Video and Freeview Plus to DVD

[windthorpe]

Hi all,

I have lots and videos and I am wanting to put them on to dvd (save lots of space). I was woundering what the best way to go about this was. The other thing I have is a freeview plus box that lets me record stuff of the telly. I am wanting to get some stuff of the hard drive and on to dvd. Is a DVD recorder the thing to buy?

Thanks

[Richard_in_wales]

Its not difficult to do either.

Freeview to disk. I presume you can transfer programmes via a USB socket/port onto a memory stick or hard drive? OK, you have your programme saved so transfer to your computer. All the files in my experience are .TS format so you want a little programme to convert them to an easier to use format.

This is free and easy to use
http://www.tsconverter.org/

Now you have your new file you have options. Most modern DVD players you use with your TV will read these files, they are usually quite small so you can fit two or three onto one disk, very simple just 'drag and drop' to disk.

If you want them in DVD format you need to use another programme such as
http://www.dvdflick.net/download.php
There are tutorials online on how to use the programme that are better than I could explain here but its not difficult. You will only get one film per disk. If you use Windows 7 then Windows DVD maker works well too and is easier to use.

VHS tapes to disk is again not hard. Something like
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Easycap-US...item415eabe3f9 Don't let the price put you off they work and again there are tutorials available showing you how to use the software that comes with it. Once the file is on your machine treat it the same as you have the freeview files.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFxuJ...eature=related

Have fun.

[MikeB]

The first thing I ask a customer who wants to do such a thing is: what are the tapes you want to transfer? If they are 20 year old analoge copies of Goldfinger, then don't bother, just buy the DVD. That goes for pretty much anything you can get on DVD. The quality will be far better (never mind Blu-Ray), you will gets lots of features, and you don't have to spend hours recording them.

If they are never to be seen again on TV (which is the ones I ended up doing) or are personally precious to you, then go for a DVD/HDD machine, and record from VHS to the HDD and then edit, or use a USB convertor (find them on Ebay for about £15 or less, once you've used it, you don't need it any more) to put it on a PC,.

As for your Freeview box, which one? If its a Humax, there are plenty of threads here, and a look at AVForum should bring up advice for other systems.

[Bernardo]

I have a Humax + I insert a 4G USB flash drive and copy the movie file from the hard drive to the USB. File is in .ts format which Corel Video Studio Pro4 can handle for cutting the adverts out and creating either an mpg file or DVD as you wish. Useful for recording plays and audio books off radio (4 & 4X) also .ts files, convert to wav with Free Video Studio software, edit the blurb at both ends of the play on Corel Video Studio make another wav file of the edited product (convert to MP3 if you wish). Ideal for in car listening on boring journeys.

[MartinU]

I record to .wtv using Windows Media Centre on Windows 7. I then edit out continuity announcements and adverts using VideoRedo which has the advantage that it's quick because it doesn't modify the video at all except for a few frames either side of a cut, so most of the time it's just copying, not transcoding. I've got an old XP PC which has an analogue video capture card, and I use that to copy from VHS or occasionally to copy something I've recorded on SWMBO's hard drive recorder (in the absence of being able to copy its native recording format, partly because the disk isn't NTFS - probably the machine using Linux and a Unix-specific filesystem - and partly because even if I was able to read the files on the disk, they may be a non-MPEG format that VideoRedo can't handle).

Unfortunately VideoRedo can't handle the subtitle stream in WTV files yet, which is the main advantage of WTV over Microsoft's older DVR-MS format, so I tend to convert everything to DVR-MS to keep the size of files down.