How to get VCR tapes to computer to cd's

[geno52]

Can anyone tell me the what I need to get my old vcr tapes to computer and then burn to cd's. I have a Dell, 1ghz,, windows me, 2 usb ports 1.1, 256 ram, 60HD. So I need to know what equipment that I need to add so I can do this.

[joeZy]

I use an Adaptec AVC 2000 card with the enclosed Sonic editing software and do pretty well. The name of the package is Videoh! Be prepared to spend a lot of time in front of the monitor and also have sufficient harddrive available. 30 minutes of mpeg file is about 2 gig.
joeZy

[unclebud]

You need a capture device for the computer commonly called a TV card or a Capture card. Good ones either need to be installed inside the computer or have a Firewire or USB 2.0 plug-in. And not all capture cards will give you the same quality.

USB 1.0 and 1.1 devices will not give you a good quality capture.

Another route is to get a DV camcorder that has analog to digital pass-thru and a Firewire card (some will only record to tape first before you can capture to a computer).
This will get you DV quality that can be edited and rendered to the format of choice.

Formats in NTSC format (USA)

700 mb CD-R
VCD = 240x352 low to medium quality at best, 80 min. per CD-R. Should play in most DVD players.

SVCD = 480x480 good to great quality, 40 min. per CD-R. Won't play in some DVD palyers.

hope this helps
UB

[Roundabout]

Like a lot of things, there are a lot of answers to that question. Really, it depends on how much you want to spend and how much time you want to invest in learning how to do it. You can go with an external device in one scenario, such as the Canopus ADVC-100 (~$260), Datavision DAC-100 (~$185) or the ADS Pyro A/V Link (~$199 - on sale at Circuit City right now for $110) - these and others will convert your video to DV, then you edit/convert/burn it to disc. You need to add a Firewire (1394) card to your PC to use one of these units (cost about ~$25). Some people will tell you this is the best or easiest way to go - but what works best is whatever works best for you IMO...

Or, you can install a video card in your PC, such as the ATI All-in-wonder card or similar, which have hardware encoding on board that will convert your video and record it to your hard drive. Depends on how much you want to spend...possibilites are unlimited. Your question is sort of open-ended so you will get a lot of different answers to what you asked.

Take a look to the left <-- at the "other" category and under "capture cards - Features and user comments" and start reading about all the different cards/boxes available to accomplish basically the same purpose, recording video.

Maybe you can re-post and give a more concise description of exactly what you want to do and what kind of budget you have to spend on it.
Then you'll get more answers to your question than you know what to do with!