A long shot, probably, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience of this? This is one of those subjects where Googling gives you lots of suggestions, none of them definitive, mostly questions without answers...

I, like many people, have a box of VHS tapes. Stuff recorded from TV and other sources, none of it looked at for a decade or more. I want to go through them, archive the content on my PC and ditch the tapes (and VHS player). Many of the tapes aren't labelled (and the ones that are, I don't necessarily trust). Many of the tapes will be almost or completely empty. Most are 240m EP tapes (ie up to 8hrs).

I have a USB video capture device that seems to work although suggests welcome.

What I want to do is be able to put a tape in, rewind it, press "play", then walk away and leave it. Rinse and repeat until all the tapes are "imported". If I can do this without any interaction at the PC end at this point that would be even better (it means I can get the wife to cycle tapes through when they finish if I'm not here too).

This seems simple in principle: I need my PC to "watch" the incoming video and record anything that isn't noise to a new file.

Not recording the noise is the key challenge: if I put a tape in and leave it overnight, say, then there's potentially 8-12hrs of "recording" which will be mostly noise, and that's a lot of disk space to be using up.

In an ideal world it would also detect program changes within a tape and split them into separate files too, but I think that might be asking too much and that's not so hard to do manually once they're on disk.

Suggestions?

Mark