Video to DVD

[sprintmp]

Hi

Not sure if this is the correct place to ask this, but I'm sure you'll tell me if it isn't..

I would like to transfer all my videos (VHS) to DVD. I have asked a couple of people in the office, and the concensus seems to be to buy a DVD recorder with a Video player in one unit. Now as there are only about 50 videos my budget is quite tight for this - although I suppose that I could continue using the DVD/RW after.

I had a look around and found just such a piece of equipment in ASDA of all places. It's made by Duel - which seems to be only available in ASDA - and costs £149. I can't remember the exact model number - but could find out later.

Do you think that this would be sufficient for what I want to do?

Thanks in advance for any advice

Pietro

[simpo two]

If you want to move away from VHS to DVD, you might as well buy a dedicated DVD recorder, or, better still, one with a hard drive as well.

The Asda machine sounds like it will do the job but get good branded media, eg Fuji. I expect it will be DVD+R, so if you want your discs to play on other machines as well, you will need to 'finalise' them into DVD-Video (see instructions).

NB 'Video' does not mean 'VHS'

[sprintmp]

Thanks for the advice.
P

[cirks]

alternatively buy a Pinacle Dazzle converter and plug it into your PC (see here. I've got the predecessor (can't off hand remember the name of it) and it cost me £40. Useful as it will do exactly what you want to do and if you've got an analogue camcorder etc will transfer from that too.

Try ebay! There are numerous other manufacturers that do similar products. If you intend transferring everything to DVD then little point in getting a combi-player as they (in the reviews) rarely come out anything like as well as dedicated units.

[sprintmp]

Cirks, that looks an even better solution. The Dazzle DVC 90 looks the biz. What does the 720x576 PAL resolution mean. Is this normal TV picture size?

P

[cirks]

sprintmp said:

What does the 720x576 PAL resolution mean. Is this normal TV picture size?

er, good question - I have no idea what std TV resolution is!! I feel a 'google' coming on........ Alternatively, I'm sure someone else will be able to answer. (p.s I got my item from Comet as a 'Manager's special clearance item - might be worth looking as it was cheaper than equivalents on ebay)

[simpo two]

sprintmp said:

What does the 720x576 PAL resolution mean. Is this normal TV picture size?P

Yep. That's telly.

[ErnestM]

720x576 is normal PAL.

There are also dual layer DVDs and burners out now where, through tactical use of good compression, you might be able to get, say, two movies on one disk (Oceans 11 & Oceans 12 for instance)...

ErnestM

[sprintmp]

Just thought I report back.

Bought the Dazzle and am now learning the pit-falls of video capture. For example I have now learnt that a SCART to S-VIDEO converter will only ever give B&W. You learn something new every day!

Am using the Pinicle S/W that came with the Dazzle and have also purchased some software from Serif. Also just purchased a 250gb USB drive - boy those AVIs are large!.

One slight problem is that when I capture straight to MPEG, it warns me that my PC may not be fast enough, and that I'll loose frames - which has happened. I'm runnibg a 2.2 gb Pentium 4 with 756mb memory. There are a number of processes running, so I guess that that may be problem? Does anyone know which of the processes I can safely stop. Obviously I'll need Explorer but don't need any internet access.

Any help apreciated......

Thanks

P

[ErnestM]

Which version of Pinnacle?

Capturing to AVI and then recompressing to MPEG might be a better approach. Of course you could always shoot for 1 to 2 GB of memory which would help things out. How fast is your hard drive? I find that the SATA II drives are almost a necessity for good video capture.

ErnestM

PS: multi core or hyperthreading processors help out a bit as well

[mikef]

sprintmp said:

I have now learnt that a SCART to S-VIDEO converter will only ever give B&W

That doesn't sound right to me - it sounds as though one device is set up for PAL (UK standard) and the other for NTSC (US standard)

[cirks]

mikef said:

sprintmp said: I have now learnt that a SCART to S-VIDEO converter will only ever give B&W That doesn't sound right to me - it sounds as though one device is set up for PAL (UK standard) and the other for NTSC (US standard)

Not right! I've used S to Scart and vice versa and get colour OK. Sounds like a setting on one end that you haven't got right. If going via TV etc, the AV settings usually have separate settings for say AV2 and AV2S and having it on AV2 causes pictures to be in B&W but AV2S is colour (well, our Panasonic does anyway)

[sprintmp]

I obtained the infomation here:

www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Studio+version+10?view=knowledgebase

Put in "Studio Version 9" in the product, "capture" in the category and "SCART" in the Question. At the bottom of the resulting page it says:

"4. SCART ADAPTER (europe only): Using a SCART adapter with an s-video output will guarantee a black and white picture. If you want to use the S-video-in, make sure you have a pure S-video output. If this is not the case, you will need to use the composite connections."

I'm new to all this so I may not be understanding it correctly.

P

[ErnestM]

Bad S-video cables will do the same thing. It'll drive you crazy trying to figure it out. It's easier to do a 1394 connection straight to PC if you are able...

ErnestM

[caduceus]

ErnestM said:

Bad S-video cables will do the same thing. It'll drive you crazy trying to figure it out. It's easier to do a 1394 connection straight to PC if you are able...

ErnestM

I know it was ErnestM who posted this, but can anyone tell me what/where the 1394 connection is on my Dell Dimension 4550 PC? Do all pc's have them?

I am trying to capture footage from my JVC digi camcorder using Pinnacle, and it says I need to connect to the 1394 port or words to that effect.

Thanks for any help.

[franv8]

1394 is Firewire, it's nto a standard fit on most PC's, although it seems to be available on more and more laptops as standard, however it get's slightly murkier as there are different Firewire speeds available and 4 wire and 6 wire etc.

If your machine doesn't have one, you can get add on cards for desktop pc's, and if it's a laptop, PCMCIA versions I believe do exist.

As for the PC performance issue, it is possible to create alternative 'profiles' for what processes the computer runs at start up, I made an optimised one for my laptop that I use most of the time, but it does take some figuring out which ones can be stopped, best way is to 'google' the process names, that often tells you what they do, you can probably strip many of them out for your video encoding sessions.

An alternative method for capturing the video, is to use a PVR, such as an Archos AV400, and capture the file to an AVI, then simply plug the PVR (it's a glorified media player with a hard disk) into the PC and copy the file over. Then you can use DVD authoring software if you need to burn a disk. I know you didn't want to outlay much, so this may only be an option if you know someone who has one.

Standard TV resolution, I believe is 625 lines, thsi may help or confuse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL

VHS has typically ony 350 ish lines, so you'd be up-scaling anyway.

[JonRB]

I know the original post was last year, but just for the record if you put an s-video feed into a device expecting PAL it will come out B&W. You just need to alter the settings on the device to tell it to expect s-video and you will get colour. This has nothing to do with the s-video to SCART converter. I used one of these on our old TV, but it was a SCART input that could handle PAL, s-video and RGB over SCART.

It is true, however, that if the device cannot understand s-video then you will just get B&W with the converter. Perhaps that is the case here?

Edited by JonRB on Tuesday 14th November 09:13