Is there any way I can move the contents of a videotape into a CD or on the hard drive?

Deeba

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~deeba~

I assume video tape is VHS or PAL.

You need to buy a TV Tuner or Video Capture card to do that. However you will need a good computer with lots of disk space and memory to do that. The quality of such card varies a lot!

Second option is to buy a cam-corder with AV in jacks. Once it is there you can do whatever you want to.

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A Proud Indian Canadian

Its simple if you understand the process:

1. From your tapes, the audio & video is digitized (onto the hard disk) –
• thorough a Video Capture Card.
2. The Captured Video needs to be transferred to a media,
• a DVD or a VCD (CD)

There are different tape formats in India (PAL)
Here in north America (NTSC). They are different. So you must know which format the tape is in ?

If they are from India you have to add another step.
Assuming you have tapes from N. America, in NTSC format
The first thing you have to do is to get a Video Capture Card.
It will have audio & video inputs, as well as the software to capture the video.
Connect you VCR to the card & capture the video.

Again you have to decide what format you want the video information digitized too ?
for e.g. a VCD or a DVD.

If you want to make a DVD, you will need to have a DVD burner on your computer & of course blank DVDs. There are a few different formats available for DVDs too, like DVD+R, DVD-R & DVD-RW, depends on the drive you get. Also, some consumer DVD players can’t play DVD-RWs so make sure you have the right hardware

The format for DVD is MPEG. Once you have the MPEG files on your hard disk, its just a matter of burning the DVD, you will again need a software to do that, it usually comes with your DVD Burner Drive.

Hope you understand !

You can also checkout some desi video stores which do this.. I am not sure about how much they charge for it.. but doing it by urself is always more fun and exciting..

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20020928/

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Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.

$20-$25 in Scarborough for creating DVD

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A Proud Indian Canadian

Ok guys - I need some real help on this.

I have a few video tapes - all in PAL, and I do want to convert them into DVDs. Am ready to buy the necessary hardware, which I suppose would be something to convert PAL into NTSC and also then digitise it.

Can anyone in Toronto help me do it - NOT thru directions on CD, but physically help me buy the necessary hardware, do the connections and try out the first few minutes of a video. (By the way, I also have a PAL VCR as well as multi system TV so seeing what we are converting will not be problem.)

After all this is the purpose of CD - helping each other - physically too if needed, right?

The reason for asking for someone's help is that buying the hardware (including a DVD burner) will be cheaper for me than to get them converted from someone - since I got quite a few family tapes collected in 15 years before I moved to Canada -wedding, children's, holidays, birthday parties, picnics etc.

Compensation? - good chai, nice snacks and lots of wonderful gup-shup

Chandresh

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Chandresh

Advice is free – lessons I charge for!!

GG has suggested going via camcorder. IMHO this would be the cheapest option if you have one.
If not a good capture card would work too. Products from pinnacle are a good bet
http://www.videohelp.com/capturecards.php

video>camcorder>comp/dvd/cd is the way to go for most folk who do not want to go thorugh the effort of a capture card for what would be a ,once in a way, need.
Moreover your camcorder manuals would have instructions on how to hookup to your vcr

Note for video res you can approximate 13gigs of harddisk space for every hour of footage that you dump onto disk.

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