Software to use with AverMedia EZCapture card?

[kelemvor]

Howdy,

I want to capture in some old VHS-C tapes and eventually turn them into a DVD. The only capture card I have is an old AverMedia EZ Capture PCI(BT-878 chip) (V1A3). I haven't used this thing for a long time and am looking for advice on the best capture software to use.

The quality of the original tapes isn't that great since they are VHS-C and are quite old, but I'd still like it to look as good as it can while not sucking up tons of space. It's mainly short clips (<5 minutes) of home movies going back 30-40 years across many tapes.

Any advice on software would be great. I'm sure I can find a tutorial here but if you have a favorite, feel free to post a link to that as well.

Hopefully I can get this going and done before the 28th since that's when we're doing Christmas with them.

EDIT: I'll be putting the tapes into one of those VHS tape cases that takes the VHS-C tapes to work in a normal VCR and will be using a standard yellow composite (or maybe S-Video) cable for audio and an RCA type to Mini-RCA converter to get the audio into my sound card input.

Thanks!

[redwudz]

To capture in a decent resolution, you will need some hard drive space. You might use a codec like Huffyuv or Lagarith Lossless Video Codec. For freeware programs, maybe VirtualDub or btwincap WDM Video Capture Driver. VD may have the advantage if it recognizes the card in that it has many filters available and you could clean up the video a little, besides editing it. Those are all freeware.

Then you need to encode the video and audio to DVD compliant MPEG-2 and finally author it. Lots of choices there. I use TMPGEnc encoder because it's easy, though a little slow. You can frameserve the output from VD directly to it to save hard drive space. It is payware, though. There are others like HC or the older QuEnc which are freeware. For authoring, TMPGEnc DVD Author is easy, but payware. DVDAuthorgui or GUI for dvdauthor are freeware. ImgBurn is good for burning, also free.

Another alternative is a program like ConvertXToDVD. It's inexpensive and will do most all of this except edit. There is an older DivxToDVD available that is freeware.

There are also commercial 'All in one' packages that do the same things. It depends on how much time and money you want to invest and what quality of output you want.

[kelemvor]

Well, Free is good and that's my main goal.

Hard drive space is no problem at all.

Guess I'll try to find a tutorial on VD to get me started. I've used that program once or twice a long time ago I think...

[mairambija]

visit SPAMand transfer your home video tapes to dvd. You can get a pretty good conversion at a reasonable price from a lot of places. But what are most of these companies lacking? Care and attention to detail! Other ways you get totally amateurish product done with domestic equipment.