How To Convert VHS To DVD Guide
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Grabbing
Software
To be able to get an analog signal from the VHS player into the digital data on your hard disk, you will need some program to record it and some codec. Another problem are the capture drivers. I use Ivan Uskov's tweaked bt878 WDM drivers and I'm satisfied. After some time I found this combination to be the best:
- iuLab iuVCR - http://www.iulabs.com/iuvcr/download.shtml
- iuLab tweaked bt878 WDM drivers - http://www.iulabs.com/drv/index.shtml
- PICVideo™ MJPEG Codec - http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm
Hardware requirements
For grabbing you need a big and fast hard disk. To minimize these requirements it is good to use the PICVideo™ MJPEG Codec. It's really something like JPEG for movies, it can amazingly reduce the size of the avi (ie. less free space on the hard drive needed). But on the other hand, it demands faster cpu (nevertheless without a good cpu you'll not be able to convert the result to the mpeg2 in your lifetime).
System requirements
I have good experience with Windows 2000 (and bad with Windows 98). I suppose that with Windows XP there won't be any major problem too. The filesystem I recommend is NTFS because of limit of FAT32 (max. 4GB per file).
Grabbing
I expect that you installed iuVCR and MJPEG succesfully and we can continue with settings. The first iuVCR page seems like this (can be different in other versions):
It's quite easy - select the location for saving the grabbed video, adding a timestamp is good for testing purposes. More interesting is »Segmentation«. Why did I checked it? I experienced problems when I forgot to stop recording and therefore the heavy noise at the end of the tape was recorded too. The audio stream is then desynchronized from the video stream and correction is pretty time consuming, so I solved it with the segmentation. First of all what you need to know is the length of your record (one rewind of the tape...). Next put the length here, anything after the time will be in different file so you can simply delete it.
The second page is really important — here you select the source and a codec. Let's start with »Device settings« – click on the button on the right side »Configure« and select the proper video standard (In Europe it's PAL, in USA NTSC, I presume you're familiar with this).
Now let's look on capture formats. The settings above are for PAL only, for NTSC is quite different, and can be found on the Internet (maybe I'll write about it in the future).
You have to select the source for recording — I think this page is quite clear, but if you experience some problems, contact me, I can put here some other comments from you.
For compression select the PICVideo MJPEG Compressor. In the configuration window set the level of compression somewhere around 16, but maybe 14 is still ok. With the other advanced settings I have not experimented, but the factory defaults work well.
Audio settings are shown above, only a small notice – if your VHS player is a stereo, choose the stereo of course.
The »Options« page works well as above, so I really didn't think about all these settings for hours. Maybe you'll find another solution.
Well it's time to grab the video. Go to the »Info« window to see the process and press the Start button. The »Statistic« part is very important - you should have no Dropped frames, Average fps around the number you selected. Watch out also the Remaining time.
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