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VHS to my PC

1

1Cheap2Crazy

Golden Member
I have some VHS tapes that I would like to transfer to my PC. I think I need a capture card, I'm looking at Plextor and adstech Is one better then the other? Is there a better one that's just as cheap, about $60? I take it a 2 hour tape will take 2 hours to record, but how long will it take to encode(?) to digital? How many MB or GB would a 2 hour tape take up in digital form? I would also like to be able to play these discs on my stand-alone DVD player, not just my PC.
I have XP, 2600+, 512MB, visiontek 9250, usb2 ports, and a PCI slot.

TIA
 
Please, please, please, PLEASE use the search function. Somebody asks about video capture cards/devices on a weekly basis (if not more often).

Any reasonably fast computer these days can encode on the fly to at least MPEG2. Encoding to something like MPEG4 (DivX) can take quite a while, easily twice as long as the source material (e.g. I can recode a 1-hour MPEG2 file in about 2 hours, although that is using pretty good quality 2-pass encoding).

Bitrate can be user-defined, but for MPEG2 (used for DVDs) is usually between 4 and 8Mbps. doom9.org has VAST amounts of information on these topics.
 
does your 9250 have vivo capability? if so you can use it without a capture device, if not, those will work fine. It will take 2 hours to record 2 hours, and the encode should be done on the fly, if you want to convert to another format, that might take some time depending on the format. I think your best bet is mpeg2 at 640x480, file size depends on compression level and I don't remember, probably a few gigs. Once it's on a dvd though, you can delete it if space is an issue. all of this information is coming from my experience recording using an old ati card with vivo and ati media center, things may have changed in the last 2 years, I haven't done this in a while so hopefully someone else will have some better info for you
 
For VHS quality video I use the VCD standard resolution (352 x 2xx ??) and capture at 4Mbit/s to MPEG-2 using a ATi TV-Wonder VE and it works fine. (Only Mono sound)

 
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