Transferring VHS to DVD?

[dseymo1]

Both DVD and Blu-Ray will inevitably become obsolete themselves, probably sooner rather than later. I'd suggest archiving material to a digital file, itself backed-up per usual good practice. Format is debatable - what do people think?
Edit: Most popular entertainment material is likely to be widely available online for the forseeable future; personally, I wouldn't bother making my own copies.

[mark pirate]

Both DVD and Blu-Ray will inevitably become obsolete themselves, probably sooner rather than later.

I agree, I have archived a lot of VHS & Beta tapes to HDD, this seems to be the most reliable method.

As used Sky boxes are available for next to nothing, I have bought several to harvest the 500GB HDD's, these make excellent storage/backup media to save archived material.
I connect them to my PC via a USB device, I always have two identical drives should one fail....

Mark

[nutteronthebus]

I had to do this for a funeral (old VHS home movie ) e-bay now sell a VHS to DVD converter for under £10 they work quite well


Dave

[Grubhead]

There are loads of software that can take old VHS and DVD recordings into them and edit and clean them up. You can even get some special effects with them. One of the best to use is by Magix, but Sony Vegas is popular too.
You do need a decent memory with your computer or when copying the tapes it will drop frames. Leaving a choppy playback.

As yet I have not come across any software that is affordable that can remove lines, tape damage on the video. Though I have seen the film and movie industry tech people clean frames up one at a time or use cloning techniques. So if it's not available now it must come in the future.

[HamishBoxer]

No DVD is reliable, best bet store on at least 2 hard drives or if you wish the Cloud".

[kan_turk]

Totally agree - make at least two independent backups, preferably on different media and hang on to original tapes - suitably stored of course

J

[G6Tanuki]

Replicate your copies - across different physical media (so have a BluRay, a DVD and a HDD copy)

Also remember the necessity for physical storage-diversity: don't store the different media together! Otherwise you risk both copies being wiped-out if your basement floods/house catches fire/mice build their nests in your storage. [I know someone who put a plastic storage-bin of VHS tapes in the attic: over the winter snow blew under the eaves and it was some months before he discovered his tapes unhappily sitting in half an inch of mould-encrusted water]

Give one copy to a friend, take it to your holiday-cottage/office or something.

Personally, I like 'cloud' backup with several different providers: that way if one goes bust there's still a fallback option.

[Grubhead]

The biggest problem for me is getting the recorded video's to play back right on a TV screen. Not the picture quality, but either the aspect ratio, or fitting on to the screen. You can get rid of the bad bits at the top and bottom of the VHS image. But once you have done that, played back on a TV it cuts bits of the picture off. And on a widescreen picture how do you get it to switch like on the broadcast TV?

[yonderdode]

Hello, It's a while since I contributed my wisdom here... a supply shortage issue!

Having recently been asked to repair a VHS/DVD machine, I was stunned to see how much some of these conversion machines are worth on ebay. The Panasonic DMR-EZ49v DVD Recorder for instance. One went for over £200 last week.

The advantage of buying something like this is that it has all the plug formats like SVHS, Scart, and composite video input available on front and rear panels. For monitoring output from the disk, there's even HDMI.
The tape player is also PAL/NTSC (never twice the same colour).

Alas, in my case, it needs a new video head/drum assembly and even from Donberg this is an expensive proposition at about 70 euros delivered for an equivalent VEG1642 to replace the existing VEG1699 which has a clearly visible hole popped in one of the 4 ferrites.

While it may not qualify as vintage equipment, it does in a way serve the media from vintage era recordings, so yes, an update on the topic may help.

[dave walsh]

The price of these conversion jobs is directly proportion to availablilty yonder, you are behind the curve on this I've hoarded Pansonic DVD recorders and some VHS machines. Even then the DVD Recorders have to be encouraged like steam engines! Things haven't really changed all that much for a decade. You take a chance on anything when archiving really, unless you have all the time in the world and a knowledge of RAID technology [I don't]. The cheapo recovered HD's method sounds good but I would just get lost in content. CD Recordable stand alone machines are even rarer these days, so I use DVDA [audio only DVD] mainly. It's got longer recording times for a start and most people still have a DVD machine. I'm hoping that DVD players are so cheap and available now they will outlast me. I'm transferring 8 cassette tapes of Cider With Rosie [50p Library sale] to DVDA currently [read by Laurie Lee himself]. It works out at nearly 8 hours, the maximum on a DVD-very convenient listening. Unlike Video, there is no discernible loss of audio quality at that setting. I suspect the cheapest way to to get a DVD dubbing set up these days is to plug a VHS machine into the auxillary input on one of those record to DVD Hi Fi units they sell in R Times and elsewhere but I've not tried it yet.

Dave

[Vectamart]

I have well over 2000 video cassettes, mostly VHS but also some V2000. I did begin to xfer the recordings onto DVD but gave up because although DVDs have the advantage of taking up less space, I am far from convinced as to their reliability. Some of my cassettes were recorded as far back as 1980 and they still play back perfectly well. It just means that I shall have to always make sure that I retain a good VHS video recorder and a serviceable V2000 machine ad infinitum.

[IanNVJ35]

Same as myself (but Beta instead of V2000). My earliest VHS tape from 1980 plays perfectly. I wasted hours burning DVD's but some of those are now 'Disc Error' due to cheap production - and they were Sony branded too.

So now I just keep my tapes in a safe dry place and my machines in tip top order. Perhaps if some of the recordings were 'priceless' I would back up for sure, but they are just interesting documentaries and never repeated films etc. so no real concern.

[simpsons]

I have used both a Panasonic VHS to DVD dubbing combo recorder DMR ES30V, a Philips version DVDR 630 and a Toshiba HDD combined DVD recorder RD-XS24SB. The Philips VHS DVD combo gave poor results because the Sanyo designed VHS player did not incorporate the correct video playback equalization. When used to playback tapes it gave too much edge enhancement especially noticed on faces. The Panasonic and Toshiba were excellent in every respect.

DVD recording quality and length or recording is dependant on the bit rate recorded. The greater the bit rate, more information which means better quality but less recording time. However, VHS video is limited to <3MHz. which in practise is LP or EP recording quality ie between 2.5Mbits/240 mins or 1.7 Mbits/ 360 mins recording on a 4.7 /GB disk. For off air recording then XP or 10Mbits gives 60 min recording with a flat 4MHz video frequency response, reducing to -3dB when SP or 5Mbits is selected.

I have DVD's, games, CD's and CDV discs which are very old and as with video tapes not subject to abuse, they are as good as new. Uploading to the cloud may be a good insurance policy as retrieving the images should be possible for the very long term if deemed important.

To be frank, we don't play the children's videos very often so the recordings get stuffed into the back of a cupboard until Grandparents visit and we can't think of anything to talk about whilst, my eyes roll when the holiday videos are shown by freinds.

Chris

[irob2345]

Combo units do a good job but if you happen to have a PC, a video capture device and no software, VLC (yes the free video "Player") can be used to stream from the device, in the process transcode to H264 at any quality you like and write to disk.

It also pays to use S-Video if your capture device supports it. S-Video (or Y-C) avoids cross-colour artifacts such as colour fringing around fine detail.

Because it's so flexible - it can scale as well as transcode - VLC is a bit fiddly to set up. You need to know what you are doing with all the options. But it's worth the effort, H264 takes far less disk space than MPEG2 for the same quality.

VLC can also be used to transcode existing video files and to copy ("rip") DVDs and even music CDs to disk directly, with or without transcoding. It also bypasses region coding....

[Grubhead]

There are several FREE video editing software available. You just have to check that you are not getting a trial version.

[peter_scott]

The cheapest solution might be under £5 for 625 line capture: https://tinyurl.com/yd528etk

I have one of these for transferring VHS to my hard drive. It works well on 625 and is selectable to 525 as well although I've never tried that. I have no connection to the above supplier and simply quoted it as an example of the thing available from numerous sources.

Peter

[sandpit252423]

I used a Panasonic DVD recorder and finalised the disc. I also labeled each copy, so that when I put the DVD in I you know what each part is.

[toshiba tony]

I have read these posts with interest, if your video and tape are in good condition I find there is no discernable loss when simple scart is used. My Sharp triple speed player hooked through to an LG Hard Disk\DVD recorder gives satisfactory results, Macro kicks in with bought tapes of course, but for home tapes not an issue. The video recorder has been regularly serviced, I'm sure this has helped.

[dave walsh]

I have Panasonic Combi Units or external VHS machines + recorder [N+South] Tony on the straight or scart lead system [all the transfer to Hard Drive stuff is a bit beyond me]. My tapes go back to 82! It may be psychological but I find even the roughest recordings can appear "enhanced" when transferred. My experience is that an occasional VHS tape may be protected but not many! The worst one was a Jane Fonda exercise tape [of all things] that someone wanted on DVD recently. I think Jane was really protecting her money in 1990. None of my usual "workarounds" removed the "cannot copy" message

Dave

[emeritus]

I did once manage to record some TV broadcasts off air when we were in France by setting up my camcorder on a tripod squarely in front of the tv in a darkened room and zooming to fill the screen. Initially a tear line was visible but by trial and error turning the camcorder on and off a few times, synchronism was obtained with no tearing line visible. The camera was a JVC VHS-C , GR M7 that I could manually set the shutter speed to 1/50 sec.