Signs of the Times – VHS Tapes No More
The title on the LA Times article was, fittingly, “VHS Era Winding Down”. The last supplier of VHS tapes is going out of business. Everything changes, I know. Heck, I remember when we were using those big 8 track things. I even remember selling some of those in a garage sale back in the late 1990s. And that was after VHS beat out BetaMax (remember?) for sole ownership of the video player market, back in the 1980s.
No more movies are being published in VHS format, and you can’t find them at Best Buy or anywhere else, except maybe a flea market. I’m not to sorry to see the VHS format go away. I can remember trying to rewind them after one of my kids managed to pull out all the tape – it was an impossible task. And I left more than one in the car in the heat, making that movie unwatchable.
I have one precious VHS from 20 years ago when I appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy! I have been wanting to convert it to DVD for some time, and I asked Robert Silva, Guide to Home Theater at About.com, for some suggestions about three ways a consumer can copy VHS tapes to DVD. Here are the options he suggested:
1. Connecting a VCR to a DVD Recorder (the same connections that you use to connect a camcorder to a VCR or two VCRs together).
2. Using a DVD Recorder/VCR Combination unit (most of these units have a cross-dubbing function).
3. Connecting your VCR to a PC via a analog-to-digital video transfer device and then recording your VHS video to the PC’s hard drive and then writing the recorded video to DVD using the PC’s DVDwriter. Also, Ion Audio actually makes a VCR that can be connected to a PC via the USB port that might be worth checking if you choose this option.
For more details on this aspect of copying VHS to DVD, check out Robert’s articles on DVD Recording and Video Copy Protection and DVD Recorder FAQ’s.
Image source: Newscom