Converting VHS to digital
 

Just wondering what to do with all my old VHS tapes - both official releases and tv recorded stuff. It would be nice to preserve some of the recordings. Has anyone transferred VHS to digital / dvd? What did you use?

Years ago I actually spent a lot of time working this thing out too. If you have a quality VHS/DVD recorder combo you can definitely get very decent results by doing copies straight to DVD (preferably in XP mode). You can also hook an old VCR up to a DVD recorder and make a standalone copy.
The most important thing is to have a quality S-VHS player to get the best signal out of the old tapes and decent cables (you can really notice the difference between very cheap ones and some that are a little more expensive).

I for one spent quite a few hundred bucks on this by buying an old mechanic Panasonic AG-7350 S-VHS recorder which was even used in TV stations back in the day. It works great but is quite huge too. I hook this one up to a Canopus ADVC-300 analog/digital converter (as far as my knowledge goes there are even devices that upscale to HD nowadays but the question is if the prize is worth the small amount of quality improvement) and record it (via firewire) as an uncompressed avi file to my PC (using Sony Movie Studio). The advance the Canopus device gives you is that you can control certain settings (colour, contrast, audio gain, levels etc.) via hardware before doing the actual transfer. That method is quite time consuming, but gives you the opportunity to clean up the sound afterwards and author a nice DVD.
The outcome of your work also depends on the kind of MPEG encoder you use, the Canopus Procoder is the most recommendable one, but costs a shitload of money. A nice alternative is going for the TMPGEnc DVD Author series which has a good encoder built into the program (and it easy to use too).
Since we have a few hundred of tapes from back in the days and a ton of home videos too I really spent time to figure things out here.

I hope this helps a bit, if you have any further questions feel free to ask or drop me a PM ;)

Is there any place that does this kind of stuff professionally? Will they convert videos of TV shows that are copyrighted? I don't have time to do it myself and I have over 200 video tapes sitting in cabinets getting old.

There are place that do convert old VHS's, but most won't convert copyrighted material.

As to transferring the tapes yourself, the method described above probably works, but is overkill for most VHS's as the quality of the original is shady at best.

I bought an LG external DVD-drive with analogue video inputs and I've been using that along with capture software (AVS4YOU or DScaler) to transfer VHS's to MPEG-2 and the quality has been at least very passable, if not good. The $20 USB sticks don't seem to work too well, I've tried a few, but they don't seem get a decent signal out of any of my 3 VHS VCR's. The LG drive works with all of them.

Ice

For the past 5/6 years I've used a stand-alone Phillips DVD Recorder with a VCR hooked up to it via gold scart lead, and have decent results. i set my DVDR to standard play/record (approx 2hrs per DVD-5/single layer) as that will generally maintain the quality of VHS and chances are the compatability will be higher wih most players. Never used S-VHS, in fact I'm not sure my VCR is even equipped with it.

The only downsides to this method are the menus are very basic and not very attractive and it's not as user-friendly as a computer when it comes to editing your recordings like cutting out commercial breaks and adding chapter points, and you can't always get a precise frame you want to divide, whereas I imagine with a PC you would.

I do what Bonjovi90 does - with pretty much the same equipment. That combination will squeeze the best quality out of a VHS tape. VHS does not have great specs to begin with so it's not gonna be prefect.

I found something better than Roxio: ClearClick's VHS to DVD Wizard converters for PC and Mac will work with any VHS tape and recorder for about $65US.

With the Richie drama of the past week, I forget to post my thanks for the replies to my question. Bonjovi90's technique sounds way too technical for me. My best best is probably to get either a vcr/dvd recorder combo, or perhaps look into rocknation's suggestion. I don't intend to transfer everything, but I do have a few concerts in particular I'd like to preserve.

Anyone know if the official releases (i.e. Access All Areas) are copyable?

The Access All Areas VHS is, as I copied mine. I just did the basic method- small TV/DVD combo hooked up to a DVD recorder. I guess you can tart up the menus and whatnot on a PC afterwards, as soon as you have the stuff onto a DVD you can play about with it then.

Good to know. Thanks.