The tapes, they hurt my eyes!

So, yes, VHS conversion to DVD.

Firstly, let me be honest here. I've been playing with MPEG, MPEG2, DIVX et al for around 9 years now. I was making VCD's with TMPGENC with the best of them. I've fought with capture cards, played with sorting out GOPS had minor breakdowns with audio / video sync. In short, I know a bit about DVD encoding and authoring.

And still it can be a nightmare!

(DANGER WILL ROBINSON - I WILL NOW GO INTO TECCYTALK)

Mostly it's a lot simpler now. I have my new (old) SVHS VCR connected via s-video to my Panasonic E55 recorder. I record the VHS to XP (the Panasonics best quality mode) then extract the disc onto my PC and re-encode it from the rather noisy 704x576 captured size (with tracking noise and whatever the TV station was stuffing into the side overscan) into a cropped, tidy 1/2 D1 352x576. The audio is stripped from the original file and multiplexed into the new file and, finally I edit the file into episodes, tidy any messy VHS ad breaks and save the new files.

Oh, did I say finally?

Of course I then author a nice DVD using DVD PRO and finally burn it to disc.

Hey come back, I think he's finished burbling!

Now that sounds hard. Well, it's easy once you know how and it doesnt take too long but the main issue here isnt technology ... its time.

It's not even the time it takes to do the work, I tend to be a night person anyway (ask my wife in the morning, I'm not a nice person at 7am). No, to meander back to my point, it's the time these things have been lurking in less than optimum conditions.

I'm presently going through the stack of doom known as "The Doctor Who" and general TV boxes. These have episodes of shows that arent on DVD, no one repeats the show and weren't even released on VHS officially. Only recorded from the UK Gold 1994/5 repeat showings or Bravo before it joined the soft-porn brigade of channels.

And some of them are not well.

Some became victims of a nasty leak here or there, some where on inferior tapes which probably didnt see out the 90's and some, well some have mould on that would scare the good Doctor.

So I've begun the painstaking process of triage. Some of these tapes just wont make it, some I wont even try. Anything, anything thats on DVD now wont even be attempted (well, if its in good condition I may scan to the end of the tape in case theres a fun overrun showing the state of the TV at the time).

And once its converted, tested and backed up. Those tapes are finally, finally going to the dump!