Computer question, audio and video this time

[Zieg Rauros]

Ok, my mom's boyfriend has a whole bunch of old tapes he wants saved, and will help pay for anything I need to do it. I wonder, what is the best way?

Also, my mom and grandma have old tapes. Same question.

If they could be solved at the same time, bonus points.

[Gwommy]

Re: Computer question, audio and video this time

At one point, I had gotten an adaptor that hooks up through the USB port. It worked, but the quality was very poor. And it was cheap, I barely even used it and it's already broke. I'd suggest if you have a tower, just to buy a card that'll let you plug in cable or A/V cords. Although I haven't actually tried it because I'm on a laptop.

[The Dark Jester]

Re: Computer question, audio and video this time

Use a PS3 and a wii. mabe a 360 to.

[thetruecoolness]

Re: Computer question, audio and video this time

Well I would go with a TV card. Of course it depends on what you want to encode to, which will require some knowledge of codecs if you decide to go with AVI, MPEG2 doesn't really have a whole lot of settings. Also if you want straight to DVD MPEG2 would be the way to go as many DVD creation programs do not have to convert MPEG2 data, saving about 2-8 hours per DVD on encode and creation time (depends on how fast your computer is).

Now as far as TV cards go I have been through a lot of them, Winfast is the company I have used for a while, and have been the best in my experience (other people also recommend Hauppauge though I like Winfasts software better), my card (Winfast PVR2000) is $100 but worth it if you want no hassle, good recordings without having to have an insane PC. Basically any card with Hardware MPEG2 encoding will allow you to have not as good computer and you will actually be able to do things on your computer while recording, and will run in the $80-150 or so price range. With a normal (non-hardware encoding) TV card even decent quality (around 3Mbit/s) will max out your computer and I have 1gig of PC2700 RAM, 2.6 GHZ processor (Athlon XP), and 7200RPM ATA133 drives.

Another option is if your video card already has VIVO (video in/ video out), you can attempt to find a capture program which will work with it after getting the WDM drivers for it (Nvidias is on their site using their drivers page, under multimedia software, ATI should have them on their site as well). Though my experience is all mine have not been as good as my tv card it might be good enough for what you want. Same for a non hardware encoding TV card. Now most TV cards will require you to get an RCA to 1/8" Pin stereo conveter, since most TV cards only have a line in like your motherboard or sound card, though some have the RCA jacks (I would recommend not buying soley on this though).

For encoding try out 352x240 at around 2 Mbits/s at first since VCR quality should not be much above this, especially through the composite input. For TV recording I use 720x480 at 3.5 Mbits/s (Constant bitrate CBR) and 100 on the quality setting. I have never had any problems with macroblocks or any other things like that, though TV is slightly better quality than VCR (not much but a little). This results in files that are about 800MB for 30min. With this setting you can fit about 120-140mins on a normal DVD and 240-280 on a Dual Layer. If you plan to store it on a PC you will probably want to look into using AVI but you better have a really good PC and nothing else going on when you record or you will get dropped frames and hiccups.

So fish around www.newegg.com or your favorite PC parts retailer and look for tv cards/ video capture cards (you might be able to find one without a tv tuner for cheaper, though pretty much all analog video capture cards come with a TV tuner).

I personally would stay away from the USB dongle ones, but since I've never used them I can't really say they are bad, but I do know PCI is 2x faster than USB 2.0 (courtesy of the nice list of all interface speeds on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths).

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Computer question, audio and video this time

Yeah, my old computer teacher at the middle school had this rig with a VCR, firewire, camera, USB cord, and computer....I could ask him about the details. Worked pretty well, and makes it easy to edit the VHS.