It’s about this time every year that I get a plaintive plea from my parents, who would like nothing more for Christmas than for me to convert some form of old media into a new and more usable format. As a kid I remember taping records for my mom so she’d have music to listen to in the car. More recently I converted slides from my dad’s days in the Peace Corps into image files that I loaded on to a digital photo frame. This year I’m tackling some of the VHS home movies in the parental archive in the hopes that I can make a dent in the job of turning their videotape library into something watchable on TVs, PCs, and iPods.
On impulse I picked up a VuPoint ST100B Digital Video Converter on sale for $30 in a JustDeals offer earlier this week. (It’s $53.14 at Amazon now.) We have an old analog-to-digital converter, but it’s hardware we haven’t touched in years, and it’s been known to be finicky in the past. The VuPoint comes with some warning. It doesn’t play nice with Macs, and it only converts files into .asf format suitable for Windows Media Player. However, I figure I can download something off the net to transcode .asf files to .mp4 – something like the open-source HandBrake software we’ve used for Roku playback in our house. Once I’ve got a batch of .mp4 files, it’ll be a cinch to burn a DVD, transfer the lot to a USB stick, or steal my mother’s iPod Touch and upload the files there. Voila, old-media-to-new-media dilemma solved.
Perhaps I’m being over-optimistic about the conversion process with the VuPoint box. Anyone out there found a simpler, faster route to playable home movies? If this doesn’t work, I’ll be looking for suggestions.
I actually transferred a ton of old home movies on VHS last year. I just hooked a VCR up to a DVD recorder.
Then it’s as simple as pushing play on the VCR and pushing record on the DVD recorder.
Jay- Point taken, but I don’t have a DVD recorder, and even the cheap ones I’ve seen run $50. Also, I’m always worried about burned DVDs playing on every kind of DVD player (perhaps an outdated concern? It’s been a while since I burned anything to DVD). And I don’t just want DVDs, I want the actual digital files so I can play them on multiple devices.
Back in the day, my go to device was the Neuros OSD, just for the recording to a card functionality, never mind the network playback functionality that’s now a dime-a-dozen. With a fast card, it could generate excellent SD-quality files in a variety of formats. Might be worth seeing if you can pick up one used now.
I’ve been using the pinnacle video transfer for a couple years and it works great. Transfers in mpeg4 right to a USB stick. A little more expensive right now $100.
Surprise there aren’t more solutions out there.
http://bit.ly/hTHUWn
Gregg- Now that might be worth the money.
VHS is video is standard def. The first conversion turning it into .ASF format will compress that poor video and the result will be adequate at best. Converting the .ASF file to .MP4 will likely compress the file further and result in terrible image quality.
Test a short sample 1st before investing much time in this project.
Sadly, these videos are never going to be high-quality. But yes, I’ll see how the first tape comes out before repeating the process.
Yeah, that double transcode kInda sucks. The XP version of Windiws Movie Maker handles analog input/recording well, surpringly. Beyond that, yeah check out the various Pinnacle solutions. My mom did it even easier – took the tapes to a store and overpaid for someone to convert them fir her.
I picked up an old EyeTV hardware unit at a rummage sale (I live in a military town). Analog tuner/RCA inputs hooked up to VCR and good to go. Just use mpeg streamclip to transcode. It’s the one thing my old G5 iMac is good for……
I have had a Canopus device that worked well:
http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc300
For me, this falls into the category of something that I used to do myself, but now I pay someone else to do. The quality of the DVDs produced by commercial transfer services is good, and I can spend my time doing things that are more interesting and/or more difficult to farm out.
Several local retailers where I live resell the service provided by Yes Video.
http://www.yesvideo.com/
I can understand Dave’s opinion that this type of service is overpriced, but I guess it boils down to what your time is worth.
I have also used a Canopus product, the ADVC 110, for this sort of thing before. You just hook up the analog feed from your VCR via RCA and S-Video cables (if available for slightly better quality) and then use firewire out to your computer. You then record using Windows Movie Maker. You can save it with no encoding at all if you want (raw) or encode to mp4 or whatever you like. VERY good quality. Problem is of course the box is $220 or so on Amazon. And you’ll need a firewire input that you may or may not have.
I just use a dual-VHS/DVD recorder which was probably cheaper than this and works virtually automatically.
dwgsp, I assume it was overpriced – but with no idea what my mom paid. And obviously she was fine with whatever that number was. I’d probably do the same at this point. :) (But… an interesting post script. Regardless of what she paid, it wasn’t enough to keep the shop in business.)
Dave, I don’t understand your logic here. You think $100 for a video-to-USB seems like a good deal, but $50 for a DVD recorder is not? Let’s look at the perks for the DVD recorder:
– automatic hardcopy backup (10-year lifespan, but that’s an eternity)
– NO worry about initial compression concerns
– trivial, future-proof conversion to final format … everything understands “rip from DVD” format
FWIW, I’ve never had an issue burning onto a DVD and then reading it everywhere. I think there were problems initially (DVD+ versus DVD-), but most DVD players now understand MP3 CDs, DVDs that are just a collection of files, etc. Most even play DVD-RW and even DVD-RAM discs.
Good post, really something that a lot of us see — the slightly tech-enabled parents / relatives, and trying to bring those old formats forward so they don’t get lost.