VHS to DVD and video capture cards

[AeroDVD]

My father has a huge collection of home movies from when my brother and I were kids. The videos are VHS-C tapes, and to no suprise, the older they get, the less quality they sustain. So I'm diving into the world of video capture to save them! Hence my problem. I'm looking at buying a video capture card, but I'm not fluent in computer language, so the specs mean nothing to me.

I need something I can plug either an RCA cord or coaxial into from my VCR, and capture the video (uncompressed) on my hard drive. Then I would like to create DVDs with chapter menus and such and produce the DVDs so I can get them back to my father (and have copies for my brother and I as well) in a digital format that will last longer than these video tapes will.

I have an AMD Athlon 3200+, 1GB DDR400 Corsair TwinX RAM, and a MAXTOR 200GB hard drive (believe it's ATA, not SATA). I'm also using a Sony DRU-710A DVD±R Dual Layer ROM. Any help in selecting the right video capture card, and the right software to create the DVD's with would help. I would like to go as high quality as possible with my system, but still stay within' a reasonable budget.

Thank you all in advance.

[BSpielbauer]

My first question -- are you certain that you wish to use a capture card for this?

As a general rule, consider the following... if you plan to do a lot of editing of these videos, either cutting, or joining, or adding transitions, or you wish to add some sophisticated menus, then a capture card is the way to go.

If not, then you should probably go for a standalone DVD Recorder, instead.

If you are simply interested in transferring these, and you would consider perhaps one tape per blank DVD or two tapes per blank DVD, and you do not need to try to re-edit them, then you should probably look into a high quality standalone DVD recorder. You can simply use a VCR (with VHS-C adapter) or perhaps even the actual camera (if you have this) to play the source, and then dub it directly onto the DVD using the standalone DVD recorder. You can select either the "one hour speed" or the "two hour speed" on the DVD recorder to try to make certain you are not getting any less quality than the original contains. You will not improve the quality, of course, but you will not lessen any of it, either.

If you go the capture card route, that is also fine. However, realize that you do open the door for the potential of "lost frames" during the capture. This can be minimized with careful setup, and enough ram and processing speed and hard drive space. (You can also help by not trying to use the PC while it is capturing). However, lost frames are always a nagging possibility. The one advantage this method has, of course, is the ability to then open up the resulting files and do some sophisticated editing, before you actually burn the results onto a blank DVD.

If you go the capture card route, the consensus is that the two best solutions are:
1) A Haupage Capture Device, or a Canopus device. This is often an external box, and not a card inside the PC. It does the capture work within the box, which frees up the PC so you do not have near as many concerns with lost frames while you are capturing.
2) The ATI "All In Wonder" series of cards. These tend to be the most robust cards, and often have more memory built into the card itself, again freeing up system resources so you have fewer fears of lost frames. I believe the current "state of the art" ATI capture card is the "All In Wonder X800." Last year's models are the "All In Wonder 9800," which you can often find discounted, still on many shelves. If you do, these are one of the best colutions for a capture card.

Hope this helps,

-Bruce

[AeroDVD]

Thank you for your reply Bruce. Here are my concearns with your suggestions. First, I've heard many negative things with the ATI All-In-Wonder cards, everything from DOAs to wretched drivers, bad customer assistance when something goes wrong, and install issues. Plus, I only need a capture card, and not a full blown video card since I have the PNY Nvidia Geforce 6800GT, which I find to be a very well built card, and admirable performer. I would like to do small bits of editing as well, not necessarily editing the video by removing/adding things, but I want to be able to seperate it out into chapters, because one VHS-C tape might include things like a trip to Mount Rushmore in 96, a trip to flordia later that year, and an ice fishing trip to Michigan early 97. Rather than having one continuous chapter playthrough, I'd like a menu where I can select one of these particular trips from the initial menu as opposed to forwarding the disk until you reach where you want to be (similar to fast forwarding a tape in a VCR).

Would you please explain further what you mean by "lost frames". If I use a quality capture card on my system, which even though is a year old I still find to be a rather powerful machine (AMD 64 3200+, 1GB DDR400 Corsair TwinX RAM, 200 Gig ATA hard drive, and the above mentioned graphics card) do you forsee many issues with lost frames during capture?

I've also heard that going with an external capture device, such as the type you'd plug in with a USB cable, is more suceptable to problems with transfer as opposed to a capture card you insert into the PC directly.

Any futher help you can give is most appreciated.
All the best,
Ryan

[tigerman8u]

Hauppage makes a good hardware encoder capture card. you can get the pvc 150 for around $60

[moonrocks]

I'd second both BSpielbauer's and tigerman8u's choices of the Canopus box or the Hauppauge PVR-150.

"Dropped frames" refers to certain time slices of the original analog video (fractions of a second) not getting captured and converted to digital. This will more often occur if you're using a capture device that doesn't support hardware compression. Hardware compression means the compression of the original video stream to the mpeg2 video format is done on the capture card itself rather than with software on your PC. Without hardware compression your PC's CPU is struggling to compress the video at the same time it's capturing it to your hard drive.

USB capture devices are convenient, but if they don't have hardware compression then you're forcing your PC to do all the work and you're risking dropped frames and audio sync problems.

I'm a fan of the Hauppauge PVR-150 too. It's inexpensive, uses hardware compression, captures very nice quality video to mpeg2 and I've never had a dropped frame with it.

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvr150.html

Since all you want to do is simple edits, cutting scenes from one tape -adding a scene from another tape, then a basic mpeg2 editor would be all you'd need. I use VideoRedo (not free) for simple edits and it's very quick and easy. Cuttermaran is similar and it's freeware.

http://www.videoredo.com/

http://www.cuttermaran.de/

After your edits you could use TMPGEnc Author to create menus, then burn to DVD.

http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/tda.html

[AeroDVD]

Thanks everyone for your help. Once again, these forums prove very useful. I'm confident I can get this done!

[j1mmy]

I'm a fan of the Hauppauge PVR-150 too. It's inexpensive, uses hardware compression, captures very nice quality video to mpeg2 and I've never had a dropped frame with it.

Wish I could say the same, I bought one and had loads of sync problems. The thing people forget is that the audio isn't compressed by the card, and the Audio card and Capture Card clocks aren't synced. If you want rock solid capturing get an ATI Theater card which hardware compresses the audio and the video.

[moonrocks]

I know many people had audio sync problems with the PVR-150 with some of the older drivers that came with it. The newest driver (version 2.2.23257) should fix that. I haven't had a single sync problem yet with that driver installed.

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/support/support_pvr150.html

[furs4u]

This is all great info, but do any of these work with VHS to DVD transfers of Copyright videos. I just want to back up old VHS movies to DVD with my Sony Vaio with Windows MCE with a simple software program and neither Sonic MyDVD, or Ulead DVD Movie Factory, or Sony DVDGate and Click 2 DVD allow me to capture the video thru my TV/Video card RCA input.

[moonrocks]

The Hauppauge PVR-150 won't have a problem with Macrovision protected tapes.

[Visionz]

Capture/Compression Question

I am a bit confused on this subject. I have 2 sources of video I need to use, obivously Analog and Digital. I bought a Canopus AVDC 300 to convert the analog to digital and I get AVI from a DVR. Do I need to also have compression hardware for the PC?

[moonrocks]

Don't worry about the "compression hardware" for the PC. For your analog video sources use your Canopus ADVC 300 and capture software like WinDV. The Canopus does all the compression in the box and transfers a DV-AVI file to your hard drive. You can encode this file to mpeg2 with software like TMPGEnc Plus and then author and burn to DVD if that's your goal.

http://windv.mourek.cz/

http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/tp.html

If your DVR writes AVI files then open those AVI files with TMPGEnc Plus, or any other software encoder you like, and convert to mpeg2 as well.

[Visionz]

Thanks Moonrocks....you helped me out very nicely! Saved me some bucks also...

[lemonyx]

We have the WinTv 250 and it works just great. Got VideoReDo to edit and burn with Movie Factory, more software but you can use the "free" stuff. The wife wanted me to record some TV shows and we have a big library of VHS to convert over to DVD. Just hook up the VCR to the card, play and record. You'll have to use the software that came with the WinTv and upgrade it thru their site.

I thought that there would be a problem of signal loss since the PC and the satalite box are in different rooms and had to use a 25' RCA and "S" video cable (ebay) but no problems.

I would get the WinTv card either the 150 or 250.