I have some old vhs tapes that I am just tired of watching them take space, so I want to copy them to my PC and just throw them away after that. Those tapes can be separated on two categories, important and not so important.
1. The important ones are old political ads from Greek elections.Since they are a small part of history and they d be hard to find otherwise, I am thinking that the copies should be as high quality as possible. The original tapes are in the PAL format.
2. The not so important stuff are things that either might be worth uploading on youtube for others to see, or they would be nice to have in my personal archive. The former category includes stuff such as 1997 BBC coverage of UK election, along with Blair and Major's final interviews. The latter includes stuff such as the 1999 Grammy awards and some random stand up comedy specials. I don't think I care about getting the best quality from them.
An additional wrinkle is that while my old VCR can still properly play Tapes recorded in standard speed, it shows a ton of noisy lines on all tapes recorded with Slow Speeds.
From my research, one way would be to buy an decent PAL/NTSC VCR player of ebay but those are crazy expensive and I would have to hassle to sell it back. No thanks.
What I am thinking is paying money to a store to the job for the important tapes I want to have in high quality and then copy the rest of the tapes on my own.
A couple of issues.
a. What kind of equipment should i make sure that the store uses in order to ensure I get the best quality possible?
b. What's the best compromise between cost and value to copy the rest of the stuff?
I probably need a new VCR, a TV capture device and the appropriate software. Any suggestions?
Thanks
1. The important ones are old political ads from Greek elections.Since they are a small part of history and they d be hard to find otherwise, I am thinking that the copies should be as high quality as possible. The original tapes are in the PAL format.
2. The not so important stuff are things that either might be worth uploading on youtube for others to see, or they would be nice to have in my personal archive. The former category includes stuff such as 1997 BBC coverage of UK election, along with Blair and Major's final interviews. The latter includes stuff such as the 1999 Grammy awards and some random stand up comedy specials. I don't think I care about getting the best quality from them.
An additional wrinkle is that while my old VCR can still properly play Tapes recorded in standard speed, it shows a ton of noisy lines on all tapes recorded with Slow Speeds.
From my research, one way would be to buy an decent PAL/NTSC VCR player of ebay but those are crazy expensive and I would have to hassle to sell it back. No thanks.
What I am thinking is paying money to a store to the job for the important tapes I want to have in high quality and then copy the rest of the tapes on my own.
A couple of issues.
a. What kind of equipment should i make sure that the store uses in order to ensure I get the best quality possible?
b. What's the best compromise between cost and value to copy the rest of the stuff?
I probably need a new VCR, a TV capture device and the appropriate software. Any suggestions?
Thanks