VHS to digital

[1] Capture VHS

There are several ways of doing this but I found my new DVD recorder (LITEON DD-A100X) allows a VHS player to be hooked up via a SCART cable. Recording the VHS is a doddle. This step took me an hour (as the video tape was one hour long). Other methods involve getting a TV card for your PC, but as many people now have laptops rather than PCs this might not be practical. That said, external USB devices do exist for this purpose: Hauppauge are probably the market leader here.

[2] Rip the DVD

Now I want to manipulate the DVD and create an AVI that I can edit at will. I used DVDShrink to rip the DVD to my laptop's hard disk as VOB files. This step typically took 15 minutes.

[3] Create AVI from VOBs

Next I loaded all the VOB files into Dr. DivX. I used two passes. This step is time and processor-intensive. It took me 3 hours to encode the 1 hour video. Finally I had a DivX encoded AVI, just over 700MB in size.

[4] Edit the AVI

Next I edited the AVI with VirtualDub (I had unwanted material at the start and the end of the original DVD recording from the VHS tape). Here's a good link on using VirtualDub.

NB - Delete frames as neccessary and then use "Direct Stream Copy" for audio AND video before saving the as an AVI. This method is very quick (a few minutes) as no re-encoding is needed.

[5] Make a torrent (optional!)

Simply use the maketorrent utility in Bittorrent. Upload to a host (demonoid etc.).