The recent thread on digital video’s got me to thinking.
I have got a heap of tapes of classes, performances etc. recorded over the years that I would like to transfer onto DVD if possible. The majority are currently on those little Hi-8 tapes. Is it possible to transfer this to disc at home or should I just take them somewhere to get it done professionally. I appreciate any help with this.
Formac has DV converter widget that they bill as “a godsend for anyone who wants to digitize old home movies.” The specs say it works with both Mac and PC. It’s a FireWire device.
formac.com/p_bin/?cid=soluti … s_studiodv
This is a first-class solution. There are lots of POS products down at guanghua that’ll do a lesser job…
That sounds cool, but I’d like to do it with a PC…and maybe cheaper as you say…what would I need to:
a) convert VHS tapes to DVD?
b) record TV programs from Taiwan’s splendiferous offerings on a DVD using my PC?
Sorry to ask but I’ve browsed the offerings at various computer stores and even though I supposedly speak Chinese, I wasn’t really able to get a straight answer. 
That’s probably because you may speak Chinese, but you aren’t fluent in ‘geek’ 
Or the sales staff are just clueless - I find you really need to get the right person to talk to about these things!
I’m guessing for a) you’d need a VCR and a DVD recorder, assuming DVD recorders come with AV inputs. I haven’t looked at them closely enough to tell, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t. On a PC you’d need it to be equipped with a DVD burner and a video capture card, plus of course the VCR. If the video tapes are copy protected (Macrovision) then that’s harder - you need to get a capture card that disregards this or a doohickey that gets around it (I know there’s ones you can buy but I can’t remember the name of it 
) Another alternative is to pass it through a digital video camera, which often strips the Macrovision. I haven’t done it myself so I don’t actually know how to connect wire A to slot B, but I know a few people who do this kind of thing and that’s the general concept (and no, they’re not video pirates ).
With b) I’m guessing you’d need a PC tuner card (to receive the TV stations), some way to connect your antenna/cable to the PC perhaps via the TV, and again, a DVD burner on your PC.
I think a DVD recorder might be the easiest, they do have AV inputs.
Perhaps get one with i-Link (Firewire/IEEE1394) input in case you consider
buying a DV camcorder in future.
I’d be running a notebook computer, does that alter what I need?
You can find cards for your pc that have a cable input for tv as well as input for dv. Look for something that may be called “DVD maker” or something similar then look at the card for the cable input, it looks the same as the one on the back of your tv. They will come with all the software you need. I can’t think of the name of one but when I do I will post it. They cost in the range of NT$2000. To make a DVD at a photoshop is NT$500 per so it is worth it.
As for notebooks…you may need some kind of external device.
Iron Lady - If you already have a vid cam then you can connect that to your tv and record your shows on dv tape from tv to vid cam, then transfer that onto your laptop through firewire. That is an alternative to what Rascal has already suggested providing you have a video camera.
Processing power and RAM might limit you, as well as harddisk capacity.
As well you would need to find a way connecting the interface card (with AV inputs), PCMCIA is possible but perhaps expensive.
If you have already a firewire (IEEE1394, i-Link) and you camera has a matching connection you can use that of course. Not sure if Hi-8 camcorders do, I only know if from DV camcorders …
Y’all think too much. Keep it simple, stupid.
Have a second look at the Formac device. It does the conversion off chip and you can store the files for processing later.
With an external hard disk as a temporary archive, you can probably go door to door on the setup you need for about NT$20,000. Spend the money, suffer less.
Besides you’re a lot more likely to actually accomplish something with purpose-built hardware than you are mix-n-match bullshit from Guanghua. Been there, down that. In fact, I’ve several large drawers at home filled with been there, down that.
Smarter people than you or I have already sussed this problem. A six pack o’ beer and some buddies on the forum will fill your drawers with half-used stuff, but won’t get your memories to disk…
(Let the pooh-poohing begin).
Well, if you’re talking that kind of money, I’d keep it even more simple, stupid, and just go for the DVD recorder, at least for what ironlady wants. I’m pretty sure there are some around that price point and no mucking around with computer bits and pieces, which I hate anyway (the mucking, not the computers) Plug and play.
The notebook changes things definitely. It will cost a lot more to get the gear to do it properly and I would be very dubious of any USB 2.0 widget for video recording. Most of the cheap and pain-in-the-a$$ ways to do it would require a desktop.
Personally, I suggest you at least find out how much it would cost to have it done professionally. A DVD recorder is an expensive proposition, as is the Formac, as is a line in recording capable DV camera (all good suggestions). If this is all you REALLY need to do with any of those things, it’s almost certtainly cheaper in terms of money, effort, and lost hair to get someone else to do it.
I don’t really understand why someone would want to store footage from TV, VHS or other analogue sources on DVD? Just for the capacity?
A standard composite video signal (the one that goes through the black cable with the yellow RCA plugs) has a resolution of about 240 lines. The same applies to VHS and VCD (which had 288 lines iirc). Even if you connect a DVD player through such a cable the resolution you get is just that bad.
If you want more (and the signal source offers that resolution), use S-video, where the colour information is split into two signals. (Can’t remember how many lines that would give you…) If you want even more: component video…
So, if your original source is something with an extremely high picture quality, something like the local TV (and perhaps even on VHS), then it would make no sense to interpolate that footage to a larger “resolution”, which takes up more space but might look crappier than the original. Instead, you could get yourself a TV card (less than NT$2000) and record everything onto your computer, probably in 320240 (or 384288 for the VCD look…).
You could compress that video stream in real-time with basically any computer you bought in this millenium, no Prescott or G5 is needed. If you want to be able to view the disks on a DVD player, you will need an MPEG encoder (MPEG-1 for VCD, MPEG-2 for SVCD and DVD) to convert the AVI you recorded previously. However, you could get your files a bit smaller by compressing them with an MPEG-4 compliant codec (DivX, XviD or Quicktime Pro), which is even supported by newer DVD players.
You could still use a DVD as storage medium for many hours of video, but don’t make the mistake to try to create a DVD-compliant disk from your VHS tapes or TV footage, that’s nonsense… I have a few DVDs that were made from such footage and the quality is… well…
Not quite sure I followed all the tech details of your post but for me the reasons would merely be storage (thin DVD/VCD vs big bulky videos), easy random access as opposed to the FF and REW and non-degradability, with a possible plus in the form of digital editing on computer. Nothing to do with quality - I always thought if you transferred VHS to DVD the picture can obviously only be about the same or less than the source material.
For VHS or any other video files, DIVX is the best for me, especially if you are considering saving space. On a regular 700MB CD, up to 1 and half hour video, on a DVD media up to 10 hrs video can be recorded with a really good quality (better than VCD, SVCD or VHS). I agree with dl7und; get a TV card, DVD writer and my suggestion Divx encoder (Dr Divx from divx.com) and start burning. Most of the new DVD players are DIVX compatible.
When you are converting from VHS tapes to DIVX, the quality can slightly drop but it is worthy to backup your VHS to CD or DVD. I think preserving CDs is more easier than VHS’ in humid Taiwan weather.
That is correct.
My point was why to use DVD - and not VCD (CD-R). As you said yourself, the quality of VHS is lower than DVD. First, I personally don’t like to put some video footage into a “real” VCD, because VCD quality is really poor, but takes up a lot of space - and you have to provide all the directory structure etc just to be sure it works on a normal standalone player. Maybe this caused some misunderstanding - because DVD could mean either a disk with at least 4.7GB capacity or a DVD video disk. If you just want to go for small physical storage space and plan later editing on your computer, store the footage as MPEG-4 (DivX or XviD on x86, Macs have another codec I can’t remember now, but QT6 works too) in an AVI or MOV container.
If you’re doing this on a PC under Windows (most likely), there should be a program coming with your TV card, otherwise use Virtualdub to record the footage into a file. Choose (depending on your confession) DivX or XviD as codec. For a VCD-like resolution (let’s say 320*240) you should usually not need more than 250kbit/s, but that may depend on the content (dynamic/static). Install the LAME ACM codec and you can at the same time compress audio to MP3. If you really plan to edit that footage later, look for a DivX/XviD setting saying something about a “keyframe intervall”, that should be set a bit shorter than the default. However, this will also increase the filesize/decrease the quality at the same bitrate a bit. (So you might need a higher bitrate.)
To find out how much footage you can fit on a CD-R just take a bitrate calculator and feed it the video and audio bitrate you selected. I would only use a DVD-R for the capacity - but then you really don’t need to worry…
If you want to read a bit more and find the software I mentioned, have a look at Doom9.org (or .net). They have some tutorials. Or go to Virtualdub’s website.
As usual when you ask a computer question you never get an answer.
I also wanted to do the same thing - Put my analog old VHS tapes into DVD.
I spent a lot of time looking into this and have a suitable system.
I feed my tapes into the PC over Moviebox USB from the VHS video,
there are firewire alternatives but USB is fast enough.
I then crunch the films into AVI using Pinnacle Studio 8.
From AVI I then can convert into DVD.
All this works very well but on the downside there are the following drawbacks
1 hour of DVD = 1 full DVD (4.7 gigs) if you want to squeeze more
then you loose quality
The hardware is expensive
Moviebox USB costs about 8,000 NT$
You need a DvD burner
and 1 free HD dedicated to the films
and a fairly strong computer
Also to crunch 1 hour into DVD the computer need 4-8 hours
Having said all this its great fun and the results are good
Well, I thought I had given one…
[quote] I feed my tapes into the PC over Moviebox USB from the VHS video,
there are firewire alternatives but USB is fast enough.
[/quote]
Are you using USB1.1 or 2.0?
[quote]All this works very well but on the downside there are the following drawbacks
1 hour of DVD = 1 full DVD (4.7 gigs) if you want to squeeze more
then you loose quality
[/quote]
This is funny… An hour of VHS footage taking up a whole DVD-5… That’s overkill… That’s like extrapolating photos shot with a webcam to 1600*1200 - it takes up much more space, but the quality does not improve.
And it is wasted if you want to feed some analogue signal into your computer. That box is mainly so expensive due to the built-in hardware MPEG-2 encoder. But it is also not very flexible, only putting out standard formats for VCD or DVD. (Except if you capture to AVI…) If you use that box, then I don’t understand why you would want to save the file as AVI first and then convert it to MPEG-2? In that case you don’t even use the only thing that makes the box so expensive…
OK, here’s a short summary, in case my answer before was too hard to understand: Just get a TV card (less than NT$2000), download Virtualdub and DivX or XviD, also LAME ACM, capture the stream from the card to an AVI file on your harddisk using a resolution of 320*240, a video bitrate of 250kb/s (codec of course set to DivX/XviD) and an MP3 audio bitrate of 80kb/s in mono (except you really have and need stereo, then use 160kb/s in stereo). With these settings (stereo), one hour of video will occupy 180MB on your harddisk, so you can get almost four hours onto a normal 700MB CD-R…
I agree with dl7und. If the video will be edited (adding titles, transitions, some special effects etc), better to use .avi format and then encode to DVIX for storage.
Even a NT$2 CD can store 40-50 min good quality (MPEG-2) video when you burn as SVCD. No need to waste DVD media for VHS backup.