warning: flagrant abuse of bbs ahead!

I’ve been telling a co-worker about all the cool stuff I learn about/ find here, and last night he called me wanting me to pose a question on his behalf. I suppose that’s what comes with being one of the best resources on the net!

Anyway, he wants to move all his VHS tapes to hard drives and is wondering what the best way is to do it. He says he’s done some investigation, but would like to know what tech savvy people have to say about the process. If anyone has any experience with this or advice that I could give him, please let me know.

I use my ReplayTV to do this. On clearance starting at $350 (including subscription) here: http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/cat_listRTV.asp?cat=51

Other similar record uses: I also use it to capture rented DVDs that need to be returned before I got to watch them.

Other networked benefits: I move a few hours of recorded TV to my laptop for plane trips.

He could give them to a professional company, but by that time (depending on how many he wants to convert) he'd spend more money than he would buying high-end video capture equipment and doing it himself.
*edit* I had some big tapes of some public access TV shows that my friends and I made in high school. There were about 8 of them, and just transfering them to VHS would have cost me hundreds from these damn companies. I had the father of an old grammar school friend (who owns a video production company), transfer them for free The point is that I think it would cost about the same to try to get them into digital format.*edit*

Really any capture card (or video card with capture capabilities) will be able to do it, especially since VHS won't result in the highest quality video anyway. This hardware will more than likely come with software which will let you select the format the finished file will be in.

Difficulties arise when/if you want to save this video to some other medium, such as VCD or DVD. In that case you need the appropriate hardware but also software to convert it to the corect format, which will likely degrade the quality a bit more.

It really depends on what he wants to do. If he wants to simply store and view it on his PC alone, then just capture it and store it as some sort of compressed format. This is an issue of the type of card you get. Some will do hardware encoding to MPEG2 format. The downside is that if you want to edit that video, you'll need some expensive software.

I would think the main issue with doing it yourself is that you need a pretty powerfull machine to do it with, particularly if you do it often or if you do any post-capture converting of the video, and especially if you want to do any editing.

I'm sure others will have better suggestions, though, including which bits of hardware they recommend. I have an ATI Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder card which captures pretty nicely.

I also use it to capture rented DVDs that need to be returned before I got to watch them.

Don't worry man I don't think the RIAA reads the forum...

Or the MPAA

move all his VHS tapes to hard drives and is wondering what the best way is to do it.

Depending on how much video he has that could take up A LOT of space... I would get a digital video camera (I think I've got the Sony PC-5) that has a fire wire connection, play from his existing video camera or VCR into the digital video recorder recording it on digital tape (of course). That way he has a digital copy archived and can do the video editing at his leisure a couple of tapes at a time. I do the kids soccer games and seasonal school skits, edit and distribute video cd's to some of the other parents and occasionally do a DVD+R for others to play in the DVD player. What's nice about the CD vs the DVD although compressed more, is that you can burn each copy in about 30seconds and they're a lot cheaper while a DVD takes forever and costs much more money.

Or, the replaytv is a good method but the video is compressed so I don't think it's as good as having a full uncompressed digital archive.

I guess it really depends on what he's wanting to do with the video, archive, view or distribute?

Really any capture card (or video card with capture capabilities) will be able to do it, especially since VHS won't result in the highest quality video anyway. This hardware will more than likely come with software which will let you select the format the finished file will be in.

I really believe this is all he wants, so does anybody have any recommendations for video capture cards?

all in wonders!!

I use the Hauppauge PVR 250 capture card with real time mpeg encoding. Gives me great results. I can select what I want - VCD, SVCD, DVD quality/standard. Full control over AV bitrates etc.

Any All-in-wonder Radeon card should treat you right.

Yes, the ATI cards are good - very good value if you happen to need a graphics card too!

I just happen to like the PVR-250 because I know it works. I'd be scared to move over to an ATI in case the things I like to do don't work any more.

Well he popped into the office mid-thread and was very grateful for everyone's suggestions/ observations. Unfortunately he left for vacation before the video card discussion got underway, but I had already told him to look at the ATI cards, so looks like I did OK on my own! Thanks everyone for the help.