This is a topic I have been doing some research on, but have not had much luck with finding good advice.

I have nearly 30 VHS-C tapes with family footage from 2000 until just last year and I would like to transfer these treasured memories on to a sturdier format. Also as technology moves forward, I imagine that VCR's will be unavailable, so that when mine finally dies I won't be able to travel down memory lane.

I tired a Happauge WinTV-USB, the older Green Box version, that a friend lent to me, but was very dissapointed with the resolution.

I have researched the pinnacle Dazzle, but all of the reviews say the Software has more bugs than an ant colony.

I believe my best option might be to install a video card to do the conversions, but don't know where to start.

If anyone has any information or experience on the best process for transfering VHS to DVD, it would be greatly appreciated.

If there is already a thread dealing with this topic, a point in the right direction would be good too.

Thanks.

You can go to Ebay and buy the ADVC100 or 110 from Canopus. It will convert the footage to a AVI file which can then be encoded to disk. To burn the disk use Procoder or another software of your choice. You will need software to edit the timeline if that is what you want to do. You can load the file into Ulead and edit if needed.

Burn on dual Layer to keep the bit rate as high as possible. DO not cram as many movies as possible onto 1 disk. Your final output is what ever resolution you choose in Procoder.

MAK

The Hauppauge is pretty good, but not the WinTV USB one...

You should try getting a WinTV PVR-150.. I can personally vouch for that particular model being good. (Although it's a PCI card and not USB..) The quality of captures is excellent.

You can go to Ebay and buy the ADVC100 or 110 from Canopus. It will convert the footage to a AVI file which can then be encoded to disk. To burn the disk use Procoder or another software of your choice. You will need software to edit the timeline if that is what you want to do. You can load the file into Ulead and edit if needed.

Burn on dual Layer to keep the bit rate as high as possible. DO not cram as many movies as possible onto 1 disk. Your final output is what ever resolution you choose in Procoder.

MAK

I second the ADVC110... used it to transfer well over 50 VHS tapes to AVI (which I then turned into dvd's using TMPGEnc and Ulead)... The captures (I used Ulead for this as well) never failed on any of the tapes, some of which were not in very good shape and most of the captures were 5+ hours in length. The quality of the AVI is very close to that observed when watching the tape directly.

BTW, I tried other locally available capture cards before I purchased the slightly pricier Canopus online... at least 3 different types (including a pricy Pinnacle device) and all had issues (capture device would lock up, lose audio/video sync, etc.) which forced me to return them.

"Small_Blind"
I have felt your pain and I went through the same grief you are going through now ,
I had all the cards mentioned here in this thread with lousy results so what I did in turn was purchase a dvd recorder and I edited and burned all the my footage to dvds with menus dates and all the trimmings including my laser discs and vhs tapes via firewire by feeding my camcorder to the dvd recorder from the vcr, and for the same price of one of those capture cards you get get a lite-on or LG dvd recorder refurbed from either www.tigerdirect.com
or www.newegg.com inexpensively and without any headaches at all....

Thank you for the guidence. I would have thought with advancing technology, things would become less confusing and easier. LOL.

Has anyone had experience with ADS Tech's DVD Express DX2?

I was doing some further research into just getting a DVD recorder to transfer video and forgoing any kind of editing, or at least maybe editing the straight transfered DVD's after, by making a second copy.

I came across the DX2 and I haven't read any bad reviews on it. It has the Capwizard and Ulead 9 software and it seems to be a reasonable price.


My main concern is dropped frames and resolution. I don't really care about editing my tapes and making them "Movies". I just would like to archive them and not loose to much picture sharpness, but if there is a way to do both economically, then sure why not.

Thanks again