I have been reading up on this for weeks...now I'm just as confused as ever. I want to convert full length movies on VHS to CD's, without losing quality (is it possible to make them better?) My current computer is an Athalon XP 1900 w/512 MB DDR, 60 GB 7200 rpm, GeForce 3 Ti 200, DVD, and Acer 24x16x40. My DVD player in my entertainment system is a 5 disc Pioneer that will play cd-r's quite well. The manual states that it will play VCD's; does this mean it will play SVCD's as well? What hardware/software will I need to do this?? What are the specs on the hardware that I should look for? Please, I hope someone will take the time to help. (I also have home videos that I want to convert, but I'm sure the process will be the same?)

-- Tom Calvert (thcalvert@aep.com), January 11, 2002

Answers

I forgot to mention...my os is windows xp. Thanks in advance for any help.

-- Tom Calvert (thcalvert@aep.com), January 11, 2002.

Go to www.vcdhelp.com and look at the DVD player compatibility list to see what it says about your DVD player and SVCD. Typically Pioneer does have good support for SVCD, but I have heard of models being sold in Asia that didn't support it at all. VCDhelp also has some excellent guides to get you started. You need to buy some sort of capture card and software of various kinds. You can't ever record anything and make it better than the source. The best you can do is good quality as good as the source. VHS is not the best source. It's kind of like recording cassette tapes to CD. Yes, you certainly can do it, but a clean LP or another CD would be better audio sources to burn to CD. Similarly, something like laser disc or a digital camcorder are cleaner sources of video than VHS tapes. This is a very complicated question but I'll give you two possible ways to do it with capture cards I have used. 1) Buy an ATI card of some kind. I have the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon. Record in AVI mode using Huffy codec and convert in software to MPEG-1 for VCD or MPEG-2 for SVCD. Software conversions from AVI source do offer the best quality, but they take the most time. It is possible to use an ATI card to record directly to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, but this is not the best approach. 2) Buy a Dazzle DVC II and record directly to VCD or SVCD format (AVI recording is not possible with this card). The quality is excellent and it saves you tons of time over software encoding. The downside to the DVC II is that it has no TV tuner, so you have to plug the output a VCR into it if you want to record TV shows. In my opinion if you want to save time, the DVC II does offer outstanding quality and is better than direct MPEG-1/2 recording under ATI. The DVC II can be problematic to set up on some AMD systems though. If you have a VIA chipset on your motherboard, you should be OK. If you don't have a VIA chipset, it may not work at all. The ATI is much easier to set up. I suggest you read everything you can on the subject before you get started. It may not all make sense at first, but eventually it will. The more you know about what you are doing, the better. People who are unwilling to read guides are very rarely successful at making their own VCDs and SVCDs. Good sites to start looking besides VCDhelp are www.digital-digest.com, www.doom9.net, www.pcphotovideo.com and www.labdv.com. I would suggest doing some research and buying the capture card you think is best for you. Every card there is has people who love it and people who hate it. www.pricewatch.com is a good place to look for cheap prices on cards. Search under ATI or Dazzle, don't list individual models, or you may miss some matches with cheaper prices where they have the card listed under some variant spelling that won't match, like All In Wonder instead of All-in-Wonder, etc.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 11, 2002.