Burn Your Memories - VHS to DVD : VHS to DVD

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Memories and VHS tapes have one thing in common – they fade over time. But fortunately, DVDs come to the rescue. If you have a large collection of family memories and home videos on VHS tapes, they won’t live for very long. As years go by, the quality of VHS tapes degrades and the more you play them, the more they wear out. If you want to keep these memories, you should copy VHS to DVD. There are many ways to do it. The process is not as simple as converting from other formats because usually you have only one VHS copy to rely on.

Your movies can always be with you, if you have a portable movie player – i.e. an iPod, or Zune, or a Palm or any other similar device. If you have a DVD, you can use a con-verter program and convert your videos to a format, which is playable on a portable vid-eo player. Among the many programs, which allow such conversion, Videora is one of the best because it is easy to use and you can quickly make your DVDs playable on your iPod.

The easiest (but certainly not the cheapest) way to transfer VHS to DVD is to outsource it to a company. When you outsource to a company, you don’t have to deal with all the technical details of the conversion. You bring them your VHS tapes and after some time go and collect the ready DVDs. This way you can quickly save your memories.

If you want to transfer your VHS to DVD on your own, there are many opportunities but usually they take a lot of time. The step, which requires the most time, is the process of converting the analog video to digital via an analog-to-DV converter. The process in-cludes encoding in MPEG-2 format and authoring a DVD. This is the best way to go, if you need to make edits to your video. But you must be prepared that converting 1 hour of video from VHS to DVD can take many hours or even days!

A faster option to convert from VHS to DVD is to use a hardware capture device. This way of conversion limits the opportunities to edit the video but converting one hour of video takes only one hour. After you have converted the video to MPEG-2, the next step is to record the DVD.

If the videos you want to convert are on your camcorder, then the procedure is simple – attach the camcorder to a DVD recorder and the VHS will be copied to DVDs right away. If you don’t need to make edits to your video and want to transfer it to DVD as it is, choose this option.

The options to convert your memories from VHS to DVD are many. Depending on your time, budget and the need to make edits, you will choose one way or the other.