Capturing OLD VHS tapes to DVDs- All in Wonder good enough?

[jowel13]

Hi,

I am new to this forum and I was wondering how I would go about backing up all my old VHS tapes to mpegs, and writing them on DVD. I want to fit as many home movies as I can on one DVD but preserving as good as quality as I can get from the VHS tape. I was looking into buying an ATI All In Wonder Card (8500DV) and I was wondering if it would be able to handle the job? I have a bunch of 8 Hour Tapes lying around, pretty much to the full capacity... would one 8 Hour tape be able to fit on one recordable DVD? Please give me suggestions and information on how to go about this process. Also, if you have other suggestions on a better capture card that would be great too (I want a card that does everything, and that is still fast with games!!)

Thanks in advance.

-Joel

[jowel13]

Or recommend any stand alone hardware encoders.

Thanks!

[Anonymous65]

The ATI AIW will do a nice job at capturing VHS for DVD. However, you will need a fast CPU for real-time captures. I'm using Ulead Videostudio and Ligos real-time encoder. Try captures at 352x480 @ 4Mb/sec CBR, and 224K/sec 48Khz audio. This will give you over 2 hours on a DVD.

You can also get the ADS Instant DVD, a hardware encoder connected to the USB bus.

[jowel13]

Hey,

Thanks for replying. Will an additional encoder like you recommended make the process faster? Whats the difference between "encoding on the fly" and "software encoding"? How much faster is one from the other, and what are the differenct qualities that each produce?

Again, Thank You for the time you taking out of your day to respond.

[flaninacupboard]

"on the fly" encoding happens in real time. i.e. you press record, play your tape and when you stop the tape press stop and its ready to burn to DVD. if you buy an external hardware encoder (expensive!!) this process can give good picture quality and is very convenient. software encoding means capturing the tape onto your computer with as little processing or compression as possible to try and preserve the original quality of the video. this video is unusable in a domestic environment, because the filesize is so big, you're talking about ten minutes to an entire DVD-R. so you use a software encoder to compress it (such as TMPGenc, the preferred encoder of most on this site) and apply noise reduction cropping and source range/simple editing. depending on the spec of your computer and how heavy your noise reduction the time the software takes to encode can be anywhere from about real time (two hours of video, two hours to encide) to 10 or 15 hours to encode. now unless you bought a new computer in the last 12 months, you're probably looking at 4-5 times real time (so 8-10 hours for two hours of video).
hope thats cleared it up a bit.

[Anonymous65]

Recording or encoding on the fly is much faster. However, until recently you had to give up quality for speed. If you get the ADS instant DVD you can do full DVD captures, but will work less good for VCD and SVCD captures.

Software encoding require large fast hard drives, and lots of time. First, you record the video in low compressed AVI format, then convert it to mpeg. To do one hour of video can easily take 4 hours or more of work.

[bsagaert]

Is anyone used to use the ADS Instant DVD? does it work as it should (USB 1 has a limited capacity).

[joeven]

Yes, I recently got a USBIDVD and am experimenting with it now. It seems to capture quite well. Earlier today I captured 30 min of The Matrix from VHS in 480 x 480 SVCD format and burned it to a CD using VCD Easy. It played well on my Apex AD-1200. The 480x480 format looked kind of distorted when I viewed the MPEG2 file with the Windows Media Player but when I played the disk to a TV, it looked fine. I don't know why.
I also intend to send files back to VHS via the USBIDVD but I have not yet tried that aspect of the unit yet.

Joe

[big_hed]

Go ahead with the AIW 8500 (although the 7500 is a better buy right now). I have a old AIW Rage Pro and it does great 720x480 VHS captures straight to MPEG2 with no frame loss.

And you cannot fit a 8 hour tape on a DVD in a readable format by a set top player. You only get 2 hours at a low bitrate max. Of course you can compress them to a DivX type format and store more, but that is not readable by a set top player.

And you do want to capture your VHS at 720x480. VHS is around 240x320 (approx) and capturing at 320x240 will lose some pixels, and with VHS you don't have that much to spare.

[joeven]

As a follow up to my earlier post: I hooked up a TV to the USBIDVD and played some files to the TV through it. It worked good with files created in VCD, SVCD, and DVD formats. MPEG1 & MPEG2 files, I am talking about here. They all looked real good on the TV and I was particularly surprised at the quality of the MPEG1 file. It looked better than the same file did when burned as a VCD and played with a DVD player.

Joe

[ats65]

I have both the ATI Radeon AIW 7500 and the IDVD unit. So far, I have been able to capture with both, IDVD or ATI. However, I am not able to play it back thru the IDVD unit. The unit would lock up after a few minutes. I am hoping I can exchange the unit and try it again. The main difference between ATI and IDVD is that with the IDVD, you can burn the captured video directly to CD or DVD, The unit comes with the software (Ulead Video Studio 6.0 SE DVD or MyDVD 3.5) to burn DVD and to make TV slide show (Ulead DVD picture show). However, I have not tried it as I use Ulead DVD Movie Factory. The capture from ATI which is in mp2 format and must be converted to mpg file before it can be burned on CD or DVD. I use TMPGenc to convert the ATI captured file to mpg (SVCD/VCD/DVD) file. If you can get the IDVD to work with your computer without the problems experienced by some of the users (audio sync, blocks in the capture), IDVD is much quicker.
Check out this site for more info on IDVD.
http://pub9.ezboard.com/fpyro1394frm8

[joeven]

The TV/VCR playback seems to work fine on my IDVD unit. I just plugged a TV into the video out jack on the IDVD. I've played back using both the Capwiz and Videostudio 6 programs. The VS6 method is not very intuitive but the Capwiz is simple and straight forward.
The only audio sync problems that I've had so far is when I made a VCD using the MyDVD 3.5 that came with the unit. The sync was waay off right from the beginning. Vcds burned with VCDeasy looked to be in sync. Also, a DVD on CD that I made with MyDVD looked okay. I should add that so far my captures have been limited to about 30 minutes. Perhaps sync issues will happen in longer clips.

Joe

[Savant]

I have an AIW Radeon and I have done some captures from VHS. I wanted high quality so instead of capturing direct to MPEG2, I used VirtualDub with the HUFFYuv codec and captured AVI files. (720x480 @ 29.97fps) Of course the resulting files were huge. Next, I used TMPGenc and encoded the AVI files to MPG using a 2pass VBR of 2.7mbps. In the end I was able to get about 200 minutes on a DVD, and the quality was quite good. Only in extremely high action scenes with big pans could you detect any hestitation in the video.

Regards,

Savant