I think that in everyone's homes there are bookstores full of videotapes, the VHS so easy to use to record the films they gave on television or the episodes of TV series or football games. Even more important was to watch the holiday films on TV, recorded with the camera, on the videotape.
Today video recorders are almost no longer sold, to record from TV you can use multimedia hard disks or CD / DVD recorders that are much more practical and less cumbersome while video cameras record on memory cards.
But all those videotapes that end up "> recording an LP 45 rpm vinyl record on the computer by converting the music to mp3, let's now save the contents of the videotapes on the computer and be able to save the films, videos and films, in digital format, inside an external hard drive or on a DVD .
READ ALSO: How to watch videotapes on Smart TV
UPDATE: Without using a computer, it is now possible to convert VHS video tapes to DVD or files to be saved on the computer using electronic devices such as the VHS to DVD Converter, which costs 20 Euros and makes everything very simple.
To use it, you just need to connect the converter to a USB port on your computer and connect the VCR or video camera via RCA cable.
Using the management program that accompanies this product, the videotape is transferred to the PC as a video file.
To make the conversion from VHS to PC to DVD, there are also very expensive programs.
In this guide we see how to do it without spending a penny, with a free video capture program that has proven to work well.
It is a small free program called Golden VHS to DVD converter .
To switch movies from the VCR to the computer, however, you need to buy a special cable that allows the capture of the video source and that connects the VCR to the computer. Finding this cable in electronics stores may not be easy however it is called "USB Video Grabber" cable which can be found on Amazon for 20 25 Euros.
In addition to this, you also need a Scart adapter and audio and video cables.
Once the connection is made, you can start using the software to capture the video from the VCR .
When installing Golden VHS, you are asked to select which components to use: to switch the video from the videotape to the computer, you only need Debut Video Capture, a program already encountered in this blog regarding how to record video taken by a webcam.
Basically Debut allows you to record everything you see on the desktop.
After installation, you can press on New Recording to start recording.
In the next screen, after pressing Next, you must select the conversion device from the drop-down menu.
If the connection has been made correctly, the video recorder should appear as a peripheral to be chosen.
On the right side of this same window you choose how the audio should be captured: you can also leave the default standard configuration or set the sound levels by trying the various combinations of the Windows mixer until you reach an acceptable level.
Now go to "next" and start playing the video recorder.
If you see the preview of the screen under the selection of the video device we are ready otherwise there may be some driver or connection problem.
On the next screen there are the conversion options :
- Restart : if you want to start recording immediately.
- Record : to start recording.
- Stop : to stop the recording.
- The volume .
- Mute : to record without sound
- Recording time .
- Size of the recording on the disc.
- Estimated time before completion.
- Frames per second : should be around 24-25 for PAL and 29-30 for NTSC.
- Buffer overflow warnings indicates the number of cases in which Golden Video stops waiting to write data to the disk.
This usually means a slow or very fragmented hard drive, or that the pc does not meet the minimum requirements for this application.
If necessary, try to close all programs except Golden video.
- Turn off the computer when finished
- Play audio when finished
- Open the file save folder .
The saved file has the MPEG4 format which you can then convert to DVD or whatever you want with the easy video burning or conversion programs .
If you know an easier way to convert VHS tapes to DVD, let them know and report if you find a cheap video capture cable.
