Nah, only video recorder I have is an old early 1990's version and its not been used in over 10 years.

Its doing nothing but raining here in Phoenix today so staying inside and getting some work done. Dropping by Fry's later today and see what they have. Going to look at the FireWire card and the Diamond video capture units. See what happens and will get back to you.

Thx,

Joe

Years ago I used an ATI tuner card for the PC which included composite and s-video inputs, so you could simply feed a signal from a VCR, DirecTV box, old analog camcorder, or whatever into it, and out came a digitized copy. As I recall the included software was pretty crappy though.

You can also look for a USB TV Tuner. They usually have a coax/composite/s-video input adaptor which is all you need for a VCR.

Upside is you have an OTA TV source for your laptop when traveling.

The one thing to remember about devices. Typically the cheaper they are the less compression hardware is built in which means more work for your CPU.

But for VHS source I would not sweat that too much.

Thanks for the tip, will take a look while I am there.

My CPU usually loafs at less than 30% (and thats right now while I am working on stuff) most of the time.

I would usually do this while I am not working on the computer or start it overnight and let it run, so CPU load should not be a problem.