Advice for most cost effective way to burn VHS tapes to DVD?

Keith Quistorff · **Posted:** Thu Oct 01, 2009 1:47 pm

I have about 40 hours of old home video on VHS tapes I'd like to transfer to DVDs and don't have equipment for doing this. My first thought was to have Wolf Camera do it for me, but they quoted a crazy price. Second thought was to look into equipment to do it myself and found a Toshiba DVD burner w/VHS conversion capability for $160 on Amazon. Reviews are pretty good, sounds pretty straightforward. There are less costly hardware options involving a DVD burner that attaches to a PC, but those appear to require a good bit of software expertise, set-up, etc., which I'd prefer to completely avoid.

Any other / better ideas or suggestions?

Aaron Buckley · **Posted:** Thu Oct 01, 2009 2:21 pm

Keith Quistorff wrote:

I have about 40 hours of old home video on VHS tapes I'd like to transfer to DVDs and don't have equipment for doing this. My first thought was to have Wolf Camera do it for me, but they quoted a crazy price. Second thought was to look into equipment to do it myself and found a Toshiba DVD burner w/VHS conversion capability for $160 on Amazon. Reviews are pretty good, sounds pretty straightforward. There are less costly hardware options involving a DVD burner that attaches to a PC, but those appear to require a good bit of software expertise, set-up, etc., which I'd prefer to completely avoid.

Any other / better ideas or suggestions?

Keith, if you want, I have a Sony DVD recorder you can borrow and do it for free. I can bring it to the NCAC. Let me know if you want it. I have the manual and it's a piece of cake to do. - AB

Keith Quistorff · **Posted:** Thu Oct 01, 2009 2:34 pm

Aaron Buckley wrote:

Keith, if you want, I have a Sony DVD recorder you can borrow and do it for free. I can bring it to the NCAC. Let me know if you want it. I have the manual and it's a piece of cake to do. - AB

Awesome offer, Aaron - thanks.

PM sent.

Marty Howard · **Posted:** Thu Oct 01, 2009 2:54 pm

what about VHS to digital?

I want to take all of our old home movies and put them up on our family website.

Scott Johnson · **Posted:** Thu Oct 01, 2009 3:16 pm

Marty Howard wrote:

what about VHS to digital?

I want to take all of our old home movies and put them up on our family website.

It would be almost as easy to convert them to DVD like Keith is doing, then rip the disks onto the computer (using Handbrake or comparable).

There are lots of cheap video capture devices for computers (USB or PCI cards). If I had lots to do, I might look for one that can do some better encoding on the fly (convert to mp4 in real time).

Scott

Ash Nelson · **Posted:** Thu Oct 01, 2009 5:36 pm

One note about DVD/VHS recorders. We had a combo unit that was a VHS player/recorder and a DVD player/recorder. The beauty was that you could play a VHS tape and record it to the DVD, all in one little unit. The down side was that DVD would not play on any other DVD players or in the computer. It was a proprietary format (SONY)

Just a heads up.

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Advice for most cost effective way to burn VHS tapes to DVD?

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