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  1. Member
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    Hello. Newbie, first post.

    I need to convert about 30 VHS tapes to DVD. The tapes are about 20-30 years old. Instead of buying separate components, I'd rather go with a decent combo recorder. I FF'd, then RW all the tapes. When I play about half of them, there is serious distortion: frame jumps about every .5 to 1 seconds, no or poor audio, flagging and noise bands at the top or bottom. Tracking doesn't help.

    Does anyone know of a good Combo recorder with TBC?

    If not, and if I have to buy an external TBC, can I feed its output into the aux input to the DVD side of the Combo?

    If you need more info, please ask.

    Thanks for any suggestions.
    John
    Vermont
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  2. Member DB83's Avatar
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    Don't think you can actually do that with a combi. Recording in to the dvd input can not invoke the playback from the vcr side. I may, of course, be wrong.

    Also I doubt if any combis have an internal tbc
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  3. At least some VCR/DVD recorder combos can dub from tape to DVD. The Toshiba DVR620, for example. But that is usually not a good way to go. First of all, they usually don't include high quality VHS decks or DVD drives. Then, if there something wrong with the picture, say washed out darks, blown out brights, too much or too little saturation -- you have no way of adjusting it. Hardware MPEG 2 encoders aren't the greatest and editing/filtering it is more difficult. The only thing going for it is ease of conversion -- if you can still find one in working condition.
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  4. Just answered a similar question in another thread just a few minutes ago. That answer applies here:

    Image quality vcr?

    As you will see, I DID recommend using a combo unit. I don't disagree with anything jagabo said (I seldom do), but the combo unit almost always gets people to the finish line, whereas doing a more complicated workflow often causes people to give up because they can't get it working, or they just find the workflow too complicated.

    It wasn't quite clear if already have a combo or are just playing the tapes on a VCR. Either way, if half of them are acting up, then either you stored them badly (hot, humid, dirty, etc.) in which case no VCR is going to play them without problems, or you have a VCR that has problems of its own.

    A TBC will usually fix flagging, but I doubt it will do anything for noise at the top and bottom of the picture. That is not its function, and that problem sounds much more like an alignment issue.

    If you have any friends who still have operational VCRs, you might want to pop a couple of the problem tapes into one of their machines before you go too far down the road of buying more equipment.
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  5. Member DB83's Avatar
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    ^^ Yes. It is not clear if the OP is already using a combi (not I always say combi-nation as opposed to comb(o)-ined )

    As for dubbing I would expect every combi to do that. I actually do own a Funai yet still prefer to do traditional capping rather than dubbing. When I id attempt a commercial tape the dub was even noisier than a cap.

    And my combi has a selector switch so one can only choose either VCR or DVD for recording/playback so it is impossible to do what the OP proposes ie playback on the VCR and then record via a tbc back in to the dvd side. The dub process in fully internal.
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