JiveTalker
Standard Member
Hi, I'm a newbie to this particular forum and I was hoping that somebody can give me some advice?
I have a collection of around 200 VHS tapes mostly recorded from 1987-1997 that take up lots of shelf space and I would like to transfer them to DVD. Almost all of them were recorded on a first generation JVC NICAM VCR. A large number of these tapes consist of recordings of pop videos and live tv performances on TOTP and similar.
I am looking for a machine that would spot the beginning of each recording and separate the tape into separate chapters for each recording. Is there a maximum number of chapters allowed? Do machines re-adjust the tracking for each separate recording on a tape? Some of my tapes may have up to 100 recordings. Ideally I'd be able to manually create additional chapter markers on longer recordings and edit out bits that I no longer want so I guess that would require an internal hard disk. Do any machines allow the content to be recorded in Divx/Xvid or do discs always have to be MPEG2 DVD video format?
Is there much difference in quality between the machines from the big guys (ie Panasonic, Sony, JVC, Toshiba etc.) I see that Panasonic claim to enhance the picture a fair bit. Does such a feature perform well?
If the machine also had a freeview tuner and HDMI output that would be good to.
One final thing I'd like is for a component video input. I have a TeleWest TVDrive which allows me to record from BBCHD but it doesn't allow any digital copying to be perfomed so I was wondering whether there was anything that could record from the high def component output? Alternatively I could use scart but that would be downscaled to SD.
That's a lot of questions, I know. From my research so far, the Panasonic DMR-EX95 looks like my best bet although it doesn't seem to meet all the requirements but I'm open to alternative suggestions, perhaps a shortlist of 3 or 4 candidates and anything significant that I haven't thought of.
Before anyone suggests it, the one thing I really don't want to do is use my pc as I know within a week I'll have a hard disk full of "work in progress" files and no space left for anything else.
I have a collection of around 200 VHS tapes mostly recorded from 1987-1997 that take up lots of shelf space and I would like to transfer them to DVD. Almost all of them were recorded on a first generation JVC NICAM VCR. A large number of these tapes consist of recordings of pop videos and live tv performances on TOTP and similar.
I am looking for a machine that would spot the beginning of each recording and separate the tape into separate chapters for each recording. Is there a maximum number of chapters allowed? Do machines re-adjust the tracking for each separate recording on a tape? Some of my tapes may have up to 100 recordings. Ideally I'd be able to manually create additional chapter markers on longer recordings and edit out bits that I no longer want so I guess that would require an internal hard disk. Do any machines allow the content to be recorded in Divx/Xvid or do discs always have to be MPEG2 DVD video format?
Is there much difference in quality between the machines from the big guys (ie Panasonic, Sony, JVC, Toshiba etc.) I see that Panasonic claim to enhance the picture a fair bit. Does such a feature perform well?
If the machine also had a freeview tuner and HDMI output that would be good to.
One final thing I'd like is for a component video input. I have a TeleWest TVDrive which allows me to record from BBCHD but it doesn't allow any digital copying to be perfomed so I was wondering whether there was anything that could record from the high def component output? Alternatively I could use scart but that would be downscaled to SD.
That's a lot of questions, I know. From my research so far, the Panasonic DMR-EX95 looks like my best bet although it doesn't seem to meet all the requirements but I'm open to alternative suggestions, perhaps a shortlist of 3 or 4 candidates and anything significant that I haven't thought of.
Before anyone suggests it, the one thing I really don't want to do is use my pc as I know within a week I'll have a hard disk full of "work in progress" files and no space left for anything else.