Convert Your VHS Tape to DVD – Made Easy!

Convert your tape to DVD

Do you have a bunch of home movies that need to be converted from VHS tape to DVD? Maybe you have 8mm, Hi-8 or VHS-C video tapes that need to be moved to a lasting easy to way to share with family and friends. In this tutorial I am going to give you a step by step method to convert that family vacation that you have stored on your obsolete  tape to DVD.

I’ll show you how to do it yourself. Be warned that it is mildly technical and although not difficult it does require time. There are actually several solutions available but the fastest and easiest is to buy a stand alone DVD recorder, plug a VHS player or your video camera into it and hit the record button.  It does the job but you probably won’t be happy with the results. I have experimented with a few different  methods and I’ll show you step by step what works for me and gets very good results.

What You Will Need to capture your tape to DVD

There are basically 3 components to capturing your home movie memories from tape to DVD.

• a computer
• a play back device (camera or vcr)
• some type of capture hardware
• software

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m not going to debate the merits of PC vs Macs or which brand or model computer is better than the other. They are all great, they all do the job some better than others, Its a matter of what you are used to or comfortable with.

The Computer

PC Minimum System Requirements:

• Microsoft® Windows 7 Home Premium (32- or 64-bit), Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Basic SP2, Windows® XP SP3 (32-bit) or SP2 (64-bit), 1 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM
• DirectX 9 compatible graphics card or higher, sound card, DVD-ROM drive
• 2 GB free hard drive space for installation
• Windows Media Player 10 or higher
• CD Writer for audio CD and DVD Writer for DVD
• Internet Explorer 7 and 8
• QuickTime player version 7.6 for some functionality
• One available USB 2.0 port

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

• Macintosh® computer with a Dual Processor PowerPC™ G5, or Intel® processor
• DVD recordable drive for DVD-Video creation
• Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6
• 512MB RAM
• 15GB free hard disk space recommended
• Available USB 2.0 port
• iMovie® HD, ’08, or ’09

Remember minimum requirements is the very LEAST that is required to convert tape to DVD. In this process more is better. It makes things go faster and smoother.

My Personal Computer setup to convert Tape to DVD:

• HP Pavilion Elite e9262f
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
• Core-i5-750 2.66 GHz processor
• SuperMulti DVD Burner
• 6 GB ram memory
• 1 TB hard drive (I also added an external 500gb hard drive for storage)

If you want more specs on my system take a look at HP’s website here.

If you have any questions regarding whether or not your computer will do the trick – Post a question in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer it.

Next:

Tape to DVD:  The Capture Hardware