Scope

In November 2004, Dixons - the UK's largest electrical retailer - announced that it would be phasing out video cassette recorders in favour of the DVD player, citing a dramatic fall-off in demand for VCRs since the middle of the 1990s and to a level where DVDs were now outselling VCRs by a ratio of 40 to one.

The inexorable transition towards a digital environment may have taken a while to progress from realm of audio recording to video recording, but it has, leading to a situation where there are almost as many people considering converting their collection of video cassettes and reels of Super-8 as there are looking to digitise their record collections!

The reasons for doing so are much the same as for transferring vinyl LPs to CD:

• DVDs (and other optical media formats) are far more durable than tape
• they don't deteriorate with repeated viewings
• they can be played on a wider range of devices than analogue tapes
• they allow much easier access to particular portions of a video recording than does tape
• they take up much less room to store than video cassettes

and developments in hardware and software over recent years have made the process both easy and inexpensive.

This tutorial will provide a detailed, step-by-step guide for accomplishing this in a Windows XP environment. The chosen method will be to use a dedicated external converter box for capturing the analogue video and digitising it and associated software for controlling the capture process, performing any necessary video editing and mastering the final DVD.