How to digitalize video?

[Guy from the 80's]

I'm getting old, my youth was in the 90's and early 2000. I got some video I would like to digitalize. How do you do this?

 

[mad825]

I suppose you could be much more clearer when you mean "digitalize". what medium/device was used to record this information? how is this information stored? tape?

In most cases it's just getting the right cable to connect I.e RGB to VGA.

Edit: Now that I think about it , you could use a TV tuner card to connect and capture/record.

 

[Guy from the 80's]

Ok, I guess it would be some type of tape. Its a girlfriend of mine that asked because I'm supposed to be the clever one.

I greatly appreciate your input

 

[evilneko]

You need two things:

1. A decent video capture device for your computer.
2. A decent piece of software to go with #1. This...is harder to find than it sounds. Cheap capture devices often come with really shitty software, and are often incompatible with some software packagaes. For example, I've found precisely one free app that is both decent and compatible with my device. And it still kinda sucks.

Actually, you do need a third thing, but that kinda goes without saying: a cable and possibly adapters to connect the video source to the computer.

 

[Guy from the 80's]

Cheers mr.evil.

May I ask if you could name the names of these softwares?

 

[evilneko]

Cheers mr.evil.

May I ask if you could name the names of these softwares?

AVS Video Recorder is what I use with my device (a SIIG-branded Somagic Easycap. Piece of shit, don't buy it unless you just want something very basic). It came with this program called Honestech VHS to DVD, which pretty much sucks. Few features and prone to crashing.

I've attempted to use VirtualDub but it lagged like hell, possibly due to the device having like no processing power of its own.

Blaze Media Pro pulled video from the device, but not audio (obviously meant for higher-end capping devices, which actually lack audio inputs, requiring you to plug audio into your soundcard, but that introduces the problem of possible a/v sync issues).

IIRC, Roxio Creator wasn't compatible with the device at all, wouldn't even pick it up. Or maybe that was Ulead.

As you can probably tell, a lot depends on the device itself. If you get a good device (which'll probably have "Hauppage" in the name and run you $60-100+, as opposed to my $15 piece of crap) you'll have a greater choice of software that works with it, and it might even encode the video for you on-the-fly, which will save you time and diskspace. My device for example only produces basic MPEG-2 (video and audio)--a one hour recording will be roughly 1.5GB, which I then encode to MP4 with handbrake. Fortunately handbrake is damn fast, encoding an hour recording in about 5 minutes. Other encoding software (gui stuff) can take 15-20 mins for the same.

Of course, a lot also depends on what the source of the video is and how often you intend to actually do this. It's probably not worth bothering with anything fancy if you're just ripping some old VHS tapes, for example. Depends how much you value the video. I keep saying my device is crap but it works for what I use it for, high quality isn't necessary. I will however suggest that if you go with a cheapo, be sure your computer has the horsepower for it, because it'll be doing all the work. My laptop with a 2GHz dual core (and a high/mid-range nvidia graphics chip) isn't beefy enough to reliably record without dropping frames using my device + AVS. And even my 2.4GHz quad core desktop gets noticeably bogged down with it. (AVS may be part of the problem too, it doesn't seem to be very efficient)