story

By Daniel Greenberg
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, February 26, 2006; F07 It's no secret that videotape degrades and deteriorates with age and use. By the time the kids are off to college and you might actually want to reminisce over their toddler tapes, the precious memories may be literally fading away.
Fortunately, it's relatively easy to transfer home movies and videotaped TV shows by copying them onto DVDs -- long-lasting, easy-to-store, inexpensive and easy to re-copy.

But it does take special equipment, some knowledge and, above all, patience.
There are many ways to do this: Maybe you're content making a duplicate copy of the tape to DVD, or you'd rather import raw footage into your PC and edit the video clips into a short movie.
If all you want to produce is an exact duplicate of a VHS tape and not a shorter, edited home movie, all you need is a recordable DVD player with a built-in VHS videotape player.

The Samsung DVD-VR325 ($380, ) streamlines this process significantly by incorporating a one-touch To DVD button to begin recording a videotape to a blank disk. The machine will allow you to do other things, as well -- such as pre-setting the start and stop points, customizing recording quality levels, or making the disc playable on other DVD players or PCs -- but you'll have to go take a trip through the on-screen menus.
This recorder has a host of special features such as component video output for digital TVs and the ability to play discs of MP3s.

It can even perform basic editing on your DVDs. But if you're looking to make home videos that aren't yawn-inducing, a computer editing system is much more powerful and versatile.
Importing video from VCR to PC requires specialized hardware, such as Plextor's ConvertX PVR PX-TV402U ($200, ).

This small, flat box connects to your PC via USB 2.0, and plugs into your VCR via standard RCA (composite) jacks or the superior S-Video connector. However, no consumer video hardware we found will digitize video via the best analog format available -- component video.

The ConvertX can record video in a number of formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX in multiple quality levels, depending on whether you intend to store the video on video CDs, DVDs, Web sites or portable players.
DivX support is especially welcome since it fits about three times the amount of video as other formats without degrading picture quality. .

Once the video has been captured, you can edit it with the included WinDVD Creator 2 or Ulead VideoStudio 8 SE DVD software programs, and burn it using your PC's CD-R or DVD-R drive. ConvertX also adds a TV tuner and basic TiVo-like functionality to pause and rewind live TV through the WinDVR 5 program and a free trial of SageTV.
The most integrated solution is a video digitizer on a plug-in graphics card such as the ATI All-in-Wonder 2006 ($200, ), which also delivers high speed, high resolution three-dimensional graphics and TiVo-like capabilities.

Muvee autoProducer, a free software program included in the All-in-Wonder, generates simple videos quickly and easily. Pinnacle Studio 9, also included, allows more detailed editing control.
The All-in-Wonder improves on ConvertX with full video in and out, digital audio out, free remote control (by mail) and even high-quality component video out (with an optional $20 adapter).

The only downside is that you must open your PC case to install it, but the setup procedure is well documented and glitch-free. The PCI-Express version of the All-in-Wonder comes with the highly regarded Premiere Elements video editing software at no extra charge.