Does anyone know if I can "capture" scenes taken with my VHS video camcorder on my computer in order to share them? Or... do I need a digital camcorder or special capture card?
:confused:

Does anyone know if I can "capture" scenes taken with my VHS video camcorder on my computer in order to share them? Or... do I need a digital camcorder or special capture card?
:confused:
You will need either a capture card or an analog to digital converter.

If you go the capture card route I strongly recommend that you use a capture card that has hardware encoding to mpeg2. This means that the capture card will do the conversion and not your PC. Some cap cards using software (your PCs CPU) to do the conversion and that can be problematic.

I have a Hauppague PVR250 PCI capture card and it works nicely. I also use a Canopus ADVC-100 firewire analog to digital converter but that is more expensive that the cap card route.

Another way to get VHS video onto your computer would be if you happen to have a DVD recorder for your TV. You may be able to play the VHS on your TV and record that with the DVD Recorder. Once recorded onto a DVD you can easily transfer that to your computers hard drive. Just a thought.

There are also some Digital camcorders that you can hook a VCR to and they will do the a/d conversion and transfer to your PC via a firewire or USB. If you go that route I recommend WinDV (freeware) for doing the file transfer from the Digital camcorder to your PCs HDD. The video format will be DV avi and will be around 12.5GB per hour of VHS video. There are a number of freeware software apps around that can convert the DV avi to mpeg2 or whatever format you choose. One of those freeware apps is SUPER.