Techno-joy starts early in life and is ever with you, hence over the years it is possible to accumulate a horde of technology that gradually becomes obsolete.

Video tapes are a case in point. Whereas films are remastered for DVD, it’s up to you to preserve and spruce up personal memories captured with analog camcorders.

Analog-to-digital converters have been around for long enough, enabling you to port a video feed from any analog device into capture software. Terratec, while not new to the fray, has applied a cool design eye to the matter and devised the Grabster AV400 MKII, a USB device offering hardware Mpeg encoding so as to lighten the load on the system’s processor during capture.

It is bundled with the expected S-video, composite and Scart connectors, although there is no RF input. Terratec also includes the budget capture and editing suite Ulead Moviefactory 5.

Of course, any video source with the appropriate outs can be put through the Grabster, so recording satellite and cable TV is an option, although there is the inevitable degradation of image quality which is characteristic of analog technology. Nevertheless, the system promises portability and good conversion performance thanks to the well-designed hardware, even if it does have a habit of falling off its unsecured stand.

Set up is easy enough: plug in the Grabster, load the drivers from disc, install Ulead’s software and plug in the analog source. S-video and composite output appears acceptably cleanly in the interface, which invites you to render video to disc in a wide variety of file formats or to burn straight to recordable DVD.

Moviefactory 5 is decidedly entry-level, but there is a support pack for Ulead Video Studio 10 downloadable from the publisher’s website should you need more sophisticated editing tools. You can, of course, import the recorded material into any decent video editor.

For quick and easy creation of VCDs, SVCDs and DVDs from analog video, Terratec’s Grabster AV400 MKII fits the bill admirably. The package may lack sophistication, especially the software, but it does the job and is well priced.

Also consider:
Avermedia AverTV Box9
A simple way to convert your monitor into a TV

Terratec Grabster AV150
A cheap and cheerful video capture device that relies on software encoding

Avermedia AverTV DVB-T PCI
A good quality tuner card for home theatre PCs

All video and TV cards