VHS-C to DVD
 

Has anyone converted old VHS-C to DVD? How did you do it?

1st thing to remember is takes at least as long as the length of the tape/movie. VHS recording needs to be done real time. So a 2 hour movie is minimum 2 hours plus your setup finish time.

You can get a VHS player with built in DVD burner. That's the easiest for unattended conversion. Prices have gone back up on them I assume due to low demand. Figure $75 and up from there. Amazon.com: Magnavox DVD Recorder/VCR Combo, HDMI 1080p Up-Conversion, No Tuner (Manufacturer Refurbished): Electronics: Reviews, Prices & more

If you have a tower PC with a TV Tuner/Capture card you can record to your hard drive then burn from that. Time consuming.

Alternately you can pick up something like a Dazzle or Matrox box and do the same as before, again it's time consuming.

If you have an older non HD Mini-Dv camcorder they usually have video in and Firewire out so you can use that in between a VHS deck and computer instead of a capture card/Dazzle. Your PC will need to have firewire in but if it does not firewire cards are cheap.

If you are only looking at doing a couple/few tapes then might be best to simply send out to a service.

If you have a bunch then option 1, the VHS DVD burner combo is the way to go.

I bought a DVD player/burner for $15 from Goodwill. Works great.

Hah!

Totally forgot the the last option.

I have a DVD recorder that has A/V in.

I bought it specifically to dump old VHS and HI 8 to media.

Was like $50.

Minor hassle as you need to cue everything up but works great.

I saw one of those converters in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Kind of pricey.

If you buy a used DVD recorder, make sure you get an instruction manual with it. The used/refurbished Toshiba I bought online a while back has worked flawlessly, but will only take DVD-R discs.

I agree. Mine required a few non-intuitive steps to make it all work. The DVD has to be "finalized" and on my recorder that command was several layers deep in the menus... not that I would have even known to do it without the instructions.

I have a burner in the laptop. Is there a way to go from the VHS player to my laptop? Or would this not work?

A few years ago I bought an adaptor from Dazzle to transfer some old home videos. It was about $40 at Best Buy, and is basically a standard cable wire female to a USB male. (might have come with RCA inputs as well, can't remember). Plug it in, fire up anything like Windows Movie Maker, and it's just like transferring from your handycam. Piece of cake. However, IMO, it's only worth it for things like family videos. I'd never transfer a movie or something like that, unless it's a very hard-to-find movie. Much faster to download it, which is legal if you've already got a purchased copy of the movie. (eg. you bought Ghostbusters on VHS back in 1988, so downloading it to make a DVD copy would be legal).

They make a USB VHS machine (I have one) where you can record MP4 files on your PC. Again as SM said, you can then burn a DVD.

The company I bought mine from included the manuals, thankfully. They were well-done reproductions, not original... but complete.

Do all DVD recorders require finalizing? I figure they do. The manual explained that it doesn't need to be finalized unless you plan to play it on other players. It takes about 3 minutes to finalize a disc that has about 6 hours worth of stuff on it.

A coupla times I forgot to finalize one and put it in the player in the bedroom and it wouldn't recognize it at all. Now I make sure I finalize it and write an "F" on it afterwards.

Short answer is yes.

Long answer depends on a lot of other factors.

You are converting an analog signal to digital. Takes some processing power which nearly all modern CPU's are capable of these days.

Free space on a fast disc. Most laptops run at 5400 rpm. Minimum is a 7200 rpm drive.

The throughput becomes the issue.

Can the machine convert, compress and write fast enough to avoid dropped frames.

Most of the external USB devices work because they have dedicated compression engines taking some of the load of the PC and some have enough RAM for frame buffer to ward off dropped frames which make the hard drive less of an issue.

VHS SD quality you'd likely do OK. 50/50.

If it is a one time deal and you don't want to buy hardware many of the "one hour photo" places will burn a DVD from VHS for a price.

Wife bought a cheap DVD/VHS player/recorder but the DVD's won't play on everything.

Use DVD-R's. Older standard than DVD+R.

Make sure the session is closed/finalize the disc.

Will check on that, thanks.

Think she bought it second hand and doesn't have the manual.

To be honest I have been avoiding the thing... it is some off brand and looks like a headache waiting to happen.