A/V Help

[Morfiend]

Its that time again, another help thread. This one should be easy though. What I am looking for is an easy way to get the content of a VHS tape in to my computer. I have a bunch of old VHS and no VHS player. My two thoughts where ether to by a video card with RCA-in and connect a VHS player, which I would have to buy, or get a combo player that could burn a VHS to DVD then input the DVD to my computer. I dont really like ether of those options, the first is better I guess.

Any advice would be much welcomed.

[Viin]

I'd probably do the first way - you can buy a pretty cheap TV capture card that accepts composite video, which is what most VCRs do (I think).

I think there are services that will take all your VHS and put them on DVD for you, but I bet they aren't cheap. :)

[Trippy]

There are any number of devices that will do what you want. The options on such a device are:

1) Video card or not
2) TV tuner or not
3) Internal card or external USB box
4) Hardware MPEG-2 encoder or not

E.g. you can get among others:

Video card with a TV tuner plus composite/S-Video input, no hardware MPEG-2 encoder (e.g. ATI All-in-Wonder card)

Video card with composite/S-Video input, no hardware MPEG-2 encoder and no TV tuner (A "VIVO" card, Video In Video Out)

Dedicated internal card (usually PCI though there are some PCI-e x1 now) with TV tuner plus composite/S-Video input, hardware MPEG-2 encoder (Hauppauge WinTV, ATI TV Wonder)

External USB box with TV tuner plus composite/S-Video input, hardware MPEG-2 encoder (Hauppauge WinTV USB)

External USB box with composite/S-Video input, no hardware MPEG-2 encoder (Plextor ConvertX PX-AV200U and a ton of others)

The TV tuner is nice if you want to turn your machine into a PVR device.

If you have a lot of VHS tapes to convert it would be best to get something that has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder unless you have a dual-core CPU and don't mind tying one of the cores up while things are converting.

If possible it's better to get a capture device that has it's own audio inputs rather than capturing through a sound card/motherboard sound inputs to minimze the chances of audio sync problems.

Edit: I forgot to say that video card and hardware mpeg-2 encoder are mutually exclusive options. I.e. if you get a video card with video capture capabilities it'll always use your CPU to do the encoding.

[SnakeCharmer]

Wouldn't the easiest thing be just to buy one of those VHS to DVD burners such as this one?

Step 1:  Burn to DVD
Step 2:  Profit?

[Murgos]

Moved to college FB thread.

[Morfiend]

So I did some more research, seems the cheapest way to go is to get a Video Capture Card. Now I just need to find a cheap one that works for Mac.