xfering vcr tapes to cd's?

a friend of my mothers asked what she would need to xfer old family vcr tapes, onto cd's that could be watched on their new DVD player. she in fact might have me build her a new machine for it, i guess they have quite a bit of tapes, and need a new machine anyway (no burner and its 4 years old and has lots of problems)

so, i know that i will need to include some sort of video capture card.. and the cables that connect the vcr to the computer are? and how do i get the sound in? are their sync up problems? what would be the most cost effective, easy to use solution or isnt there such a thing?

thx in advance everyone

first of all I would say go with a capture card not a USB capture device (ie. dazzle usb capture devices). An all in wonder radeon would be great... look for a cheap old one like a AIW 7500 or lower if they wont be doing any gaming, the AIW radeon 9700 has some cool features that will "clean up" the videos to make the image quality better but it definetly comes at a premium. The AIW cards come with Ulead video studio so they can also edit their videos (add titles, wipe effects ect.). You can also use a PCI capture card such as the TV wonder PCI (again dont get the USB one).

Make sure whatever capture card you get has "composite" inputs (AKA RCA inputs... those yellow, red and white inputs/outputs that are on VCRs/TVs ect). That way you can just connect the VCR to the Computer just like you connect the VCR to the TV, that will also take care of the audio.

Find out their price range and see if you can get a DVD burner and take the cost of the burner out of the CPU and motherboard... The faster the CPU the better but you can do this on a P3 600mhz or equivalent. The DVD burner will give them higher quality and better compatabilty then VCD or SVCD would. If you cant squeeze in a DVD burner then a CD burner will have to do but make sure that their DVD player can play VCDs or even better SVCDs.

Video files are large so it would be nice to get a lot of RAM (preferably 512 and up, 256 can do the job though) and a fairly large hard drive or 2... at least 40gigs total.

Last but not least is CD burning software, Roxio easy cd creator is simple but only does VCDs not SVCDs. Nero isnt quite as simple but will do both formats. I would assume any DVD burner would come with DVD authoring software but i dont know how good it would be or what programs might do a better job (Roxio has some kind of DVD burning software which might be worth a look).

Think I got everything in there but I probably missed something...post back if you want more or more specific advice, Im sure other members will add their opinions too.

EDIT: The audio can get out of sync with the video if a low end video codec is used (low end MPEG or MPEG2 codec), if that happens you can work around that problem by only encoding 15min or so of video at a time, so you would have maybe 4 fifteen minute videos on a CD... you can set up a menu like on store bought DVDs so you can select which of the 4 you want to watch with the right VCD software. Oh BTW WinXP would be a good OS for doing this. Knew I forgot something.

wow thx for the info! their pricerange i guess is under 1000. as of now i dont think they need a monitor.. i could be wrong, i'll check back with them. i dont believe they have any kids living with them any longer, so i dont think they game much, if they did i'm sure a 7500 based card would still be overkill for them.

A card like this should do, newegg.com has them for $67 but they are OEM so I dont know if it will come with Ulead Video studio or anything. The AIW 7500 retail is only $127 at newegg anyways.

I dont know if you will be able to squeeze in a DVD burner with that price range (I am Canadian...dont really know American prices) so make sure they can play SVCDs on their DVD player (or VCD but VCDs have to be done in MPEG1 so the quality isnt very good, 320x240... think streaming video for a quality comparison). SVCDs can be done at 480x480 so the quality is better then VCDs but still not DVD quality, of course these are only VCR tapes so they are not going to be DVD quality regardless.

SVCDs can be up to about 30min on a single CD and VCD can hold about 70min. VCD is pretty poor quality and SVCD is closer to VCR quality but I have seen some SVCDs that could rival DVD... still cant figure out how to make them look that good though.

Ok, I have a TV Wonder, and I have trouble recording in the first place. When I put the quality settings up to record, which is only 640x480, is will only record for 56 seconds. I have around 30gb free, shouldn't it do better than that? Is there any way to record directly to cd?

No you cant record directly to CD. I have an AIW radeon 8500dv so I dont know if it would be the same for you as it is me but I think you need go into your settings (in the TV player) and define how much hard drive space it can use, give it like 10 gigs or something that will give you like 6 hours of recording or more.

I have to go into Setup, then digital VCR, then Disk Space and tell it how much HD space it can use (for digital VCR) and i have to run the "initialization wizard" on the display tab (still in the Setup for the TV player) and define how much space it can use for tv on demand (TIVO like function).

hope that helps

well I don't seem to have the "initialization wizard" thing. I have a slider that allows me to change how much space i will allocate. even if i give it everything i have it still stays at the same time. no matter where i put the slider it gives me the same amount of time i can record unless i give it no space at all. its like its limited or something. I'm going to look and see if there's a new version of the program online, since i've has this one for a year an a half. Hope i don't crash anything during the bears game

woohoo, it worked. And now refresh rate is faster, but quality has dropped. sort of wierd. But more importantly, the recording thing works like its supposed to. Must have been a limiter on the old one to prevent preople from copying movies or something. Thanks for the help