VHS Video > DVD Format?

The tape to MP3 thread reminded me to ask my question...

What has everyone done with their VHS video tapes? Did you keep them or transfer them to DVD? If you transfered them, how did you do it? And how did it work?

And what do you use to tape tv shows now if you plan to keep the video to watch again?

I'm still in the VHS video era, but need to come into the 21st century.

Well you can get DVD recorders cheaply enough now (<£70 here I think) so you just connect them with a SCART or whatever and just record from tapes to discs, or from TV to disc etc

I had a HDD/DVD Recorder for my 21st birthday which runs like a dream. It has an 80gb hard drive which I record my VHS tapes into, then edit them with chapters and cut out commercial breaks, then burn them onto DVD. The picture quality I find is sometimes slightly better than the original VHS recordings! (That I can never work out why!)

The menus on my custom DVD's are extremely primitive but I really couldn't care less about that, it's the material on the DVD's that I'm more concerned about.

Mine is a Daewoo DVD recorder and it was around £130. DVD Recorders with hard drives are slightly more expensive but I highly recommend you get one with.

That's impossible.

Well they don't look DRASTICALLY better than the original tapes, but the picture looks slightly more solid, and slightly less grainy.

Not really. You cannot get the image on the tape better, but the wires you use, the TV & VCR you have etc. all have an effect on how the VHS picture will look like. If you transfer the video on to a digital medium, the image will probably look better.

But you're right about the fact that you can't get a better quality than the original tape, but depending on the equipment, it might _look_ better.

Ice

That's pretty much my theory.

The HDD/DVD Recorder sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. I see a LG one in a flyer for $399 (Canadian) It has a 250GB harddrive and DVD Recorder with 1080i Up-Conversion. (not sure what Up-Conversion is)

So with the harddrive you can tape over shows you don't want anymore, right? Do they show up with filenames like on a computer?

How do the chapters work exactly. One per show?

And what about DVD discs. Which ones are the best? Do certain ones work with certain machines? How much (time) will one hold?

The hard drives user interface (menu's, etc) is very basic, but effective and user-friendly. Each recording session is saved a title, which you can split into however many, and chaptors are piss easy to put in. You can get rid of unwanted stuff like commerical breaks, etc aswell, which saves disc space. Chapters, you can place just about anywhere in the program, so I just aim for commercial breaks and just delete the breaks after.

I tend to use Maxewell discs which are cheap and tend to be the most recommended brand, but I do use Tesco's own disc aswell cause they're cheaper, lol. I have 2 other DVD players which the discs both work on, though playback on a PlayStation 2 and some DVD-ROM drives can be a bit iffy. Go for DVD+R aswell. Basically, any sort of superstore, not just computer stores, will sell just the right type of discs you want, as they're for the "average" customer I suppose. I'm quite a techno-wizz myself, but I do like to keep things simple.

As for Up-Conversion, I have no idea, never heard of it! lol. Judging by the name, I assume it means improving picture quality?

Hope this has been helpfull!