Convert VHS to DVD

Consumer digital video has been with us, in one form or another, for more than a decade. If you still own a VHS VCR, it’s more likely to be gathering dust in the attic than sitting on the shelf underneath your TV.

Analogue video hardware is no longer just stuff you don’t use any more, it’s becoming history and will soon be as relevant to home movie making as celluloid film.

More and more people are waking up to the fact that, if they ever want to see their old VHS analogue recordings again, they are going to need to drag them into the 21st century. In other words, transfer them from magnetic tape to DVD or even Blu-ray discs.

If you’ve been putting off converting your old VHS tapes, now’s the time to do it. Capture devices that connect your VCR or camcorder to your PC are cheaper than ever and, for those whose VCR has long gone, machines such as the new Ion VCR 2 PC from Firebox.com provide everything you need in one box with one cable. Alternatively, you can take the easy route and pay someone else to do it for you.

Whichever route you take, our VHS conversion guide will show you how to overcome the technical pitfalls and get the best quality results so you can continue to enjoy your old movies for years to come.

CAPTURE EQUIPMENT & TECHNIQUES
The first step in converting your old analogue video to digital media involves capturing the footage. Three things are required for this ­ a player, a digitiser to convert the analogue signal from the player to digital video that you can work with on your PC and some software to handle the capture process, (the same software can usually also be used to edit the captured footage and burn it to disc).

PLAYBACK HARDWARE
The player could be anything from the original camcorder you shot the footage with, to a domestic VCR. Digitiser options are also many and varied, but the end result is invariably the same ­ digital video encoded in a standard format such as MPEG2 (the format used for DVD video).

We’ll take a look at digitising hardware and video codecs a little later, but first let’s take a look at the hardware you can use to play back your tape for capture.

Camcorders
Most consumer analogue compact camcorders popular in the 1980s captured video in one of two analogue formats recorded onto 8mm tape cassettes ­ Video8 and VHS-C. There were also two higher quality, or hi-band, variants called Hi8 and S-VHS-C.

If you own one of these higher quality camcorders, to get the best-quality captures you will need to connect it to your capture device using an S-video cable. This has a small, round mini-DIN connector at either end with four pins. You will find an S-video out port on the camcorder and you will also need a capture device with an S-video input port.

The S-video cable doesn’t provide an audio link, so in addition you will need to connect the audio output on the camcorder to the input on your capture device ­ the capture device’s instructions will tell you how to do this.

To connect Video8 and VHS-C camcorders you’ll need to use a composite-video connector. One of these should have been supplied with your camcorder. They sometimes have a small jack plug at one end which plugs into a port ­ usually labelled AV ­ on the camcorder and three coloured RCA phono plugs on the other end. The yellow one is the composite video, the red and white ones are the right and left stereo audio channels.