Converting VHS to DVD, the easy way
As technology advances, a lot of stuff we had grown used to gets left behind. Remember film cameras, vinyl LPs and VHS tapes? They were the rage at one time, but have now become just memories.
A lot of my readers have sent me e-mails asking how to convert VHS tapes into DVDs. But I have always shied away from this topic since it involves a lot of complexity. Then, Eureka!, one morning I just woke up with a simple idea on how to do it. And here it is, the easy way to convert VHS to DVD.
This is what do you will need:
*Pinnacle Video Transfer
*USB hard disk
*PC with a DVD writer, Windows XP or Windows Vista
*The Film Machine software
*Some patience and time
I have in the past reviewed the Pinnacle Video Transfer and if you have not bought it till now, this is another reason for you to buy it. The gadget, now available easily across India at a cool price of Rs 9,000, not only records your TV/DVD to a USB hard disk but will also record any video that you have in composite or S-Video.
So how do we get started?
*Get the Pinnacle Video Transfer connected to your VCR
*Connect an External USB hard disk to the Pinnacle
*Load the tape that you wish to transfer to DVD
*Now press the centre button on your Pinnacle Video Transfer and play the tape, the contents of the tape are now digitised and stored on the hard disk in MPEG4 format
*After the playback of the movie is finished stop recording on the Pinnacle.
*Disconnect the hard disk from the Pinnacle Video Transfer and connect it to your PC, move the file you just created to your PC
*In case you just wanted to save the file, so that your rotting VHS Tapes and VHS Player can now be history, your job is done. You can double click the file and watch it on the player of your choice.
The tricky part comes if you want to convert this file into a DVD. You should have a DVD writer in your PC and a good software like The Film Machine (TFM), which you can download from http://members.home.nl/thefilmmachine. The software is about 29 MB in size. Though it is not a fancy looking piece of software, its functionality and the fact that it’s free are great reasons to have this conversion software.
Install TFM and make sure you read the manual on the site. Fire up TFM, select the file you saved, press Next and select where the output file will be saved. Select output type MPEG2 if you are creating a DVD and MPEG1 in case you are creating a VCD.
Select the AC3 Encoder you want to use, stick with 4:3 as the aspect ratio and leave other options on default. Press Next, and make sure you select “don’t burn DVD” as I don’t’ really like this part of the software. Fire up, and let it convert the file from MPEG4 to DVD format.
Now all you need to do is, fire up the DVD burner software that came with your DVD writer. In case you don’t have one, you can download a free version from http://www.deepburner.com/ and use it to burn this file into a DVD. You can now enjoy your favourite classics on DVD and relive old celluloid memories.
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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday 2nd November 2008
3 comments:
There is an easier way. Many brands like Samsung, Sony, LG and others have special machines called video-combos. They are about the size of VHS machines, though a little wider.
They include two trays: One for a DVD disc and the other is 6 head VHS recorder-player. With just one button you can record from VHS to DVD or the other way around.
or you can record on both feeding the same source. Easy and neat.
I was very interested in your article in today's Sunday Indian Express on converting VHS tape recordings to DVDs.
Is there any similar software for converting music from my vinyls to CDs? In the US there are turntables with inbuilt software to do this e.g . Audio Technica AT-LP2D LP-to-Digital Recording System, but this means adding an extra turntable which I don't need since I already have a top-end Thorens turntable. Somewhere I read that there is software which can convert the analogue output signal from the turntable pickup to a digital signal which the computer can then process for burning a CD but I cannot remember/trace where I saw it. Can you help please?
I am a regular reader of your weekly column "Tech2.0" in The Indian Express. I found this week's article about converting VHS to DVD quite interesting. But there is just one problem- the price of this gadget. Not everyone can afford to spend nine thousand bucks.
Recently a friend of mine wanted to transfer all his video cassettes to his computer. All that he could think was to visit the neighbourhood shop and get them converted to a CD. But then an idea struck my mind. He had an internal TV tuner card on his PC which could record TV programmes. We just connected the VCR to the tv card and recorded the video tapes. Ofcourse it took a lot of time but at the same time he saved money.
I had even converted a few audio cassettes to mp3 format on my PC in the same way sometime back (just to experiment). I just connected the cassette player to the computer's 3.5mm MIC port (through the aux-out ports on the player) and recorded the cassettes through windows sound recorder. I just had to tweak the microphone volume to get the best sound quality.
I guess this is Indian 'jugaad' about which you had mentioned in one of your earlier articles!
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