ION VCR2PC

[Gramps]

I have about 600 VHS tapes that I want to dump to file. I happened to spot the ION VCR2PC video convertor in the store, but wanted to know if anyone has tried one out.

http://www.ionaudio.com/vcr2pc

Are they worth buying, or are they junk? Would I be better off with a decent VHS player and a TBC?

[gadgetguy]

You would be better off with a good VHS player and a TBC. That type of device by design will not output Macrovision protected tapes. Even if you only plan on using it for home video tapes, typical errors will be interpreted as Macrovision and fail to play.

[lordsmurf]

Junk.

[Gramps]

Thanks, guys!

[omar80]

Wish I'd read this before I bought mine on Ebay. At least I only paid $90 for it.

Mine works fine. My only complaint is that even on the lowest quality setting the file size is huge! 1.1Gb for a 48 minute kids show! It saves as an .mpg file and I used Xvid to convert to an AVI and it lowered the file size to about 800Mb, but that's still huge for only 48 minutes.

Anyone have a suggestion for converting it lower without losing too much quality?

[jdearman]

I recently bought a ION VCR2 PC. I cannot get any VHS tape to tract properly. Using the tracking buttons will correct the problem, but only for about 5 seconds. The tapes play well on my old VHS/DVD players.
Anybody had this problem and know of a solution other that chunking it out the back door??


Jim

[classfour]

It certainly got kicked about on amazon.

My current setup is: Panny AG-1980, >> Hauppauge PVR250 with hardware mpg2 encoding. I also have a DataVideo TBC and Old Elite Video BVP-4 that I can throw into the chain if need be. Most VHS captures look pretty good with this setup, and I'm not seeing any dropped frames - and the audio is good. I also have a JVC prosumer VCR and another Panny as backups - just in case the 1980 rejects the tape. If I simply want to go straight to disc: I've got some DVD recorders waiting in the wings for unattended work.

[LHUPA]

I got mine at The Source electronics store in mid 2008 or 2009 and it worked fine for the type of media I converted to DVD or CD at the era! But, this week, I experimented someting bizarre with the apparatus perhaps due to power outages this month or a lot of time ago! The VCR 2 PC system seems to don't detect the tape speed, the video goes truly fast as on fast foward (fast search) and the tracking is not adjustable at all. So, I got from a guy a job to do as converting a family christmas video to DVD and the VHS cassette was recorded originally in SLP! The apparatus seems to read it in SP instead SLP as a regular VCR! The VCR 2 PC has an alternative audio-video input in front of it and I had connected a regular Hitachi VCR through these inputs and I got a perfect image for the type of media but no sound throughout the Corel Video Studio Pro X5 video editing software! The bonded software so called "EZ VHS CONVERTER" cannot retrieve the VCR 2 PC hardware and asks to close the applications that uses the VCR 2 PC hardware! So, I had upgraded all drivers and softwares and the problem persists plus this problem of bad tape reading speed while ION says that the product is discontinued!... Shit!...What shall I do? I need it to do this job!

Thanks for reading me and I count on you!

LHUPA

[Brad]

I don't know enough about this hardware to offer a solution, but you didn't mention whether you went through the troubleshooting step of making sure that this Hitachi is in fact playing sound back from the tape (by hooking up to a TV directly).

[LHUPA]

So, I had tested the cables from that Hitachi VCR (mono VCR with a yellow video and white sound RCA connectors) with an headphone and the sound from that VCR is impeccable! That's the VCR 2 PC that fails to its job!... I don't know what's happens to this system knowing that with my former computer in 2008 or 2009 it worked so fine. Since, I had done about three video transfer jobs with the apparatus ant the bundled software "EZ VHS Converter" successfully! I'm very surprised of the amount of people that experiment exactly the same troubles as me with, once verified it in several dedicated forums over the Internet... Ultimately, solutions seem to be far away!!!!! Did you know a better solution to convert VCR to DVD or files?

Thanks a lot

LHUPA

[Brad]

I am liking the Diamond VC500.

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=27886&vpn=VC500&manufacture=Diamond&promoid=1322

[LHUPA]

Thank you very much guy for your idea... So, I will study this Diamond VC500 right now!