VHS to VCD -=HOW?=-

[SupaV]

i'm going to buy a sony vaio laptop but i'd like to know how to get my VHS tapes onto my pc. The format i want is AVI or MPEG so i can easily turn them into VCDs. What should i buy? (hardware software)

Thanks

[lhorwinkle]

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On 2001-07-30 11:14:15, SupaV wrote:
i'm going to buy a sony vaio laptop but i'd like to know how to get my VHS tapes onto my pc. The format i want is AVI or MPEG so i can easily turn them into VCDs. What should i buy? (hardware software)

Thanks
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I just bought the Matrox G400 TV card. It's a video card, capture card, and TV tuner combo. Does a nice job capturing from VHS and from cable TV. Saves in an MPEG format. I can edit with Premiere, then converting to VCD format with TMPGenc. Or I can skip the edit phase (like when I'm just doing a straight copy of VHS tape), and just do the TMPGenc conversion to VCD format. Straight capture consumes about 1GB per minute. After conversion to VCD format, it's about 10MB per minute ... small enough to put a full hour on a CD-R.

I haven't yet found out if this setup can go past the 2GB or 4GB file size limit on Win98. If it can, then I just need to buy a 60 GB drive so that I can capture an hour of tape uninterrupted. Otherwise, I'll have to pause the tape at commercial breaks in order to keep the file size down, TMPGenc the file to the VCD compressed format, delete the original capture file, and then capture some more.

I like the Matrox because it's easy to setup and use. Others prefer the under-$100 boards, but quality suffers, and capture problems abound, depending on your computer system.

Still others like the semi-pro equipment, such as the Pinnacle DC30 or higher models. I've not used these, but they have an excellent reputation.

You can also read the rec.something.something.video newsgroups for recommendations.