Converting Video to DVD/MP4

[MRAlan]

Hi All looking for advice please. I have over 100 videos I want converting to digital format......What I want to be able to acheive is put all my videos on a hard drive,.

What would you suggest the best hard and software to achieve this, and a breif explanation.

Thanks In advance.

Alan

 

[landzw]

if you have a mac, WinX DVD ripper is pretty good

Good settings are

256kps sound

2500kps for vid quality

use any high quality options if availible

25 fps

mp4 H.264 codec

Use original vid size and aspect ratio

Then you have a video format that will play on most things including ipad or touch

 

[robjcooper]

MRAlan,

When you say videos, do you mean analogue tapes like VHS, S-VHS, Video8 or Hi8 or do you mean DVDs?

If analogue tape is what you are talking about, then you will need some form of hardware analogue to digital converter to get them into the digital domain. As you also don't say what operating system you are using, it is hard to recommend anything software wise to convert them.

Please give us a bit more specific information and we can probably help you a bit further.

Cheers

Rob

 

[ultraminiature]

Assuming you mean from video tape (VCC200, Bata, VHS, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi8) you need a deck to play back the tape, a head cleaner (particularly if playing 20-30 year old tapes) a video capture device and appropriate audio and video cable RCA phono (left, right audio perhaps to a 3.5mm mini jack and RCA video or S-connector.

There are some inexpensive video capture USB dongles. I use Hauppauge 3000 Freeview/Freesat TV card, which after several upgrades to the software does a good job of importing and better than several of the cheaper composite and S-video input cards I tried.

WinTV imports to .ts and I use VideoReDo to edit out unwanted material (head and tail the original recording) and output to a smaller .mpg file. Nero does the same with slightly better compression without lost of quality.

For a better job and more powerful software I use a Canopus ADVC300 external box. The supplied Neo software edits digital video (DV format) as native and conversion to mpg for DVD or HD tape to Blu-ray as well as importing analogue video formats to DV (edit, merge and add effects along with DVC inputs) and optionally output to a range of other formats.

DivX is available on many DVD/Blu-ray players, portable devices and computers. Most options result in JPEG like compressions. E.g. A clip of a kitten at Home theatre option doubled the number of whiskers seen. Using DivX Author at the highest quality made a far more acceptable job and a much smaller file than the original MPG, but several times larger than the standard options gave.

I have also experimented with converting AVI (native DV input format) to MPG. This should reduce the size of the file and in DVD format give an acceptable quality. This was not always the case and some effort had to go into the options to get it right. If the imported tape is not to be edited with A/B roll over titles added or dubbed then VideoReDo works perfectly for cutting out unwanted material and does not convert when saving but a frame to frame copy so so quality is lost in the edit.

 

[robjcooper]

ultraminiature,

Why are you trawling this site and answering year old posts about file conversion (both video and audio)?

Seems a bit suspicious, but would be interested to know why.

 

[ultraminiature]

ultraminiature,

Why are you trawling this site and answering year old posts about file conversion (both video and audio)?

Seems a bit suspicious, but would be interested to know why.

Because I have been looking to see if there are alternatives or better solutions to what I have been using and so far there has not been. I have nothing to buy or sell in anyway related to the topic so why should there be anything suspicious?