IT Professionals

VHS To AVI Or Mpeg Or Even QuickTime?

Posted by on Aug 1, 2006 | One Comment

Recently one Lockergnome fan wrote in:

Hi, Matt.

I don’t know if I’m emailing the right person or not. I’ve been a long time reader and fan, and have learned a lot! However, I am looking to take my old VHS movies and tapes and want to make them into .AVI or mpeg or even QuickTime. I found an ebook that was written by Jake Ludington about converting VHS to DVD. I ultimately want to do that, however in the interim, I want to store the movies in a file format and ultimately burn them to DVD when I want to watch them, or some just watch from the computer.

I know I can use Windows XP’s built in recorder, but I don’t want a 15gig file for an hour’s worth of tape. I want it compressed down to like 200 meg or something like that. I have no idea what software program will do this, let alone how to get it started, as to the best or a very good TV card.

Can you help guide me? Thanks!

Eric


Now I used to be pretty hip to this whole transferal game, but it has been a long time since I even owned a VHS tape, much less transferred one. With this in mind, I am turning this over to you, the readers. What are your thoughts as to Eric’s best option?

[tags]dvd,vhs,mpeg,file conversion,file convert,video transfer[/tags]

  • http://none Wesley

    This is actually fairly simple to do. You will need a capture card ( card that supports video in, and you will also need a a Program such as VirtualDub to filter.

    As far as the size in concerned, if you are looking at compressing the file, look into downloading codecs such as divx, that will take a raw AVI file and encode it.

    it sounds more complicated than it actually is, but its a failrly easy process once you fiddle with it a little bit.