VHS to DVD on my computer...... Is it possible?

I have many home videos of my children as babies I would like to put on dvd's because I am afraid vhs won't last forever. Is there a away to hook vcr to pc to burn to dvd? HELP!!

 

It is possible if you have the right equipment. If your computer is not equipped for it there are external devices that will let you do it.

 

You need video capture card

 

You need to purchase a video capture card for your PC. Typically these are PCI cards with various types of video inputs. (If you don't have any available PCI slots in your machine, there are also USB2.0 devices that can get the same task accomplished.) The capture card will often come bundled with the video capture software needed to "save" your vhs video on your hard drive. If you go to your local computer retailer (like CompUSA) you will find a variety of devces and capture packages are available.

You will then need a DVD authoring program that can take this raw video and convert it into a format that your DVD player can play. I use NERO 6.0 ULTRA to burn DVD's and it works nicely.

 

I'd advise you check out Doom9.org.
It's a fairly elistist site, but there's some fairly simple guides you can attempt to follow.
You could also try a DVD-Recorder, which would allow you to record from VHS to DVD-R (the ones you can record from TV with), but these cost money...

Good luck...

 

I was wanting to do the same thing, so I bought leadtek winfast tv expert pci card. It has the connections for a vcr and dvd player. I have done a couple of tapes and the quality is'nt too bad. I hav'nt mastered it yet as there are quite a few choices for how you want to compress it, and have yet to try them all. It came with excellent software for burning. It is a slow process though, a 1hr movie took 3hrs to compress and burn. There are alot of capture cards out there, I chose this one because of the price $90 cdn and found some good rewiews on it. Watching tv and listening to fm radio on your computer is kinda cool too. I would have bought a allinwonder ati card but I just recently bought a new vid card so for me this was the way to go...good luck an welcome to MG