backing up some old vhs tapes

[deeinc]

i have some old vhs tapes to back up and i have a Aver tv studio card and using the software that came with it the vhs tape im trying to capture are on for about a hour but when i capture them in high quality i get good copyes but the file sizes are realy big so i tried a lower quality but the picture is all blocky could anybody tell me a good program and what settings to use im looking a good picture but smaller file sizes im not worried about what kind of file format it is

[deeinc]

can anyone give me some advice please

[almostaborted]

only if you can say your first post in one breath

[Bob W]

Capture at the highest quality then use NeoDVD which I believe came with your card to make the correct NTSC DVD files (encode the file to your hard drive) then use DVDshrink which is free to transcode the files to fit onto a single DVDR. Also be sure in NeoDVD in options to set the audio to Dolby Digital to save some file size.

[FOO]

The accepted way to do that is to capture AVI with
Picvideo MJPEG codec or Huffyuv codec at 352 x 480
and encode to MPEG2 at around 3000 - 4000 kpbs

[FulciLives]

i have some old vhs tapes to back up and i have a Aver tv studio card and using the software that came with it the vhs tape im trying to capture are on for about a hour but when i capture them in high quality i get good copyes but the file sizes are realy big so i tried a lower quality but the picture is all blocky could anybody tell me a good program and what settings to use im looking a good picture but smaller file sizes im not worried about what kind of file format it is

I have an AverTV Stereo which is basically the same as the AverTV Studio only mine doesn't have a built-in FM receiver.

The software that comes with the AverTV products is really only good for watching TV on your computer monitor. It's not really all that well suited for capturing though.

I suggest you look into VirtualVCR which is a FREEWARE program that works great with my AvterTV Stereo.

When you capture I suggest using either the PICVideo MJPEG codec on a setting of either 20 or 19 (20 is the highest) or if you have the HDD space then use the free HuffyUV since it is slightly better quality and free whereas there is a charge to use the PICVideo MJPEG codec (you must register it to remove their logo from your captures).

There is a guide on doom9 website called TV-CAPTURE and in that guide there is a section on how to properly set up VirtualVCR.

So give it a try!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
When done capturing this way you will have an AVI file that is your video and audio. You must then convert this to MPEG-2 video using a program such as TMPGEnc or CCE or MainConepts etc. After encoding to MPEG-2 you can then use an authoring program to add menus and chapters etc. then burn to a DVD-R disc (or DVD+R etc.)