Copy A Vhs To Hard Drive

[wastedsandman]

I have a Wintv card that you can plug a vcr in and watch tapes but how can I copy it so I can save it to a disk? Any free software?

[3RA1N1AC]

if you have a lot of hard drive space, try VirtualDub with the HuffyUV lossless AVI codec. this will create a huge file (approx. 20gb per hour, i think), but it will drop only a handful of frames compared to capturing straight to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 which is much more of a drag on the CPU. "lossless" means it is extremely high quality, so it will not look bad when you recompress it (as opposed to recompressing from a lossy format like MPEG-1/MPEG-2/DivX/etc).

then you can use VirtualDub again to compress to DivX or XviD, or use TmpgEnc to compress to MPEG-1/MPEG-2. in either case, you will want to use deinterlacing and video noise reduction when you compress, in order to clean the picture up a bit & make the VHS source easier to compress (the visual noise in TV/VHS results in poor compression, if you don't use noise reduction).

if you just want to capture straight to VCD-quality MPEG-1, i'd recommend WinDVR, but it is not a free program.