Hey all- I've got a fair number of vhs tapes taking up living space here and I'd really like to send them to the round file- after transferring the contents to a hard drive of course. Got some LD's I'd like to transfer as well. I intend to either build or buy an htpc at some point, but would like to lose the vhs sooner rather than later. My current desktop is an e-machines celeron 900 mhz,128 syncdram, and 2 nearly full drives. I'm thinking if i get a bigass seagate hd like the htpc crowd uses, I could transfer to that with my current machine and use it in the htpc when that time comes. The $64 question though is this enough machine to do this? Maybe with a vid card doing the heavy lifting? The extent of my pc experience is replacing hard drives, adding a card or 2, and programming in Atari basic don't think the last one will help much.
So, has anyone done this? am I doomed with this machine?
Thanks for any wisdom you can share.

Duckman:
Why are you looking to put the videotapes on a HD? Editing?
If not, why not convert them to DVD?

Personally, I'd be nervous about putting them on a HD only....

I did a little of this a couple of years ago and wasnt that happy with the return i got for the time invested. I had more horsepower than you and a card with hardware mpeg compression, but I cant say I made sound decisions all the way around.

Have you considered farming the job out. Last time I checked there are companies that specialize in converting vhs to dvd. then you could put them on the hard drive if you wish.

I am assuming you are talking about home movies and not copyrighted material.

hth

Randy

There's nothing of enormous value really. Some camcorder footage from the 80's , some taped musical acts from snl and the like from back then. A few music vids I havn't seen released on dvd, and 20 or so- ahem- "non-family" vids.
The 20 or so tapes are taking up about $200 worth of cabinate space and my tv-dvd collection is swelling.
I am also considering a stand alone dvd recorder, but I would have no use for it once the tapes were gone.
Sounds like I may be better off saving a few of the most sentimental tapes and sucking it up and dumping the rest.