Your old VHS tapes are sitting in boxes in your entertainment center or a closet, gathering dust because you haven’t used your VCR player in years. Yesterday’s VHS recordings not only less technologically advanced, they are also degrade physically rather quickly. But you don’t want to lose the important things recorded on those VHS tapes — television shows and movies that you love, and more importantly, video recordings of milestone events with your friends and family. You can spend hundreds of dollars on VHS digitizing services offered by specialty companies. On the other hand, there are a number of different products you can use to transfer the videos yourself.
There are a number of different options you can use to help move your videos to the newest technology available. Software that supports vhs digitizing usually costs less than $100; it allows you to quickly and painlessly transfer the video. Step-by-step instructions walk you through the process. Software is available that permits you to convert your VHS video to either a Mac or a PC so that you can play it in QuickTime or Windows MediaPlayer formats.
A vhs capture device is one of the essential components you’ll need to successfully transfer your video from the analog VHS signal into the format used in DVDs. You’ll have several you can choose from. A high-quality video capture card must be installed in the computer itself and is rather expensive, but offers top-of-the-line video editing and quality. A less-expensive external video capture device connects your computer to the VHS player with dedicated data cords. A new technology coming on the market is graphics cards that have the ability to capture videos. These cards are recommended as an add-on for new computers.
Video encoding is an important factor you’ll need to think about if you plan to convert your VHS tapes to DVDs by using a special conversion camcorder. There are several different types of encoding used in video files, but the MPEG-2 format is accepted by virtually every converter or editing program. Converting a video by this method can be time-consuming and take a lot of memory. You could also convert the video by connecting the VCR or camcorder to a stand-along DVD recorder. No matter which method you decide to use, you’ll be able to save those important videos for years to come.