I have a moderately old SHARP camcorder and a bog standard VHS player.

On both I have tape that I would like to burn to DVD. (Mainly video of my kids which I want to convert to digital before the tapes degrade)

My new computer has a DVD writer....

What is the easiest/best way to capture moving video from these kind of non-digital sources and get it into my PC ready for burning???

Do I need kit? software?!?

ANY advice gladly received.

Regards.......

Tony

[MarkE19]

Hi TonyDavies76 & welcome to the forum

This is becoming quite a common question on here as more people get DVD writers on their PC's and want rid of the old VCR.
Do a search for other threads on this to find loads of info, but here are a few pointers to get you going.

What are the specs of your PC? If you have a capture device installed as part of your graphics card etc (The AIW cards are about the most common for this) then you will have all you need already.
Assuming you don't have a capture device then you can either use a USB2.0 capture device from Belkin, Pinnacle, Dazzle etc and this should have everything in the box you need. The problem with these devices are that they are fairly low quality. Cost of approx £50
A better quality option would be a PCI card that plugs in to your MoBo with analogue (and perhaps DV for the future) inputs and perhaps outpus. This will cost a fair bit more but the results will be a lot better. Cost of somewhere around £100
The above will be for capture and should include at least basic capture & editing software. If not then if you have Win XP you also have the MS Movie Maker. Upgrade this free from the MS web site to MM2 and you will have a good editing program to do the work.
As the PC already has a DVD writer you should have software for file conversion, authoring and burning to disk.

As I said already, you have loads of options and it all depends on what you already have on your PC. If you need more help then let us know the hardware & software you have and we will do what we can.

Mark.

Thanks a lot for the advice. I will check out my kit.

Regards........

Tony