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Hello there great forum. Question on VHS conversion

post #1 of 6
7/1/08 at 10:50pm
Thread Starter 
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Has anyone ever used one of those services to convert VHS to DVD? I have some family classics and would obviously not want to lose them. Just google it and go for it?

Vicky
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post #2 of 6
7/2/08 at 12:46am

Re: Hello there great forum. Question on VHS conversion

First, welcome to the forum!

Second, in answer to your question, I haven't, but a few years ago I was in the same position as you. I looked at the prices of commercial copying services and figured it was way cheaper to do it myself. I think the 'break even' point was something like 12 hours of tape.

If you don't have a DVD recorder and you're getting one specifically for this task, there are dual VHS/DVD recorder machines available, so you only have one box to deal with.

The downside of copying for yourself is that the recordings have to be done in real time (i.e. a 3 hour tape will take 3 hours to copy) and you can find the process drags on. We found it was easiest just to set one recording up each evening, watch something else on the TV or do other things and set a kitchen timer to remind us when the recording had finished.

I would, however, strongly recommend archiving VHS material, because the tapes decay with time. E.g. we found that some of the tapes we were copying were already showing signs of decay after only a couple of years, and they'd all been kept in supposedly ideal conditions.

So, not perhaps the precise answer you were looking for, but I hope this helps.
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post #3 of 6
7/2/08 at 6:37am

Re: Hello there great forum. Question on VHS conversion

VideoHelp.com - Forum, Guides, Tools and hardware lists has lots of great information on how to do this if you have a computer. I've done it with great success with an external box to convert the analog signal to DV-tape style.
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post #4 of 6
7/2/08 at 7:47am

Re: Hello there great forum. Question on VHS conversion

I have archived a tremendous number of VHS tapes to DVD for both myself and my parents. Having a DVD recorder with a built-in hard drive was a wonderful feature when I did this. I could dub entire multiple tapes to the hard drive, divide and trim the content as necessary, and then burn to DVD, breaking up the content as necessary to fit onto DVD's.
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post #5 of 6
7/2/08 at 9:53am

Re: Hello there great forum. Question on VHS conversion

I once sent some videos to this place: Convert (transfer) any video to DVD! Fast and Professional video conversion with APM Studio. and they did a good job. The reason I did that was because I needed PAL to NTSC conversion. Otherwise I would have just used my DVD recorder.

As mentioned, there are dual DVD-recorder/VHS decks available and they're not too expensive so that would probably be cheapest in the long run.

(Edit: I keep typing in just the URL and it keeps getting automatically converted to clickable text.)
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post #6 of 6
7/5/08 at 1:25pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Hello there great forum. Question on VHS conversion

Great advice everyone.

I never even thought of do it yourself. I still may try the service out on some throw away vhs. Thanks again
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