Converting VHS to other formats?

[Mermaidman]

I hooked up my VCR to a Leadtek Winfast TV tuner card and used the included software at the default settings. Converted VHS to 'MPEG-2 Highest Quality." I then converted the MPEG2 file to DVix and burned it onto a DVD. (As far as I can tell, the MPEG2 and DVix versions seem to be of the same quality.)

Was that a good way to do the conversion? What is a better method? (I'm a n00b )

 

[btcomm1]

Sounds fine to me, perhaps there is a way to go directly to divx but what you did worked so I would stick with it for now.

 

[Mermaidman]

Thanks. The Winfast bundled software did not have the DiVX codec. ANy suggestions for software to do what I'm doing?

It also just occurred to me that I could have bought or borrowed a combo DVD-VHS player and just burned onto a DVD-R directly.

 

[Severian]

It depends on what you want the final format to be. I capture my VHS stuff via a Pinnacle card and analog module as DV AVI, which is around 13gb/hr of footage. I then compress to MPEG2 with TMPGenc, and author it to DVD with TMPGenc DVD Author. If I want to add transitions etc I use Pinnacle Studio Pro. If all you want to do is compress the captured footage to MPEG4 (Divx) I'd suggest using Xvid instead (it's freeware) and VirtualDub.