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Hey guys. I'm trying to covert my old VHS movies to DVD or pc. I basically don't want to buy all of these movies over again simply because my VHS players never last long. A regular DVD combo converter won't allow and gives me a message concerning copyright. Any ideas that involve minimal to no quality loss?
My advice is to just go buy the DVD. You can do it but you need specific devices like a TBC($500), there's cheaper devices that will notch out the macrovision and some of the signal along with it and last but not least some capture cards will work and they start around $150.
Then you need a standalone VCR, hours and hours of time.... get my drift?
My advice is to just go buy the DVD. You can do it but you need specific devices like a TBC($500), there's cheaper devices that will notch out the macrovision and some of the signal along with it and last but not least some capture cards will work and they start around $150.
Then you need a standalone VCR, hours and hours of time.... get my drift?...
...to end up with a possibly perfect copy of a crappy (and degrading) video format with 25 year old audio technology.
Torrent the XviD and when the feds knock on the door you show them the VHS and tell them to eat sheisse.
LOL..... just make it's not the HD version.
Having said that this is civil claim and isn't prosecuted as criminal act. The copyright owners would have to file lawsuit. I'm not aware of anyone that has ever been sued just for downloading, the people that have been sued were all uploading.
Criminal prosecutions are few and far between where massive copyright infringement is involved.
Hey guys. I'm trying to covert my old VHS movies to DVD or pc. I basically don't want to buy all of these movies over again simply because my VHS players never last long. A regular DVD combo converter won't allow and gives me a message concerning copyright. Any ideas that involve minimal to no quality loss?
The quality of VHS is so dismally poor as compared to even a DVD version of the movie and if available in BlueRay will totally blow it away. I would buy DVD or BD versions, you will enjoy your favorites even more. Even at it's best, VHS sucked.
The only reason I would consider converting VHS to DVD would be for videos of the family.
Exactly what I want to do so how do you go about putting family VHS onto DVD without the expensive equipment listed above? Thank you.
Commercial VHS videos have copy protection commonly called Macrovision which is actually the company that patented it. This is just an error that is inserted into the tape, it doesn't bother direct play to TV but when recording equipment detects this error it will make the copy you produce unwatchable hence the need for some additional equipment. Having said that since so many home movies have a lot of errors these sometimes are incorrectly identified as copy protection. Some devices are more prone than others, you're mileage will vary.
While the VHS to DVD combo is the cheapest and easiest solution it's not what I recommend for a variety of reasons. Firstly if you run into the problem I described above where the recorder is misidentifying common errors as copy protection there is absolutely nothing you can do from that point forward with that equipment since it's one unit. Anyway to get around this requires the device be placed between the VHS deck and the recorder and all those connections are internal on the combo unit.
Secondly and probably more important is VHS home footage is generally noisy and very shaky. Due to the technology behind MPEG encoding which is the format DVD uses this is like the worse case scenario for MPEG. My preferred method is to capture with a DV device these are larger files of about 14GB's but only lightly compressed and much more suitable for further processing.
You may actually already have the capability to do this, if you have an old DV camcorder some of them have a feature called "passthrough". This will allow you to hook up a VHS deck to the DV camcorder and it will convert the video to DV format which can then be stored on tape or passed onto your computer as a file. If you have a DV camcorder list the model and I'll look it up to see if it has this feature. If you don't have a camcorder with this feature there are standalone devices like the Canopus 110 or ADS Pyro. There are cheaper DV devices but I have no experience with them.
Once you have your DV file on the computer you would keep that as an archive, you can play around with some of the noise filters using Virtualdub etc. Use that to burn a DVD. Always keep the original DV file you captured for the next and greatest tech/format. Treat it like a negative for film.
Exactly what I want to do so how do you go about putting family VHS onto DVD without the expensive equipment listed above? Thank you.
First question is how many VHS tapes are we talking about. There are many places that will do this for you, for a fee. If only a few, it may be less expensive to pay someone to do it than invest in equipment you likely won't need after converting.
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