Converting vhs tapes to dvds

[hunter]

4. Converting tapes you made is easy.

I don't use a computer for that, just an older DVD recorder.

High quality VHS players sell at our thrift stores for ten bucks and I got the DVD recorder, which doesn't have a modern digital television receiver in it, as obsolete new-in-package surplus merchandise.

There are several layers of copy protection on commercial VHS tapes. Some older tapes have none. Our DVD recorder simply refuses to record tapes with copy protection, it's programmed to reject them. There are gadgets you can put between the VHS player and the DVD recorder that remove copy protection, and there are also computer video conversion cards and dongles that ignore copy protection.

BTW, Disney tapes and certain movies that appeal to the pirate crowd have the highest level of copy protection, sometimes at levels confusing to modern flat screen televisions. Our flat screen television does a marvelous job with most VHS tapes, they look better than they ever did on our CRT television. But I still see artifacts on the screen caused by copy protection, which I'm certain will appear in other sorts of digital conversion too, no matter what sort of device does the conversion.

It's actually pretty rare that a copy protected commercial movie that wan't available on VHS isn't available on DVD. I've accumulated DVDs of most of our old VHS movies.

Duplicating DVDs or converting them to another digital format is easy. My favorite method starts with Handbrake.

https://handbrake.fr

It's free, and it produces outputs that are friendly to most video editing software.