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Ask Slashdot: Which VHS Player To Buy?
stkpogo (799773) writes "I have several old VHS tapes that I'd like to digitize but my old VHS machine died years ago. What's a good VHS player to get so I can make nice clean digital videos from my old tapes before they're gone? I have a few TV -> USB adapters." How would you go about this, especially with tapes (like old home movies) you might be worried about sticking into a low-end VCR? And with what number of tapes does it make sense to outsource the digitizing?
It was like my first first post.
Something before the macrovision chip with 4+ heads... Though Im not sure if the heads affect playback...
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Buy a broadcast-quality Sony player from eBay.
BTW remember to retension the tapes, which means to rewind the tape, then wind it to the end of the reel, then rewind it again.
And with what number of tapes does it make sense to outsource the digitizing?
evaluate the cost of a vcr and the amount of time you have to transfer, I cannot provide a value to your time then compare it to the cost of outsourcing and make choice.
But tapes are better for long-term storage!
Will you actually bother watching the digital files when they're off VHS, or are you doing this "just because?"
I am working on a similar project with old VHS movie, if you can pick up a SVHS deck, that will help. Anything prosumer is good too. I just picked up 2 Panasonic AG1980P and that is supposed to be one of the better decks for such a purpose. I found them on goodwill's website! Hopefully they work. These have TBCs (time based correctors) which are supposed to correct issues with the picture due to damaged or old tapes, etc.
A "normal" tv -> USB dongle may not be sufficient for the usual VHS players, since their timing may be way off. You'll need somehting that has a TBC (time base corrector), either in the player or in the device to digitize the signal.
Other than that, I'd recommend a player made by Panasonic, since they used to make more robust, metal drives thatn most other manufacturers.
They sell some pretty good ones at a place called time machine
Find a reputable service and have them do it for you. You will only need to do it once, so buying an expensive set up to get the best results is dumb. However, a professional service will invest in top equipment, because they do it all the time. The devil is in the research of finding a reputable service that does quality work, vs Staples.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... "Toshiba DVR620 DVD/VHS Recorder" Highly recommend it. Read reviews and follow fellow buyers recommendations and its fantastic. Non-tech users can be taught to use it as well.
You should ask the specialist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o
no direct experience, but I read on the web that professional VHS editing decks have wider heads, so if a pro deck is reading and writing the tape it will make better use of the medium, and likewise it's ok if a consumer deck reads a tape written by a pro deck because the narrower track it reads will fall within the wider one written. However, if a pro deck reads a tape written by consumer deck, it will pick up noise on either side of the narrow track and actually produce worse output than a consumer deck would.
I also read the advice about TBC and assume it's correct, but I have to say this seems really stupid. AIUI a TBC is basically a capture card and a video card, back-to-back. Why don't the capture cards include this function? It's where it belongs. Are there good capture cards you can buy that make TBC irrelevant, or do all capture cards suck?
The things Star Wars fans have to put up with just to watch some movies...
I have been going though the same process. digitalfaq and videohelp are good resources.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/dvd-video/
http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/capture-playback-hardware.htm
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/1567-vcr-buying-guide.html
Let me know when you decide to de-interlace or not. I'm still deciding on that. All the research on-line I have found says to not de-interlace. I feel it would be better to de-interlace though. The video can have a lot more detail before a video is compressed with h.264 or something a de-interlacer could use.
...you want to go Betamax.
Speaking from experience, the greater difficulty is going to be getting the digitizer to not freak out when your old-ass videotapes warble. Video input adapters, especially cheap ones, freak out and glitch on bad video signal, completely dropping the video sometimes for a second or more before it recovers. This can make the digital recording just unusable. I have heard that DVR-style recorders handle this better, but have no personal experience with this.
I would highly recommend a SVHS deck that has video enhancement, to try to minimize this (SVHS standard doesn't come into play, just that the machine will automatically have four heads.)
I've had good luck with an Ion cassette-to-USB deck for ripping an old tape collection to digital on the computer. They've got a VHS-to-USB one as well: http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/vcr-2-pc.
I've converted several old family VHS (and Beta/Hi8) tapes to digital. In my experience, s-video output makes a much bigger quality difference than the type or quality of player. Composite video (the yellow plug in the yellow, red, white RCA triplet) combines both luminosity (brightness) and chroma (color) into one signal, resulting in a lot of crosstalk (the shimmering "marching ants" when you display high-contrast lines and borders). S-video keeps these signals separate so there is no cross-talk. Makes for a much cleaner transfer to digital.
Of course if the original tape was recorded using a composite signal, then there's nothing you can do.
Does Betamax play VHS tapes? and if it does, does it play with better quality than that of a typical VHS player?
Check ebay, buy one, do your conversion then sell it. VHS quality for old tapes would be bad so don't worry too much about the player.
Don't stick your tapes in crazy.
2 head VCRs are SP only. 4 head VCRs add two heads for EP. If all of your content is SP then a 2 head VCR should suffice. Depending upon the quality of the audio you want to present you might consider either stereo or Hi-Fi. Whatever VCR you choose should have manual tracking adjustment.
For capturing content on a Windows box I cannot recommend the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 highly enough. That capture card should also be compatible with MythTV.
The output from my current consumer grade 4 head Panasonic Omnivision (mono audio) VCR was friggin amazing. My wife had a selection of out of print VHS tapes and I captured them with that card. She was missing one tape and while searching for it I found a three pack of DVDs, one of which matched what she was missing and two of which matched what she had. I had to look at the output frame by frame to see if there was any perceptible difference between the Hauppauge output and the DVD. There was none.
Even with normal recordings from home there can be issues with the picture quality. If you have problems with the video becoming lighter and darker that my not be a copy protection issue (obviously as you are working with home movies). Consider purchasing a Digital video stabilizer. The guys at the electronics repair shop nearby recommend ones by MCM Electronics to help mitigate transfer issues.
Tossing your MPEG-2 output from the Hauppauge through the NLE of your choice might help with noise reduction (I use NeatVideo> and color skew. YMMV.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Get a cheap, new VHS player. It's higher quality than the expensive ones were 30 years ago. Something like Toshiba SD-V296. A used one will probably work, but you're taking a chance that it's sold because it's unreliable.
evaluate the cost of a vcr and the amount of time you have to transfer, I cannot provide a value to your time then compare it to the cost of outsourcing and make choice.
Include the cost of your time in dealing with the outsourcing service, too.
There's also the issues of:
- what values you put on letting others see your tapes,
- the risk of them making copies,
- whether anything you want to tansfer is copyright-encumbered and the service wouldn't copy that for you.
- the relative likelyhood of quality transfers and tape damage when done by a professional service versus do-it-yourself. They have the experience but you have the personal involvement.
You need to evaluate these as well.
(I often do things myself rather than hire them done because I'm more comfortable blaming myself than someone else if something breaks - even if breakage due to my efforts may be more likely. I also enjoy learning new skills and technical trivia, even if I'm unlikely to use them again later, and surprising situations keep coming up where some tidbit turns out to be useful.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/NICE-So...
That should do the job, and it'll keep its resale value. Skip the ultra cost-reduced thingies you see at walmart.
Mostly random stuff.
For just a few, just buy the DVD or Blu-Ray disc. Unless you want the unborked Star Wars.
I've got some 40-50 tapes – Disney movies my children watched as kids and "original" Star Wars, among others. I've still got a working Sony VHS/DVD deck with composite outputs, which I feed to a Sony digital camcorder equipped with Firewire to a Mac where I use iMovie and iDVD. It's a bit Rube Goldberg, but I already had all the pieces and it does a good enough job.
It beats buying the Disney movies all over again when grandchildren come along.
I had some VHS tapes converted to DVD at Walmart. Cost was about $20 for 2 tapes. Took about a week. Results are quite good, considering the VHS tapes were made from old 8mm movies going back to the late 40's. At the time I looked at doing it myself, but decided my time was worth more than $20.
Also in my experience the best quality you can get is to buy a MINI DV camcorder that has firewire, most have an input function where you can input video through the camcorder to firewire. I have a JVC GRD90u and it has this functionality. USB based capture devices seem to be flaky in my experience.
If it's just a few tapes, don't you know anybody, friend or relative who still has a VHS player tucked away in their attic or basement that you could borrow from?
BTW I still have a working VHS player. Once in awhile I'll find where somebody has put their old VHS tapes out on the street or something and there will be a title that intrigues me enough to take it home and try it. (I also still have an old analogue TV capture card from the late 90s that works.) I don't think you need to be too concerned with the player itself. The quality of the images from those old VHS tapes certainly leaves a lot to be desired after one has gotten used to HDTV, but, if there is no alternative, as when it's a home movie, then it's just a question of whether it's worth the bother at all. If the tape isn't playable in standard consumer equipment, then ask yourself it you want to pay the premium for a recovery specialist.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I went thru this a couple of years ago. I had hundreds of movies on VHS I had bought over many years. I had a very good VHS deck to play them on. I spent several weeks playing them into my computer, using Pinnacle Studio to trim the beginnings and ends and remove some of the noise, and Handbrake to further transform them to MP4 files on my Plex server. The result was OK, if not spectacular. Since them I have found many of my favorite movies in the DVD bargain bin at Walmart, at much better quality than my VHS originals, and many more popped up on TCM or Cinemax, where I could capture a nice clean copy. In the end, many of the VHS files on my Plex server got over-written with better copies. I also discovered I could simply watch many of the same movies on Netflix, negating the value of owning a copy at all. For example, many years ago I bought a VHS release of the freshly restored "Vertigo", one of my favorite movies. A couple of weeks ago, TCM aired the same print, much better than VHS quality, and of course it is also on Netflix. The effort I spent making my own MP4 of my own VHS copy was a waste. I still enjoy the movie, but rather the low quality of my own Plex copy, I just watch it on Netflix. Think carefully about what videos you want to copy, and you may find that there are few, if any, you really want to bother with.
has a whole library of vhs. he has a panasonic and he has a sony and the panasonic plays the data better. but download the pirated dvds if you already own the movies. dont steal but if you already paid, get better copies for your xbmc or whatever
I think we've got a problem here... there doesn't seem to be anything current in analog-video-in ports right now... I think you have to go all the way back to XP to get a driver for those things.
Fuck BETA!
LOL ... just awesome!
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Send your VHS tapes into a company and have them do it. They have much better equipment than you can afford, and it saves you the hassle of having to find a recorder and do it yourself. I recently sent VHS tapes + 8mm reels + slides in to a company to have them digitized. The results were incredible. I have a VCR and a capture card, as well as a slide projector and a slide scanner, but the quality of their high end equipment was unbelievable. I didn't realize an old slide could hold such high quality photographs, and the scans my little slide scanner made were not even approaching the quality of theirs.
Have a company digitize your tapes. If the content on them is meaningful to you, you won't regret it.
that is, if the content wasn't that which you created yourself.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Have a 17 year old Sony player and it works great.
I did about 15-20 of them last year, some of them Macrovision protected. I used an Hauppauge PVR-150 capture card (didn't seem to mind Macrovision like my Theatre 550), or I could have used my video stabiliser.
I used two vcrs. A really nice JVC from around 1986 (HR-830U) for most of the tapes with the PVR-150. for some of the tapes where I couldn't get audio from both channels (mangled tape), I used a Samsung VHS/DVD combo since that one allowed me to force left or right on both channels (but no manual tracking).
Most important thing, be prepared to clean the machine quite a bit using a wet cleaning system, not the abrasive ones, as those old tapes could flake (or be dirty). For capture, I used DVD movie factory (came with an old burner) and Video Redo (trial) for commercial removal and editing. Figure about 2GB/hour on DVD Quality (not worth going higher since it's only VHS.
If it's an old VCR, be prepared to replace straps as some of them might have dried out or decomposed / broken (like I'm about to do on the old Beta, one of them is slipping).
As someone else said in the thread, some home movies might have issues with white balance, a video stabiliser is helpful to help fix that issue...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Several years ago, some high-grade hobbiests recovered data from warehouse-stored audio/video mag tapes from the lunar missions. The one important thing I remember is that they were able to get remarkably good recovery from these ancient tapes by using a very low (mildly warm) oven setting and warming the tapes for several hours BEFORE trying to read them. This had the effect of releasing the tape-to-tape stiction and also re-tensioning the mag-tape mylar base material. Good luck finding the article - possible by asking /. about it - - - or searching NASA's site.
Another hint - tryout an empty cassette first to see if the other materials can withstand the temperature. You might have to remove the tape spool and heat it seperately. The tape removal and reinsertion is not child's play, but is fairly easy with a steady hand and patience.
It all really depends on how valuable the material is to you personally.
cheers
redneck geek
find a local place that will do it for you and pay them to do it.
If you absolutely have to do it yourself, find a local place that does it and ask what tape deck they use.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
A couple of hundred bucks and who knows how many hours of work and fiddling for movies you haven't watched since your last player died? That seems a bit steep to me.
We just came across a bunch of boxes of old VHS movies, and after some conversation... we're just tossing them in the Goodwill donation box. If we haven't watched 'em in five years, there's no point in going to all the trouble of copying them to a new format. The handful we might have converted, we've long since bought on DVD or Blu-Ray, not knowing this box was buried underneath a bunch of other crap. If our DVD player wasn't a combo DVD/VCR unit, we wouldn't even have hooked the VCR player back up when we re-arranged the living room a month or so ago.
Seriously, unless you have a ton of old (commercial) tapes that simply cannot be replaced, just convert the home movies (and possibly outsource that) and toss/donate the rest. If it's a movie that's in demand and it's one you actually want, odds are it's been remastered if it's available on DVD or Blu-Ray and you can get a copy pretty cheap at your local used disc place.
Find the Magnavox DVD Recorder ZV427MG9 with Line-In Recording at Walmart (or Amazon) for about $160. It is worth searching for, or having it delivered to your local store from another store. This is a VHS-to-DVD recorder, and does an amazing job. I copied about 40 VHS tapes to DVD's (priceless family videos). The audio is perfectly synchronized with the video. Now I am loaning it out to other family members and friends for their collections. Be sure to specify the highest quality. The results are amazing.
Panasonic AG 1980
as far as I know is/was the best ever made
Does Betamax play VHS tapes? and if it does, does it play with better quality than that of a typical VHS player?
The two formats are incompatible.
The best players are not made anymore but if you go back to around 1986 - 1993 ish 4 head hi fi should do the trick, otherwise get a Television with video (outs) there was a generic apex that did it around 2000, that particular tv would take care of that macrovision crap even if you are stuck with a newer unit.
These are going cheap (like all the other analog NTSC gear) on eBay or from video supply houses now that the world has gone digital. You likely can buy a good used rackmount VHS deck for less than the shipping will cost you. I bought a Panasonic AG-6500 for $40 about a year ago.
The only caveat here is that these things generally ONLY work in the SP (2 hour) mode. If your home movies were recorded in LP or EP/SLP, you obviously need to look for a deck that can play those speeds.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
im not even that old but hell growing up i kept my dss porno caputres on betamax just so my folks couldnt figure out what the tapes went too...... they set in plain sight right on equipment stack.
http://www.scancafe.com/services/video-transfer-to-DVD
Archiving old media is a time-consuming process, unfortunately. How many is "several" in your case? If it's more than a dozen or so you will probably run out of time and patience and will want to consider only doing the most precious ones or else paying someone else to do it. Also it may take a bit of experimentation to get the quality right. I asked around my friends and this is a common experience - so much so that I was considering making a business out of it.
If you're considering outsourcing, there are quite a few companies that will do this for you for around $10 per tape. Obviously this can get expensive if you have hundreds of tapes - it's up to you to decide how much your time and the tapes are worth to you. Unless you're willing to trust the post (or a courier) with your tapes, you'll need to find a local company.
A reputable commercial company is likely to get a better result than you would yourself, unless you're the obsessive compulsive type (not unlikely on Slashdot, I guess.)
Phil McKerracher
I was about to write a longer post, but it boils down to this; you probably have too much stuff you don't need. And VHS tapes which you think you may want to watch later, but 95% of them you never will, and the remaining 5% is no big loss, or you can just get them on DVD or similar. If you are afraid of losing information, just put the VHS tapes in a box somewhere. If you find out later you really want to watch one of them, then you will find a technical solution at that time. Which is going to be cheaper and/or less time consuming than converting a bunch of commercial and/or personal videos, which you can then not watch in digitized format instead of not watching them on VHS.
I'm a BSEE who, among many things, has done VCR (etc.) repair for over 30 years. I own many VCRs and a really high-end A/D converter. I do this for people from time to time.
The BEST VCR to play a tape is the _one_ it was recorded on. There is NO guarantee that the recording machine was 100% aligned to correct standards. Even among perfectly aligned new machines and adjusting tracking, a tape recorded on one can look terrible on another. There are so many possible mechanical variations due to normal manufacturing tolerances, and minute differences can make huge differences in the final picture. Each manufacturer has their own design ideas. Flying head thickness is a factor. Head wear is a huge factor- as the head wears, the gap will widen. You may not see the difference until it gets so bad that the video frequency response is bad and you see it. I could go on and on about tape path, head azimuth, etc., mechanical adjustments, and sometimes dozens of electronic adjustments (especially in older machines), but I won't bore you.
Bottom line: I have many brands and models so I can pick the best VCR for the tape. Tape wear is negligible during transport, _unless_ there is a broken head, worn flying head (big gap), tape path guide misaligned, etc. If in doubt, play another tape for 20 seconds or so, eject it, flip open the cover, and see if the tape is visibly damaged at all before playing your good tape.
Panasonic and Mitsubishi are great. At both a company I worked for and an A/V team I was part of did some tests and the Mitsubishis had the best video frequency response of 10 or so brands we tested. Sony wasn't bad, but cost more and seemed to wear out faster.
A great A/D converter for the money is Canopus ADVC 110 Converter. Some high-end ones: http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity/, http://www.ospreyvideo.com/products/osprey-cards, and I have an AJA http://www.aja.com/.
So is there a step-by-step guide for copying your VHS tapes into digital files on your PC? What hardware, what connector cable, what software, and what settings to use? I honestly can't find a guide anywhere.
Everything on the internet wants to describe coping VHS to DVD, which is useless. If I wanted to copy VHS to DVD, I'd just go buy a VHS/DVD recorder machine.
Not one VCR is best for all tapes. For SP speed tapes like home movies, the JVC SVHS and DVHS decks equipped with JVC's "Digipure" TBC/noise reduction from the late 90s-early 00s have some of the best picture quality out there. The Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U DVHS deck is another recommended model. Expect to pay upwards of $200 for a working deck on ebay. The list of model numbers can be found here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...
The Panasonic AG-1980P is best for EP/SLP tapes and is also better behaved with VHS-C tapes in the motorized adapter. The JVCs tend to have problems with the VHS-C adapters. The downside of the AG-1980 is that it is VERY prone to electrical problems. Almost all of them need to have full capacitor replacement, otherwise they have problems with herringbone noise, loss of color output, and "barber pole" patterns on the video output. Sometimes the deck even stops accepting tapes. Repair involves replacing close to 100 surface mount capacitors.
For capture, find an old Pentium 4 with an AGP slot running Windows XP and an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder with the Rage Theater 100/200chip. They have excellent analog capture quality and the ADC doesn't do any sharpening or muck up the video with AGC. Both of which are common problems on modern capture cards, including ATI's own PCI "TV Wonder" cards.
To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync. They also tend to strip Macrovision off of tapes *wink* *wink*. More info here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...
Sony SLV-678HF ... for all the experts who claim Sony did not offer consumer VHS products. ... current products ... again, for the experts
Sony RDR-VX530, RDR-VX535 and RDR-VX560 VHS to DVD converters
Good luck on the MacroVision hurdle. Some people like the ADVC-100: S-video in from VCR and S-video out to the DVR.
Also, there's a product from DiMax: http://www.xdimax.com/common/default.html. I haven't used it but the WWWeb sites has all the right words.
Same for the AVT-8710: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=details&kw=TVAVT8710&is=REG&Q=&O=productlist&sku=276891. Actually, being a time-base corrector, this device should be the best.
Few years ago I bought on ebay the JVC SR-VS10 which is a miniDV and S-VHS, and plays regular VHS. It also has a tuner (analog). There are S-video and composite in/out. AND it has firewire (DV) input and output to complement the miniDV, I've used this to firewire video in and out from a PC. I haven't had problems with jamming but with multiple kinds of inputs/outputs it makes for handling all kinds of video experiments. Retail price from when it was on market was $2000, this one on ebay for $500, http://www.ebay.com/itm/JVC-SR...
mfwright@batnet.com
I've done some VCR conversion and the main problem with basic came-with-the-computer video cards is that they'll stop recording at the first big glitch in the analog video signal being fed to them, and most home recorded video tapes will have more than a few. Very frustrating if say, you have a bunch of mystery 6-hour tapes that you just want to dump onto your hard drive while at work, and then pan the resulting file for gold at your leisure.
I bought a converter like this one and it works great, converting the entire output to DV, glitches and all. Your PC will need DV / Firewire input to use it, and Firewire cards are available cheap. The added advantage is that they have unadvertised Macrovision bypass features (google the make/model and 'macrovision' for more info.)
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I have never seen one. I think there are some video cards that have RCA or S-Video inputs that you can connect to a VHS player.
^^^ DVHS, some decks also had firewire outputs, firewire out to firewire in on a machine avoids the need for third party A2D.....
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
I've only converted home tapes ;)
Homemade VHS quality is not great to begin with, I used a new (old but in the box) VCR and an EasyCap (a clone i think). It worked fine. There was no noticeable degradation of quality. The mpeg was about 20GB for a two hour tape. The software i used was Virtual VCR
To be honest, i think a lot of these best practices are voodoo (it entirely depends on how and when it was recorded), just to jack up the price. As for not wanting to risk a tape on an old player, just test it out on a junk tape first, if it works 10 times in a row, chances are it'll work the 11th time.
It is better to just buy DVDs on eBay or used on Amazon for a couple of bucks if your VHS are commercial releases.
Unless it's something that hasn't been rereleased on DVD like the film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, or something that was taped off air and never officially released on home video at all like the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea.
>> To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync.
^This
Let me add for the person asking the question that I found an external TBC extremely useful back when I was transferring family movies from VHS. Even though I used a nice SVHS unit with an internal TBC, some of the worst older tapes still had lots of dropping out, tearing, and sync issues that magically all but disappeared when I fed the signal through the external TBC. Perhaps you don't need it in your case, but I definitely did.
Here's an in informative thread where someone asked about the need for an external TBC. Be sure to look at the images in post #7.
If I have a VCR with TBC, why is a separate unit needed anyway?
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
I went with the Toshiba DVR610. I found the hardware conversion to DVD far superior to any form of computer conversion. I converted to DVD files directly and then used those DVD files to edit them into better DVDs on my computer with a program that could work with the files directly with no need for conversion.
Don't go through the trouble of buying anything. There are dozens of service providers with professional equipment who can convert these tapes for you for less than the cost of the cheapest equipment you can buy. Try a google search for "VHS Transfer."
-rd
Get a COSTCO membership and they digitize videos. I had it done with some precious ones and they did a great job.
Only if you believe it takes more than tape runtime to convert a tape to DVD. Get one of those cheap VHS-to-DVD dubbing machines.
Get any major brand VCR (e.g. Sony, Panasonic etc) as they are usually quite good. To be honest, I have never seen a big difference between VCR's in terms of quality. However, I did once have a cheapo VCR (Only one in the Electrical Store) which did chew up a couple of tapes.
You dont have to sit there idly watching the vcr whike t records. Pop in a tape, go for a run, pop in another, watch a movie, pop in another, waste an hour on slasdot, pop in another, pleasure your wife, pop in another, write your congressman, pop in another, vacuum your house, pop in another, fold your laundry, pop in another, get groceries. Pop in anther, deposit $100 into your kids college fund.
I tried something similar with some audio cassettes a few years ago, and found that I was too late: the tape had begun to stick together, and required more power than my high-end Denon tape deck could muster to play back. Rewinding didn't work either, as there's a tape tension sensor that shuts down the motor if it gets overloaded.
Search eBay for VHS VTR. It'll turn up things like the Sony SVO-9600 which was studio-grade VHS. All mass produced tapes are made with similar devices and they support both manual and auto tracking.
A BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle USB 3 is a "Studio Grade" full frame capture device.
If you add a RS-422 to USB device and use a program like Adobe Premier, Sony Vegas Pro or even BlackMagic's tools, you can set start and end points for capture and then compress. Final Cut Pro works as well, but then you'll prefer a DeckLink Extreme.
I worked professionally in the field of video hardware development and funded long development stretches doing media conversion. VHS simply sucks. Garbage in... Worse garbage out. But good decks and good cards make a huge difference.
I recommend also getting some studio grade cables.
You'll spend more on cables and shipping than on hardware, but if you're serious and want to retain what little quality is left, studio equipment is 50 times better than consumer and $200 will get you most of what you'll need.
you will spend $0 and while some of the VHS players you get won't be work well, you are bound to get a decent one. A VHS head cleaner tape is not a bad idea though. http://www.amazon.com/CleanDr-...
Panasonic made good quality players that are remarkably durable. I'd pick one up used with little fear that it wouldn't work. My older Panasonic VHS dates to 1983 and still works fine. And no, you can't have my newer Panasonic, which also still works. Also, they have NEVER eaten a tape, and the older one in particular worked its little analog ass off. (I've often joked that Panasonic consumer electronics are too dumb to know when they're dead, since they generally work forever.)
You want a four-head player, as the pickup quality is considerably better than a two-head. As someone mentions, S-Video output is a Good Thing too. My newer Panasonic has this, and it's at least 15 years old.
You also want to make sure no one ever used a "head cleaner" on it... those only had value in a smoking environment, as they'd scrape off the residue. They'd also scrape off the head surface. This is the real cause of VHS players "wearing out". Needless to say you don't want one that's been in a smoking environment in the first place -- it'll gum up your tapes.
With tapes that have been in storage a while, you should do a full wind and rewind (at low speed if you have the option) to make sure they're tensioned properly and not stuck together, before you do your ripping job.
The other thing with Panasonic is that they used a generic-sized belt that can be replaced. So if the belt has cracked from age, you can probably find a new one.
And chances are you can pick one up for free off Freecycle.
Someone mentioned a tape/DVD DVR gadget -- much easier, but from what I've heard the quality of the tape heads on such gadgets is not great, being they're not really dedicated VHS units. On the other hand you don't have the loss from the data being horsed back and forth across cables, so it might be a wash.
Please come back and tell us what worked out best...some of us also have boxes full of tapes we haven't got round to digitizing. :)
(Actually, it was easier to just buy the damn DVD when/if those came out. *sigh*)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
There'd a third type who asks 'do I trust this person to do this for me or will they mess it up and destroy the tapes? will the quality be good?
And most important of all can I trust them?, my video isn't going to appear on YouTube transformed into a something else? Like a porno. Is it? (Rule of the internet 34 - Take something, no matter what it is, somewhere someone has made (will make) porn out of it.. No Exceptions.)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Wow. If any guy invited me into his house so I could take a closer look at his collection of VHS movies, I'd run for the hills, as far and as fast in the opposite direction as my feet would let me run. No second date. Seriously.
I've had no trouble with it, but I've only used it for a few things, so I can't speak to the longevity of it, but it is very easy to use.
I found a seller on ebay that sells manufacturer refurbished VCR's. Paid $17 IIRC, came with the remote control, manual, and cables. Hooked it up to a Dazzle USB device and used VirtualDub to capture the video/audio. I then used VLC to do the encoding for simplicity since VirtualDub is a bit OP. You have to hit Play on the VCR (or remote) and then start the recording in VirtualDub and manually stop it when it is at the end of what you wanted to record. Most VHS movies have the runtime listed on the box, make a note of the runtime and figure out approximately when it will be over then just remember to check it around that time.
The software that came with the Dazzle was largely useless, VirtualDub worked without issue as did VLC. Search online for guides on how to capture/encode video with them, there are plenty out there.