Copy VHS to Hard Drive

J

jdjoubert

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I have about 50 or 60 Hi-8 tapes. I would like to copy them to my PC hard drive in .avi or .divx etc etc etc.... (I am not sure what the standard is)

My pc is about 3 years old. I was going to upgrade, but finances does not allow this to happen this year.

My PC specs:
AMD Athlon 64
3000+
1.81 GHz
1.5GB Ram

my graphics card is not good at all... ATI Radeon 9550 (does my graphics card help at all with the capturing of the video feed?)

Also, I was under the impression that I need a very fast PC in order to copy the tapes to my PC, but now it seems I just need a good TV tuner card......?

Can someone please recommend a TV card. My budget maxes out at R500 to R600.
Also, if there is a card for this amount of money, will I be ok with my PC processor?

I read that some of the cards do 'mpeg2 compression' (or something like that) internally, do I need this?

All help appreciated.

jd
 
You can pick up a TV card for around R250 from Esquire and it will do the trick. It will also cost you a bit for (not much) for cable adaptors... Has your VHS machine have RGB out or only a TV aerial cable connection?
 
No, I will be copying directly from the camcorder. It does have a firewire output and AV outputs too.
Some of the tapes was used in a camcorder that I have sold long ago and the tapes are too big to fit in the newer camcorder. Those I will have to place in that VHS adapter in order to play it on a video machine and then feed the video via tha AV cables to the TV tuner card........ me finkx
 
directly from the camcorder? hmmm, check this out :)
http://windv.mourek.cz/

i recently gave this to an old omie who wanted to capture his family videos on his relatively old PC. it works just fine, costs nothing and he did not need to buy a TV card. he is using some onboard thing.

give it a test, let us know :D
 
If the camcorder has firewire then use it. Buy/borrow a firewire card and use that. It works verry well and is a lot easier than using a capture card.
For the tapes that you have to use in the VHS then the only option is a capture card.
To try and capture the video in a compressed format might be a bit unrealistic. You can capture in mpeg and then compress it after.
 
Is there anyone who has experience with these TV cards that can give some advise of a model or brand to buy to copy my VHS tapes?
 
You don't need a capture card if your camcorder has firewire. The output from the firewire interface will be digital and provide a better source picture as opposed to using a capture card where you convert between analog & digital.
 
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