DVD recorder with hard drive

[Dorkenstein]

I have tapes that I need to convert to DVD somehow and I need to do it practically on a shoe-string.

Can I hook my crap vcr to any DVD recorder with hard drive and expect quality on par with the original tape or is it worse? Also, none of this is commercial VHS so I don't need to worry about protection. Thanks for any useful knowledge.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

All you would have to do is video out from VCR to Video In of DVD Recorder. Quality should be identical to the output unless you select high compression.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Whew, thanks. Do I need a picture stabilizer? I think thats what it was called. Also, do you know of an inexpensive dvd recorder that would suit my purpose? Thanks for your reply.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Whew, thanks. Do I need a picture stabilizer? I think thats what it was called. Also, do you know of an inexpensive dvd recorder that would suit my purpose? Thanks for your reply.

Not if you only intend on recording home movies.

 

[Dorkenstein]

So the picture stabilizer doesn't merely improve all vhs tapes, it just improves commercial ones?

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
So the picture stabilizer doesn't merely improve all vhs tapes, it just improves commercial ones?

If you and I are talking about the same thing, its used to be able to record commercial VHS tapes, which many DVD recorders/VHS players do not let you do.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Oh, I thought it made the picture nicer. Big difference I guess. Thanks.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Why a hard drive? If you don't need to do editing you can record directly from tape to disc, then copy the discs with your PC's burner.

Just test this once or twice to see how the recorder settings should be set and whether you need to "finalize" the discs before copying them or playing them on the PC.

Also, be careful about using the higher compression / longer time settings. When I was copying laserdiscs to a Hauppage card, I used the lowest DVD format which was only about 1:15 per disc. Picking a 2+ hour setting is going to look much worse than a commercial DVD since you're encoding once in real-time instead of using fancy multi-pass optmizing to change the encoding bitrate from second to second.