VHS to Digital Windows 10

Hickok357

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Jun 5, 2015
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My father is wanting to digitize our family home videos. This is proving to be a gargantuan headache and possible disaster. There are professional services that will do, but at a steep price. I have an old usb capture device that will hook up via rca jacks, it says EasyCap on it, but it's not working reliably or at all sometimes. I tried it with an old windows 7 laptop, but it didn't work.

Searching around the internet I can't find much. Basically there are a few devices that claim to work with windows 10, but the reviews for both are riddled with conflicting information.

Does anyone here know, and by know I mean you've personally got it working for yourself, of anything for saving our priceless memories? Well, it's looking like the price is thousands of dollars if I can't figure something out...
 
I did it some yeas ago by just playing the VHS normally, while at the same time recording from the TV to a recordable DVD player/writer that had a HDD. Then copied the recorded file to a DVD. One full VHS tape made one full DVD. Both picture and sound was recorded.
Only problem was, I was limited to max 10X speed DVDs, else the DVD recorder refused to format them.

Nigel
 

Hickok357

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Jun 5, 2015
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Thanks for the answers so far. Yeah, we're going down the try what's on Amazon route. My dad bought something made my Diamond because it was 35 bucks. We'll see how it goes, it may be a lot of buying and returning on amazon... If nothing works someone at my dads church has an old windows xp computer that was mothballed years ago, but it has a video capture card and the guy who owns it says it worked great when he used it, so we may just try to revive that computer and spend a few days saving what we can. The absolute last resort is putting a digital camera in front of a tv screen. I'll try to keep up on the updates, they may not come super fast, I'm pretty busy, but I imagine there are a lot of people in the same boat...
 
Been there. Done it. It took months. About 5% of VHS tapes (mostly made in the late 90s) were copyright protected at DVR level, so couldn't convert to DVD. If time is money, it's probably easier to replace the collection with pre-recorded DVDs, all things considered. VHS copied quality is sketchy too.
 

USAFRet

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For prerecorded VHS, no way I would go through this.

Mine, and the OP's, are family home videos.
 

Hickok357

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Jun 5, 2015
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Update. We got the capture card. It's a Diamond VC500 it even has "compatible with windows 10" written on the box, but, with the software provided, it does not work for me. I open up the ez grabber software and it gives me audio, but there is no video preview. If you record it does try to record video. I tried a shorter tape (45 minutes) and the resulting file was 5 seconds long. After a little bit of digging I was lead to trying a third party program, virtualdub. Still no preview screen, but it records and gives me a usable file. But, for 45 minutes of video it was a 55gb avi file. It took awhile to wash it through handbrake and turn it in to a easier to handle size. Also the cropping was a little bit odd. The top right corner seemed to bend in.

I tried it with my ancient windows 7 laptop and it works. I get the preview screen and it records. I didn't have enough time to do an extended recording, but it appears that, the biggest problem is Windows 10. I tried "compatibility mode" and it make zero difference. I honestly cannot think of a single thing compatibility mode has ever fixed for me...

It is by no means a solution, because this is trying to get something that works on Windows 10, because not everyone has an old windows 7 computer laying around, but we have a workaround.

Words cannot describe my disdain for Windows 10.