If you have piles of video tapes crowding your home entertainment center, it's probably time to consolidate the tapes and upgrade your system. You can transfer these video tapes to CD and watch them in a DVD player.
Moving videos
from tape to CD requires two steps.
1.Digitize the video.
2.Record that data onto a CD.
Digitize the
video
Digitizing is a way to convert analog video into data you can store on your hard drive. To do this, you need a video capture card, or if you have a digital video camera, a 1394 or Firewire port. The ATI All-In-Wonder is a good video
card with capture capabilities. If you don't want to replace your video card, pick up a standalone capture card like Pinnacle Systems Studio DC10 Plus. The Studio DV is a good choice for digital video cameras.
Capture your video to hard drive using the best quality possible with a color depth of at least 24 bits per pixel. The chief limitation here is the speed of your system and size of your drives.
Once you have the movies on your drive, the simplest thing to do is to burn a CD with the captured video. It's a little slicker and friendlier to your viewers to record the CD as a Video CD or VCD. This is a standard for creating
CD-based movie discs that pre-dates DVD.
1.Create a VCD
Some capture software can save the resulting video in VCD compatible MPEG 1 format. If not, save it as an AVI and use a free program called AVI2VCD to convert it. The AVI2VCD page has useful information on
what kind of files a VCD needs.
2.Record a VCD
Use a VCD authoring program to record your VCD. One common solution is Roxio's Easy CD Creator Deluxe. It's only $69 for the package.
Easy CD Creator will arrange your video files onto a CD and can create simple menus so you can navigate your files.