How To Convert VHS To DVD Guide

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  1. Introduction
  2. Grabbing
  3. Audio Cleaning
  4. Video Encoding
  5. Authoring
  6. Burning
  7. Links & Search

VHS to DVD Introduction

Welcome to VHS to DVD tutorial!

VHS to DVD image This tutorial you're about to read is targeted on converting VHS tapes to DVD Video. I tried to write a step-by-step guide instead of ultimate tutorial with a lot of options. I just picked up the best way I know with the best possible quality in mind.

The main target is the most valuable source - home video VHS only, not movies. Home video has actually a greater value than some movie you can borrow on DVD for a few bucks instead of spending hours with this process. And be sure you can't deal with this in few minutes. There is a quick solution - you can buy a DVD recorder, plug a VHS player into it and press the record button - but the quality is horrible (at least from what I've seen so far). I've tried many different ways and this way which I introduce here is the result of my experiments.

Nevertheless, there is always something to be improved. If you have any idea or advice, I'd be glad to hear about it in my mailbox jave@janvesely.com or in the Google Groups: How To Convert VHS To DVD.

You can subscribe to this e-mail group just by writing here your e-mail:

Also, if you find an error (whether false data or bad English) in this VHS to DVD Guide, please don't hesitate and let me know. Thank you!

I'm now working on a new VHS to DivX tutorial using free tools. Many of us have DVD player capable of DivX and Xvid decoding and I found this clearly better than DVD (smaller size of a video equals much more video on one DVD, easier to work with these files on a computer, still good quality). So in about a month I'm going to write it down and share with you.

Hardware

Although this tutorial is about converting, not about buying and configuring hardware, I should put some lines about it. I have some good experience with two grabbing pci cards for pc - one from 3DeMON and the other from Prolink (about Prolink PlayTV Pro I wrote also a review - but in czech language). They both have the BT878 chip and have a good quality converter from analog video stream to the digital one. I suppose that connecting the output video and audio signals from your VHS player to your grabbing card's input can't be a big deal for you so I won't describe it here.

Software

Unfortunately I haven't found much free software that would fit my needs. But I've tried to use the cheaper ones, here comes my list:

So as you can see it's not the cheapest way. But the prices are not as high as they could be, we won't use any professional software for thousands of dollars and get the result good enough for us. Keep in mind what is our source - the standard VHS tape.

Continue

In the next chapter of the VHS to DVD Guide: Video Grabbing.

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