Hi I have just found a deal to buy a VHS to USB adapter for $24. Does anyone know once you have this adapter how you then burn VHS tapes onto DVD? It says the adapter comes with a software CD and manual. Does anyone know if that is all you need, the adapter, software and manual? Would it be pretty straight forward or is it a complicatedprocess? We have about 20 hours worth of VHS tapes to transfer so it would be very expensive to get it done professionally, but at the same time im not sure I want to risk trying to do it myself in case I somehow damage or erase the tape. Thanks
Transferring VHS to DVD
cinnamon85 on 05/06/2012 - 13:05
Comments
hey sorry i should have said in the original post, i have a VHS player as well that the adapter would be connected to :)
The software may not burn DVDs, it may just record to your computer. In this case you will need to use something else to put the video on the DVD (Windows 7 comes with software, others are freely available).
Note however that you should consider how you are going to format the 20 hours. Note the following points:
- DVD chapters need to be manually set and can be troublesome if you aren't confident with software
- DVDs have a notional length of 3 Hours, but this depends on video/audio quality
- You can record from the device and/or write to DVD in a spectrum of different qualities.
- Burnable DVDs degrade, so don't consider this to be a long term storage option.
If you have a modern DVD player you can record the video as divx/xvid/h264 files (high quality for the size) and store the files directly on the DVD rather than burning a 'DVD Video'. This will allow you to store a lot more on a single disc (and save archiving space).
Pretty sure you still need a VHS player to connect to the gadget. It's probably a USB video capture dongle that takes signal from the VHS player and records to the PC's hard disk. The software then burns it onto DVD. So you won't damage the tape any more than a normal play.