purchase an HD because I want to transfer my fav TV shows to DVD. They are recorded on 8 hour VHS tapes. What software should I use to then burn it to DVD to make it all fit on one 4.7G dvd??

[thotholicious]

Also can anyone recommend a good capture card or TV card to do this? I will get the rest of the info from the guides. I need to record them to DVD-r

[Gees]

There's loads of opinions on "what's best" to capture with. Depends on lots of variables.

How much HD room you need also depends on how you want to capture: avi? straight to mpg? How much editing you intend to do, etc. How many projects you'll have going at time, etc. With more info from you, we could all estimate how much you'd need for any given capture.

Safe to say - go for as large as you can afford - but make sure it's a 7200 rpm HD.

Head on over to GUIDES and TOOLS to get started.

[vhelp]

Hi thotholicious,

Well, first of all to get those 8 hours would mean you recorded in EP mode.

That alone will cost you some reduction in capture quality. Maybe a lot or
maybe a little.. will just depend on some factors like Cable, Attenna or
Satellite etc. But, I would suspect source signal was from Cable

Ok, to get 8 hours is not so cut n dry, unless you opt for an all-in-one gizmo
like those DVDWriter decks or hardware MPEG. But that's assuming you did
not have to edit the source (MPEG) in any way. imo, it would be pretty
sloppy of you to just burn them to DVDR w/ a DVDWriter deck, or hardware
MPEG card. There's almost always going to be some editing required. wow,
that's another process to learn. Anyways...

To get 8 hours on your harddrive would be like this, if broken down to the
nearest Hours worth of capturing:
* ~8gigs/hr** - - divX v5.0.2 codec
* ~13gigs/hr - - MJPEG .avi (by DC10+ card)
* ~13gigs/hr - - DV .avi (by ADVC/DV CAM pass-throu)
* ~25gigs/hr - - huffy .avi (by any Analog capture card) (huffy=codec)
* ~60gigs/hr - - uncompressed .avi (by any Analog capture card)
.
.
* (~13g/hr * 8hr) = 104gig hard drive (not including enditing the source file
...and possible requiring offline .AVI source files, and also the encoded MPEG
...files too, for each hours worth of capturing.. assuming you capture at an
...hour at a time. Nobody captures 8 hours straight, except maybe a small
...handful here, but definately not consistanly/regulary, every day.

** untested

-vhelp

[SaSi]

Interesting answer and good approach Vhelp, the main point is what codec to use for capturing.

And also what resolution.

But I think you have the figures a bit off.

Uncompressed AVI, at 720x576 x 25fps is more like 31Mb/sec which gives 1.86Gb/min and 112Gb/hour. Certainly not feasible to capture like that more than 2 hours.

Huffy gave me a 113Gb AVI file which is 3:06:00 long. I used best compression (which is slightly lossy), otherwise the file would be more like 150Gb.

On the other hand, I think the DivX codec would give much smaller files than the size you mentioned (yes, you stated it is not tested). My experience is that it generaly requires 5~6 Gb/hour using max quality.

On the other hand, if capturing 8 hours VHS (LP I would guess), I would certainly not capture at 720x576. It's a waste. 352x288 would be just fine. In such a case, it is safe to divide the figures above by a factor of 4, so uncompressed would be 30Gb/hour, huffy would be 9Gb/hour, so on.

In such a case I would, and have quite often, capture using huffy. What I have used is the capture feature in the ASUS nVidia VGA board and VirtualDUB. I wind the tape to it's end, note the duration, rewind and capture setting VirtualDUB to stop capturing after so much time + 10 minutes.

[thotholicious]

This is what I have. 39 vhs tapes with 356 episodes of my favorite show. I was planning on taking one tape, putting it on the HD and then cut it into to epsodes as there are between 8 and 10 eps per tapes. I dont' want it to be one long continious video file but rather have a menu where I can select any of the episodes and insert chapters so that I can skip within the indivdual epissodes. As for the quality, the tape quality isn't the best anyway so I guess EP wouldn't be to bad. I only have to do this once so I don't mind taking the time to do it right. So, I hope that is enough info, what do you think?

[ktnwin]

Hi thotholicious,
you may be better off with a stand-alone DVD recorder. That will save you a lot of headaches.
Gain: you will get your DVD right away after playing the VHS tapes to the DVD recorder,
Lose: you have very limited editing capability if any

If you have lots of VHS tapes, this could be a good way to go.

[Vejita-sama]

Another way to go is to capture directly to MPEG2. Again this will cause a slight quaility hit. If you need to edit out commericals thou this is not a great idea, as editing MPEG2 files is a huge pain in the a&&. Of course a standalone recorder has a similar problem, but it's easier to hit pause. You can capture directly to MPEG2 and pause as well, but better to make each break it's own MPEG file.

[thotholicious]

Oh, I forgot to mention that I had to leave the tape running for 8 hours and edit later because i go to school. So I was going to play the VCR and capture and then edit it all into single episodes when I get back. So I should go with a 160 gig HD??

[thotholicious]

Where can I get these stand alone systems. Can i insert chapters every 5-10 minutes with it? That would be the fastest way i guess. Also, I heard they record in DVD+r but I need dvd-r. How can this be done? Can it be done?

Main thing is, need to get 8 hours on each dvd and also need to insert chapters. Any hints?

[geek rock]

Main thing is, need to get 8 hours on each dvd and also need to insert chapters.

at 8 hours, you'd need to use 352 x 240 resolution and a very low bitrate. you're looking at vcd quality. if you're happy with the quality of VCDs, go ahead..