VHS to DVD Made Easy

[DudeAsInCool]

STATE OF THE ART

Videotape to DVD, Made Easy

By DAVID POGUE

Published: January 27, 2005

Whoever said "technology marches on" must have been kidding. Technology doesn't march; it sprints, dashes and zooms.

That relentless pace renders our storage media obsolete with appalling speed:5¼-inch floppies, Zip disks or whatever. And with the debut of each new storage format, millions of important files, photos, music and video have to be rescued from the last one.

At the moment, the most urgent conversion concerns videotape, whose signal begins to deteriorate in as little as 15 years. Rescuing tapes by copying them to fresh ones isn't an option, because you lose half the picture quality with each generation. You could play them into a computer for editing and DVD burning, but that's a months-long project. You could pay a company to transfer them to DVD, if you can stomach the cost and the possibility that something might happen to your precious tapes in the mail.

There is, fortunately, a safe, automated and relatively inexpensive solution to this problem: the combo VHS-DVD recorder. It looks like a VCR, but it can play or record both VHS tapes and blank DVD discs, and copy from one to the other, in either direction. Pressing a couple of buttons begins the process of copying a VHS tape to a DVD, with very little quality loss. (You can't duplicate copy-protected tapes or DVD's, of course; only tapes and discs you've recorded yourself.) And if your movies are on some other format, like 8-millimeter cassettes, you can plug the old camcorder into the back of this machine, hit Play, and walk away as the video is transferred to a DVD.

Read the full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/technolo...its/27stat.html

[moodyblue]

Cool! I'll have to get me one of those...

[slum_goddess]

fuck! i've been wanting to write on 'planned obsolescence' for some time now and hopefully, this will remind me. i want one of those as well but aren't they like 400$? (we've got like 300 films on vid and so far, the oldest--from 1989--is still perfect but we know we must get them all on disc ASAP). damn, more fucking money down the tubes.