I posted this on the movies & home theatre forum and got no responses, so I figure I'll let GD take a look.



I've been reading up on this a little, but I keep getting bogged down in the negative reviews for various converters.

Any opinions here on the best-for-the-money converters?  Principally home movies in VHS and a Mac based home computer system.

Price is not necessarily the most important factor, but I don't want to spend too much for a converter that doesn't work properly.

I'd probably go up in price for the right equipment, but not hundreds of dollars.

Thanks for any input.

You're real close to the end of the window where consumer machines to do this just don't exist anymore, since DVD is a nearly-obsolete medium, and VHS is long considered obsolete.

If you're not happy with any of the Go-Video type machines which accept both a VHS tape and a blank DVD-R, and play/capture the VHS tape while recording to the DVD-R, then your next step is going to have to be a video capture solution. Those were kind of common once, but getting rarer/older/harder to find. Might be some standalone USB video capture solutions you can still find cheap, and can use those to capture VHS output from an old VHS player in 480p resolution.

If you capture digitally, no real reason to record to DVD-R, unless that's your only playback option. 480p upscaled VHS video capture transcoded to MP4 is pretty compact, and you can store a wall full of tapes or more on just about any modern internal HDD.

I've got a region-free VHS to DVD Go-Video copier I used back in the mid 2000s to transfer tape library stuff to DVD, but that's all long since been ripped to permanent digital storage on my media server.

Thanks for that.

I guess I really don't need the tape to disc option, I just wanna get the home movies in digital format, before everything is obsolete.

Do you still have a working VCR?  There's a number on inexpensive devices you can use to stream the video to your computer.

http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/easy-vhs-to-dvd/standard/overview.html?gclid=CO-8yeedws8CFcNZhgod6h4GSw

I have an older model by Roxio, but it worked ok.  Keep in mind the resolution is going to look horrible on your monitor.  You'll want to clean up the video, but I think this package has the software to do it,

This is the Mac version http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/easy-vhs-to-dvd/mac/overview.html

Years ago I went the easy route and used a DVD recorder to transfer directly to disc. Worked out well at the time.

I'm currently working on transfering those discs to digital.

It wont be cheap.

https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-DVR620-Recorder-Black-Discontinued/dp/B001T6K7G6/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1475621883&sr=8-4&keywords=dvd+vhs+converter

I had several VHS tapes put on a disc at Costco. They did a fine job.

we're doing this right now - bought a converter at fry for $50, took a VHS player. plus the player into the converter and the USB cable into the mac. Had to install some software. then it is really a matter of running the program and pushing play on the VCR.

then I pull them movie in to iMovie and clean it up. Then it gets written to a DVD.

it is as painless as you can get.

Buddy of mine used to work in a "Store" doing this sort of work. It was a near daily occurrence for someone to roll in with the VHS collection and freak out over conversion costs.

I'm not talking about home movies. They wanted to change all their stories, "Die Hard" etc, to DVD. Not only was it illegal, and he couldn't do the work, it would have been expensive. People got very angry.

I'm having 25 8mm reals converted. Estimate is $160. Could be less if the reels aren't full of video.

Can't wait to see what's on them.  Dates range from early 60's to 1979.

Family treasure.  

I use Pinnacle Studio capture feature.  Best Buy has an adapter to connect the VCR component to USB.  Start VCR and let play while Pinnacle captures.  Burn to DVD.

We have a Minerva real-time analog to DVD-compliant mpeg converter sitting on a shelf.
It has video & audio inputs and connects to a computer. There's an interface for the device which allows you to configure settings for the bit rate and such.

Basically, it's built for studio production and video to satellite broadcast for the big networks, cable TV, etc. You can find them on eBay for about 500-1000 bucks now depending on the unit's features (10 years ago they were about $15K, but HD video became popular and the Standard Definition VHS and DVD went out of fashion soon after). Anyhow, for SD video, it's a very high quality professional / industrial device. I recommend them if you have a lot to transfer and want top notch image quality.

ETA I think we still have some pinnacle and AJA cards that fit into PCI slots, which I seem to recall doing pretty good conversion work ok too.

If you're going to do it yourself on a shoestring, I'd recommend taking a look at one of these: Pinnacle Systems Video Capture Cards. You can find them for less than a hundred bucks and they will perform the job. They're not a high-end device, but if you just want to make a cheap digital back-up, the kit is set up to connect with standard, consumer grade VHS outputs (like Composite Video (RCA or S-Video (mini-DIN) and RCA audio jacks). The more sophisticated devices offer high-fidelity input and output, plus allow deck control. Professional grade capture cards tend to be for editing of things like TV shows, commercials, etc. Industrial converter boards and appliances are usually a bit more specialized and limited in function, but ones like the Minerva I mentioned offer the same mpeg quality as the production companies who stamp out the DVD's you buy commercially. Minerva or Optibase converters are just a couple examples of the type of  many of them use. Depending on what you're willing to spend, how much video you have to capture and the quality you want in the end, you might be able to put a nice dubbing system together for SD video pretty cheap because most of that gear has gone way down in price in the last few years.

Good luck. I hope you can enjoy your videos for a long time now.

I have a new in box VHS tape of "Salmon Scam", about pacific NW closure of most successful salmon hatchery, so successful was about to lose the "Endangered Species Listing", and loss of all that lovely Federal Control of the real estate.

Here in Maine, the only salmon on the listing is a hybrid from two different rivers that is our "endangered species listing control mechanism.  Very few salmon, no more fishing.

Decent VHS - DVD recorder on ebay. It does the job. I just got finished converting a ton of VHS-C tapes on a less than magnificent setup. The tapes through my nicer VCR are of the same quality as what came out on the DVD. No artifacts to speak of, etc. When you get done with it, use it as a spare DVR or put it back on ebay

Thanks for all the good info.  Unfortunately, the Pinnacle system is not MAC compatible.

Are you using a desktop mac that has PCI, a laptop or something else?

I bought one of these in '05, still working like a champ.  They show up on eBay from time to time:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/sony_dvdirect/

You can always buy a VHS/DVD combo set box and then record direct to DVD's... then use the DVD's on your PC.

Had a professional shop do one...turned out like crap.

Using either a MacBook Pro laptop or an iMac desktop.

Sorry, don't know what a PCI is.

PCI slots are a way of adding extra input/output for desktop systems. Basically, circuit boards with connectors for network, audio, video and other peripheral stuff are made to fit into PCI slots.
Even though your macs probably don't have PCI slots, there may be a workaround.

Here's one way to attach an outboard PCI card using an expansion box:
//www.magma.com/products/pci/

However, before going too far down the rabbit hole with all that..
find out which port your mac has




Odds are pretty good that you probably have a Firewire port on your mac (those are the ports that have the little lightning bolt icon).
Here's an outboard device that converts analog to digital:
https://www.cnet.com/products/datavideo-dac-200-digital-video-converter-video-capture-adapter-firewire/specs/

If you had a Windows machine I would tell you to buy a Slingbox for $100 and a copy of the Frapps software and that would allow you to view and record the tapes on a computer.  You could view them on your mac with a slingbox, I just don't know of any software for a mac that does what Frapps does.



The bonus to buying the slingbox is you could use it even after you are done with your VHS project.

I don't own a mac so I don't know how well this works, but here is an article from mac world about this issue.  http://www.macworld.com/article/1030972/software-graphics/fromvhstodvd.html It is from 2004 so it is very old but the idea should be correct.

Most of the gee-whiz high quality firewire or pci capture solutions from last decade don't work on current macs any longer (not to mention macs don't have native firewire ports any longer), but USB composite video capture solutions are likely to still work.

I've got a $30 USB TV Tuner that includes composite and S-Video inputs, and you could just plug your VHS VCR into something like that - but that's for my Windows boxes.

Like everything else Mac, there are far fewer versions of hardware to get macos drivers and support. If you're still on yosemite (osx 10.10) or earlier, you can get the AVerCaptureM, which has been discontinued, but may still be available in stock somewhere online.