Using a VCR and my computer to burn DVD's?

I have some VHS videos that I want on DVD. My computer has an internal DVD-R/RW burner, and I've got software called CyberLink PowerDVD. I also have blank DVD-RW's. My VCR is a Sharp (VC-H998), VHS HQ, VCR plus+3 Cable box Control (whatever all that means). I've got those colourful wires too (for video and audio L-R). My motherboard is an Asus A8V-E SE.

My question is: What do I have to do to enable me to put a VHS video into my VCR, then burn to a DVD the video of the VHS?
There are no colourful connectors on the back of my computer that the colourful jacks will fit in. So do I need a new video card or something? My current graphics card is: ASUS Extreme AX550 Series (Radeon X550)

-Thanks

P.S. Will someone tell me exactly what the name of the colourful video/audio wires is?

you need a VIVO enabled video card or a video encoding box.

there's the yellow cinch jack it's the video signal. red and white are the stereo audio signals. When your VCR has SuperVHS out then use that instead, it has a better image quality.

Your Graphics card has no Video-In AFAIK. you need something like this:
http://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product_Id=3717720&JRSource=overture.campaignname

If you have a MiniDV Video Camera, you may check if it has a working Vido In (not DV-In), so you could "stream" it trough the camera, over firewire to the pc. well, if you have such a camera and a firewire connection. If you don't, the video digitizer I mentioned before is the cheapest.

Ah, ok. Would that work with a DVD player as well? (in case I want to burn DVD's)

That's what I use, works well. It costs more than simple digitizer of course, but dv-camera can be used for other things too.



Should work if you have a SCART with three video jacks in the other end. But you would get better quality if you copy the DVD straight to HD and then burn that. Of course you might have to remove copy protection etc with suitable softs and re-ecode it to fit to single layer DVD.

I got a TV card for £40ish I think and played my videos into it via analogue using MS Moviemaker2 and then used Nero (full version) to burn to DVD. It's pretty important you have Windows XP as 98 can only record 4GB files which is around 10 minutes at 640x480 uncompressed.

po: If you want to back up a commercial DVD, Macrovision protection will stop you (yes, even if you hook your DVD player up to your VIVO capable gfx card).

You would be far better served by placing the DVD in your computer's DVD-ROM and making use of DVD Decrypter (Google is your friend). Retail DVD's have been employing further anti-piracy protection which will prevent DVD Decrypter making a backup. If you encounter such a DVD, you're on your own because I can't be bothered to find out where the instructions are to make backups of protected discs.

**EDIT** I almost forgot, to crunch a DVD-9 (most retail discs) down to a DVD-5 (most DVD-R's) you can use DVDShrink.

Get yourself the following:

VirtualDub:
http://www.virtualdub.org/

Huffyuv codec:
http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html#Changes

TV Wonder video capture card by ATI (available at your local Best Buy). The PRO version I think comes with an extension cable, may additionally support Svideo, and comes with a remote, which is fairly useless.

To backup a video tape, you'll need to disable the macrovision detection on the card or all it will record is a gray screen. I'm sure a google for macrovision "tv wonder" disable would be most enlightening.

Then you need to capture. To do that you first need to hook up those yellow red and white cables to your capture card. You may need to click the little speaker icon on your taskbar and check to see if on the recording screen, line-in is enabled for recording.

Now the reason I told you to get virtualdub and huffyuv is as follows.

Huffyuv is a codec which does LOSSLESS huffman (zip) compression on video. It is therefore really fast, but the video files it produces are huge. Why do you want a codec that compresses fast but makes huge files? Because you need to compress fast if you are to avoid missing frames when capturing. Missed frames mean jumpy video. Why not capture to uncompressed video then? Because you may not be able to capture even a half an hour of video if you don't compress it at all. Now, if you have a faster CPU, you might be able to compress with DVIX or something in realtime, but you're unlikely to be able to do so without losing some quality because you have to use the fastest settings when compressing.

Why use virtualdub when the video card has it's own capture program? Because the capture program sucks. Virtualdub captures video really fast. That means no missed frames. It also can trick the capture card, and capture 640x480 video if the card is physically capable of it, but the manufactuer has disabled it because they are jerks, like ATI has. Also, Virtualdub has great editing capabilities as far as cutting out portions of the video including indivdual frames, which is useful for removing the static before the tape begins, or for removing commercials. And, it supports filtering the images with various plugins for removing noise, resizing, and color correction.

So there you go, that's everything you need to know about capturing the video I think... I don't know about how to burn DVD's.

Virtual Dub is great, I used it to capture and edit my home videos.

Thanks for the advice.
sswift: so it would compress the (let's say 2 hour) movie to under 4.7 GB's?

po:

Huffyuv? No.

I assume you are talking about putting the video onto the disk itself. Virtualdub is only useful for capturing the video, and then encoding it in some intermediate format.

To make a DVD, you need some kind of DVD authoring software which can convert the video to MPEG2 and create the DVD menus and stuff. Virtualdub works with AVI format with whatever codec you choose. There are some MPEG2-based codecs, like Divx, but that's not the same as actual MPEG2.

*sigh* This is way more complicated than I thought. Expensive too. Thanks anyways though.

DVDShrink is far from complicated. You puts your disc in, press a few buttons and you're done.

Why don't you just buy a standalone DVD recorder? No idea about Canada, but here Somerfields are selling a really nice Daewoo dual format DVD recorder for £70. It won't resolve the DVD to DVD copying, but it makes VHS to DVD-R really simple, and has a lot of other uses too.

I bought a standalone Liteon dual format DVD recorder - connected up the VHS to the scart socket - and recorded all my VHS tapes to DVD with no problem - unless recording in real time is a problem. I get up to 6 hours on each DVD and unless the quality of the original tape is bad the quality seems fine to me.
Regards

It's just the whole process of capturing the VHS then converting to mpg2. It's probably more worthwhile buying a DVD rocorder like Gab and Big suggested.

My dad bought a DVD recorder for around £80 and they guy assured him it could record from video to DVD but my dad says it doesn't. Mindyou, he's probably just c*ocked up somewhere....

Some DVD recorders don't have dual scarts, which can be a problem for Europeans as we tend to use scarts for everything. If it's only got a scart out, you will have trouble unless you can get the vhs to output to component or something else.

The Daewoo I mentioned and the LiteOn that BigH mentioned both have dual scarts and are both packed with features. I actually bought the LiteOn initially and returned it because it failed to do timed recordings all the time. Just happened to find the Daewoo for £30 less and it has all the same features as the LiteOn but makes a lot less noise. They're both feature packed and good value though.