Do you have a more recent camcorder? maybe an HD one? I have a Canon Vixia and it comes with analog -> digital converter built in. I believe most new HD camcorders come with this feature. You connect your old camcorder to the new one using RCA jacks and connect the new camcorder to your PC via firewire port. That's how I backed up all of my family videos and the quality was "as good as tape was going to get."

Otherwise you can get one of those USB capture devices off of ebay and some software that will let you capture and compress to MPEG DVD. I know a lot of users here have them and use them to capture dos gaming via an s-video cable.

DVD Flick will remain my preferred DVD authoring tool until I learn otherwise. Fine piece of open-source software, that.

As for getting the video onto your PC in the first place, I agree that an EasyCap USB ought to be fine – except that I understand they're not 64-bit compatible, and I have no idea if the drivers will work under Windows 2000.

any analog tv card will capture the footage form a camcorder
just makes sure it supports the old style analog tv and not the new digital tv
your pvr 150 should be fine why wont it install

theres an update only for 32bit windows and you need your original pvr-150 cd
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_pvr150.html

ps: on the software side windows movie maker will do

Davros wrote:

your pvr 150 should be fine why wont it install

The driver setup can't find the card, though windows seems to. The drivers get copied across from the cd but the card is then reported with an error in device manager. The machine has also started bsod'ing since I installed the pvr card. I've tried it in different slots. There are no conflicts reported.

See post in Marvin - I'm now finding the netwrk connection is basically so slow it's useless. The cpu is also running hot [56c? its a p4 640 3.2ghz], but that may be problems with my old water cooling system.

Bit of a mess right now!

It does indeed sound like a mess. Addressing those cooling problems before anything else sounds like a good idea. You might also want to try a different power supply, just to be sure.

Right, I reinstalled windows 2000 and have tracked the connection issue down to the hardware on the board, a loose network socket I think. Cables work fine in other boxes. Wiggling them, sometimes they connect on this board. Using a 3c905 in the board it connects no problem.

However the pvr150 refuses to work in any slot, latest drivers or otherwise, complaining about being unable to load the driver because something else isn't working right. I see from asrock's site that there's a terratec tv card known to be incompatible with this board.

Looks like the reboots were to do with the 3dlabs drivers, though it would take more investigation to work out what caused them to start crashing the machine.

So... thanks everyone for your advice 😄, I'm going to have to think about the best way forward.

Whoops, found out there's a driver cleaner utility for this card, needless to say it now works using the latest drivers... lucky as I was on the verge of buying a new motherboard 😜.

thought i'd update this as i finally got to the bottom of the problems.

in the end i bought a canopus advc-300, cost about £400, it converts analogue video [like from an 8mm videotape camera] to a digital stream. it only really comes with what's essentially a driver - a program you run so that other software can detect the input and the advc appears as a digital input source. it also cleans up the signal a good deal even on auto settings (unlike the other hardware i had tried - adaptec and hauppauge). however...

i got the xp version of windows movie maker, and i got the same problems as before: after a few seconds or minutes, it stops recording anything, loses the signal. none of the software i have from other hardware purchases worked either, its all limited to particular hardware [plus it all has crappy user interfaces - the kind that's meant to be simple but just adds fluff and opacity].

i finally found that the issue is what's called "dropped frames". all of this damn software bombs out when it gets a dropped frame, and with analogue footage at least, you pretty much get "dropped frames" whenever you press stop/record.

luckily there's a tool called windv which gets round this - instead of bombing out it continues tracking the input signal, tells you how many frames were "dropped" and then continues recording. absolutely bloody amazing, it works great, wish i had had it 14 years ago [that's how old some of my tapes are]. it produces avi files so i'll have to use other software for editing/compression, but that's a minor issue.

i am utterly dumbfounded by how poor consumer-level hardware and software is [hauupauge, sonicdvd, adaptec, ulead,...] , along with the associated "service" in pc shops. and correspondingly over the moon with the advc-300 and windv 😀 .

And yes those hauppauge and adaptec devices were supposed to deal with analogue input.

ratfink wrote:

i am utterly dumbfounded by how poor consumer-level hardware and software is [hauupauge, sonicdvd, adaptec, ulead,...] , along with the associated "service" in pc shops. and correspondingly over the moon with the advc-300 and windv

Many thousands of people seem to get along with them just fine.

I guess it's nice that you've found something that works for you, but holy cow, £400 ? Even if something like the EasyCap doesn't work with your current 64-bit system (and it might – I haven't looked into it), for that kind of money you could probably easily buy an entirely separate 32-bit system and get the job done that way.

I might have to look into windv next time. I have also experienced some problems with dropped frames in the past, though it never crashed anything; the problem was more with the audio desynchronizing. I got around the problem using VirtualVCR-Matroska . (Matroska, unlike AVI, does not require a constant frame rate and so dropped frames are much less of a problem.)

Heh yes I'm surprised myself I did not baulk at the cost, but I don't mind paying decent money for decent kit.

For what it's worth I'm feeding the signal via firewire into a prescott-based box running xp and 2000. One of my so-called retro boxes, using an asrock agp/pcie board. Fine for video loading but i suppose something newer and multicore might be better for editing and compression when I get round to it. Avi is taking 20gb for a 90 minute tape.

Alittle late posting here I see, but I just used my Hauppage PVR-150 in Windows 7 64-bit for capturing old VHS tapes. I had no problems and quality was very good with the supplied software.

I have a cheap Compro USB adapter that has all drivers (32 and 64). I use it for capturing S-Video out from my Time-Machine 😀

PS: I just think your machine is way to old. Dropped frames with analogue signals is very strange.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. It is nothing to do with the PC. It's a decent-ish camcorder that records fine, I doubt it was ever at fault. Other people have had the same issue, that's how I found my solution.

What causes the supposed dropped frames is the very small blank or "errt" or noise or whatever it is that gets written to the camcorder tape between "takes". It's not really "dropped frames" as far as the camcorder goes. It's what happens when it stops and starts recording. It's just the way that particular piece of technology works. It's a Canon consumer-level camcorder, UC-2000 using 8mm tape - better than vhs quality but not digital. The description "dropped frames" is more of a cipher - it's as though there were dropped frames, and these digital devices I've had trouble with [or more accurately their bundled software] couldn't deal with it.

I think the advc-300 may to be honest a red herring regarding so-called dropped frames. I bought it to solve the problem, but I think the software that came with the hauppauge and adaptec may have been the real culprit. But when all they display is noise once they lose the signal, it isn't clear what is to blame. The advc also cleans the signal well [another issue] - no excess glows etc.

I have not tried windv with my haupaugge card and probably never will - I've got my solution. But it might work.

This camera is from about 1996. That's what - p2 era?

What I am doing is not the same as taking a signal from an s-video output from a digital machine like a pc. Nor the same as recording from a continuous analogue signal like recording a vhs video [like a film] to digital if that's what you mean.

I have converted VHS tapes, but not from a camcorder, from a VHS player. Haven't had any issues.

I use PowerDirector to capture and author.

Well, if I had no life to lead I could try to digitise a vhs-recorded version of one of these tapes , just to see if that makes any difference to dropped frames - maybe recording to vhs would somehow fix the white noise or whatever. But the reduction in quality would mean it would not be worth it.

ratfink wrote:

What I am doing is not the same as taking a signal from an s-video output from a digital machine like a pc. Nor the same as recording from a continuous analogue signal like recording a vhs video [like a film] to digital if that's what you mean.

But that's exactly what it sounds like. You said your camcorder has three analog RCA jacks; why should its signals be different from anything else that communicates via RCA jacks?

Likewise, S-video is surely S-video regardless of whether a "digital machine" is involved, is it not?

I do not know the detail of how this gear works, but what I was sold did not work and what I have now does.

The advc and windv are aimed at my scenario more fully than the Adaptec and Hauppauge devices. Although those latter devices were advertised and sold as being capable of addressing my problem. Other hardware and/or software may well work. I found some that did after all.