On 01-Jan-10 02:52:13, stevey.eu wrote:
It is very much a long shot, but is there anyone out there with any knowledge of copying VHS tapes to a PC for archiving purposes?
I have a fair number that I need to archive sooner rather than later so any guidance would be brilliant.
On a side note, anyone happen to have a spare VCR I can loan/purchase? Preferably with S-video output.
Cheers, Steve
I have been solving this problem "the hard way" -- though to be honest it was a carry-over from archiving to DVD which I started doing some years ago.
Having myself a big collection of VHS tapes going back over more than 20 years, and wanting to transfer them to DVD, I bought a combo VCR/DVD player/recorder. This plays from, and records TV input (from aerial or from coax link) onto, VHS tape, and similarly plays from, and records onto, DVD; and it will also copy from tape to DVD and vice versa.
So I put a tape in, put in a DVD, initialise the DVD, set the tape to the desired start-point, choose "copy from tape to DVD", and start it. I then have to wait while the tape plays at normal speed, and have to be careful to stop the playback at the desired moment. Then the machine finalises the recording on the DVD, and it's done.
After that, I have a DVD which I can copy as a DVD-iso onto a computer, and then I have it on computer as well. Totem (on Gnome) plays the result with no problem. And I also have the DVD which can then be played on any DVD player.
I have only fairly recently been doing the latter, since I did not previously have a computer with enough HD space for storing much of that sort of thing.
For the record, the player/recorder is a "Bush DVRHS02 Combined DVD Recorded and VCR", which came at the relatively cheap end (£150 from Argos), but there are plenty of other models with similar functionality.
Of course, the direct solution would be to copy straight from VCR output via a TV input on the computer, but I have never done this so will not attempt to offer advice!
Hoping this helps, and Happy New Year. Ted.
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