VHS onto DVD via a PC

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · September 22, 2006, 03:51 PM

folks,

I currently have a whole load of VHS videos (including my wedding) and I want to put them onto a DVD via my PC. I've got a video recorder and a PC with a DVD burner.

So, how do I do it? what do I need to do/buy (without spending more than about £200 at most.

Any suggestions gratefully received...

**Titus** · September 22, 2006, 04:04 PM

Try this out its pretty simple to use I own it! http://www.adstech.com/ .

**krazykarl** · September 22, 2006, 04:05 PM

you need a tv tuner and thats about it. I would recomend an ATI based card as I have used them before, but all you basically need is a TV in of some sorts. You simply use the software (The ATI bundled stuff is pretty good) to bring the video (assuming you hook up your VCR) into one big file, then you can use video editing and dvd authoring software to create chapters and such, then simply burn to a DVD.

**ENSAIS** · September 22, 2006, 08:41 PM

Any more info on this stuff?

I had bought Pinnacle Systems version 9 (prior to Liquid pro).. and it practically fried my computer (512mg 2.8 ghz celeraon w./ Nvidea 5200fx video card).

It took like 5 hours to render 10 min of video, so I gave up.

Anybody have real life experience with this ADS tech?

THanks, ENSAIS

**Erik** · September 23, 2006, 12:56 PM

I sometimes record VCR or TV clips with my computer.

I have an Athlon XP 3000+ with 756 MB RAM. (not much fatser than your system)
And a simple TV capture card from Pinnacle that is almost 10 years old.

I can record full resolution (712x576) without problems.
I use Dscaler and the DivX codec.
I have tried other software and codecs but these give by far the best result.

Dscaler simply owns, I highly recommend using it instead of pinnacles own software.
Especially when you plan to caputre from interlaced sources (such as TV or VHS), because it has de-interlacing algorithms and that's something I have never even seen in commercial packages.
It also has filters to reduce noise, and that's a must-have when capturing from VHS.

AND it's free because it's open-source!
You can get it here: http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/

The only downside about Dscaler: it doesn't work with all capture cards.
It does however work with virtually every cheap TV card because they use standard components.

There are realy two different kinds of TV capture cards:
The type WITH and the type WITHOUT on-board compression.

The type without on-board compression simply send the raw video data to the system RAM.
Programs like Dscaler can then simply process this data and forward it to a codec running off the CPU (such as DivX).
This is a very CPU-intensive task, but on the plus side it gives you a lot of flexibility.
These kind of cards are also very cheap: about $15.

The type with on-board compresson compress the picture data first (into MPEG2 format for example) and then they send the compressed data to the system RAM.
All that is left to do is store the MPEG data onto disk.
This sounds great, but the lack of flexibility and the relative poor quality of the compression (a reasonably fast CPU has much more processing power than any MPEG chip) means the end result usually won't look as good.
And Dscaler won't work with these kind of cards because it needs access to the raw video data.

Because your computer is about as fast as mine I think you are best off with a capture card without on-board compression.
Try different codecs and different settings because that can make a huge difference in the required processing power.

You wil probably have to record at pretty high data rates (I record at 1400 Kb/s, resulting in 5GB for a one hour recording), and then re-compress it later on (this wil probably take several hours for each recorded hour).

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · September 23, 2006, 03:08 PM

I just went and bought a dazzle USB DVD recorder, plug in the VHS box and away it went. Only problem is it only records from VHS at the lowest qulity setting, any higher and the recorded video runs at 2x speed for some reason.

Apart from that it works fine (mind you, my DVD-ROM now doesn't seem to be working.....)

**Erik** · September 23, 2006, 04:22 PM

Originally Posted by Tacticalwithdrawal

Only problem is it only records from VHS at the lowest qulity setting, any higher and the recorded video runs at 2x speed for some reason.

It probably can't keep up and drops half of the frames.
How bad is the "lowest quality"?

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · September 24, 2006, 08:33 AM

not bad actually, but it'd be nice to get it better. I assume I can use descaler with it as i don't have on-board compression?

If so, I should be able to get the quality up a bit

**Erik** · September 24, 2006, 12:14 PM

Originally Posted by Tacticalwithdrawal

not bad actually, but it'd be nice to get it better. I assume I can use descaler with it as i don't have on-board compression?

I don't think it wil work with that USB device you bought.
Dscaler is designed to work with PCI TV cards, not USB devices.

Basically, every TV card with a bt848, bt849 or bt878 decoder chip wil work with Dscaler.
Other devices won't.

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · September 24, 2006, 12:17 PM

Originally Posted by Erik

I don't think it wil work with that USB device you bought.
Dscaler is designed to work with PCI TV cards, not USB devices.

Basically, every TV card with a bt848, bt849 or bt878 decoder chip wil work with Dscaler.
Other devices won't.

oh bum,