vhs tape to what format?

[rokky]

I have had 40 year old home movies(no sound) of my departed parents put on vhs by a company that specialized in such. They were 8mm I assume.
Now with better hardware and technology I wish to copy these vhs tapes to my hard drive and then to dvd.

I have purchased a Nexxtech TV Usb2 Box. This device comes with Honestech TV Plus software. This device will record the vhs player and record into several formats.

I read somewhere that mpeg2 was the best format for quality and working with the files later. It is not imperative that I need to play back these movies on a dvd player right away. I just need to know the very best format to save them in and perhaps change them to dvd later on.

Thanks for advice on this. There is a lot of information on this subject but I do not want to make a mistake. These movies are very important to me.

[ZippyP.]

I don't know if you have a lot of tapes, but if you do then a DVD recorder might be the best solution.

[whitejremiah]

dvd recorder is one route to go...another option would be to invest in a decent TBC and capture them to the computer in lossless then compress it with divx with a quality setting of 1..and save to a dvdr........(lower numbers as far as divx's file quality means higher quality but bigger output sizes) i wouldnt advise this route though, if you have a lot of tapes to convert over...it can be quite time consuming...

[daamon]

Hi rokky,

Welcome to the forums.

Have a root around in the "Restoration" forum, and also head over to the site: www.digitalfaq.com, you might find some useful info there too. The site is run by lordsmurf a very knowledgeable chap.

[Nelson37]

Uncompressed AVI would be the best quality, but you may find the size to be prohibitive. Huffy, a Max-bitrate MPG, or a DV codec would probably be the most realistic option. You could archine these to data-DVD.

Advice on editing - cut NOTHING. If you had the only 2 minutes of video of your great-grandfather in all the world, how many seconds would you choose to loose forever?

[daamon]

Uncompressed AVI would be the best quality, but you may find the size to be prohibitive. Huffy, a Max-bitrate MPG, or a DV codec would probably be the most realistic option. You could archine these to data-DVD.

Of those, I'd go for DV AVI - still excellent quality, easily edited, and lower filesizes than uncompressed by about 5x (around 13.5Gb per hour). If you're not gonna edit, then recording straight to DVD from VHS might be the option.

Advice on editing - cut NOTHING. If you had the only 2 minutes of video of your great-grandfather in all the world, how many seconds would you choose to loose forever?

Sage counsel. I only have memories of my granddad - fond though they are.

[rokky]

Thanks for the replies. You folk are terrific.

I only have 2 vhs tapes - about 3 hours worth.

I am taking your advice Nelson37. I will NOT edit those recordings unless I make extra copies for that purpose.

The main thing is getting the tapes onto dvd in their present state and the best quality I can.

I have recorded the smaller tape into dvd but it is too big to get on one dvd disk. Can I safely split it?

I should have enough hard drive to use avi or the dv avi in order to make data copies.

Thanks again for the help. It is much appreciated.