Posted: 11/23/2025 10:41:58 PM EDT
[Last Edit: Klee][Edited]
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I finally picked up a good used VCR so I picked up a cheap usb video capture device from amazon, tried it on a older i3 laptop with Windows 10, it struggles a little so I plugged it into my Ubuntu Desktop and even tho it didn't officially support Linux it works just fine in OBS. I'm just testing it out with a old Wayne's World VHS tape to make my first recording.  My goal is saving all my old home video recordings to digital. Will need to dive into video editing I guess. Any tips on making video DVD's that will work in dedicated DVD players? |
I'm not lazy, I just really enjoy doing nothing.
Joined:
Mar 2019
Posts:
14467
EE: 100% (17)
USA
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I had a dozen or so DV tapes from our camcorder in the late 90s and early 2000s. We paid a company through Walmart and they converted them all to MP4. This was much easier and faster. Google three services and just pay someone. Seriously. |
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I suggest buying multiple capture devices. When I went down this road, I bought a handful of them off amazon. Tried them all out, compared the putout files, and returned all of them but the one that created the best file. They are not all created equal. Its been a while since I did that. No clue what the current options are. But I'm positive some of them will be better than others. If you're gonna bother investing the time to go through all your videos, you may as well have it creating the best possible files with the most detail and highest bitrate. You can always dumb it down later if you want. I put my home movies on my synology. Then allowed all the family members access so they could download them however they want. Everybody doesn't need 2 copies. If everybody has 1, then there are already offsite backups built into that model. |
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Buy a video capture device and use an old VCR. I use these for my projects some times. Not the same application but they work really well. They don't sell them at this site anymore but I'd try to find it elsewhere if I were looking for another. I'm sure just about anything you find will work though. https://www.adafruit.com/product/4715 OBS software is free and you can use that to record. https://obsproject.com/ You can also buy the HDMI version and record newer stuff. Add the home videos to Plex and they are accessible to watch whenever you want. |
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vhs-decode master race, checking in. https://wswartzendruber.net/uploads/t2-sample.mkv The tape deck has bad heads, though. |