1. The longer they are in the loft the more likely it is they won’t work
2. Save space and store them safely on HDD / DVD.
Converting VHS to DVD
So firstly I decided to invest in a Dazzle Video Creator which basically captures the SCART output from the VHS and connects to the laptop via USB and can output MPG of different qualities or DVD. The manufacturer of Dazzle is pinnacle and a link to their website can be found here.
The leads provided with the Video Creator are RCA Phono and as most VHS video players are SCART leads I need to buy a converter which looks like this:
You can find these on Ebay called something similar to ‘SCART ADAPTER 3 x RCA PHONO S-Video Adaptor’ and only cost approx £2.
I wont go into how to use the Pinnacle Studio software but wanted to tell you about a really useful bit of software called Free Video Dub.
So the scenario is I’d press play on the VHS recorder and you’d get the usual fuzzy lines across the screen for the first couple of seconds and then 10 seconds or so of nothing. Unfortunately Pinnacle did not have the option to chop the mpg file that was output all it would do is create a reference file that was only useful in Pinnacle Studio – not great.
Editing Video MPG’s
So here’s where Free Video Dub comes in. Basically all you need to do is fire up this app select your input mpg file and then select an output mpg file and find the start and end points of the then cut off the rest, then you have a nice clean video file with no waste and also reduces the size of the mpg file as well.
A screenshot of the software can be seen below:
Hope that's of some use to someone!
