DIGITNOW Standalone Composite Video to Digital Converter

welcome in this video I'm going to be taking a look at this digit now full media recorder so this was provided to me by the distributor but they're not compensating me for this video and they're not reviewing it before I post it if you find this video helpful and you want to purchase one of these I'll put a link to it in the description on Amazon and if you use that link it helps me out a little bit and doesn't cost anything extra so if we look on the side here it says directly capture video from VHS vcd DVD VCR DB camera and saving to memory card let me get the shrink wrap off here so it's easier to read so here we have some inputs going into the composite input it also has stereo audio input it has HD out to an HDTV has video Jack to TV it uses USBC for power and has a Micro SD card slot here's the product contents we have the Video Grabber power supply HD cable RCA cable data cable AV cable memory card and manual so here we have the device pull the plastic off the front here so we have a screen here we have volume up down previous next buttons okay looks like that might control a menu yeah there's menu here mode and record here we have the composite input with stereo HDMI out AV out near we have the port here's the TF card or the micro SD card and it's a four gigabyte card included and on the bottom we have a speaker and a reset button and these feet are rubber power adapter is five volts at one amp it's HDMI cable this would be the video out to hook it into like a TV or something this is the RCA cables it came with and the power cable this is a mini USB not micro cable so we got this arcsoft HD video capture software it's a warranty and there's the manual so it looks like we have about 20 pages of English there so here it says the memory card saves in Avi format file size is 13 to 15 megabytes per minute any segments you record more than 1.5 hours will be divided into Parts it will have a serial number assigned so you can connect this up to Mains power or you can plug it into USB from a computer it says charge your Video Grabber for at least three minutes before turning it on so it looks like this has the battery in it so I'll get that plugged in so I can start charging this talks about the inputs here's the operation so you can pause and read through these I'll be demonstrating it though this talks about how to connect different sources to it so to turn it on you want to press the power button for approximately three seconds upon being powered up the Video Grabber starts off in the video recording mode and will show the following information so here you can change the settings you can set the date and time has automatic shut off you can set it to 15 30 or 45 minutes and it will only shut off if it's not recording so to record you press the record button to play you press play you can press the middle button the OK button I think it is to take a snapshot and that says you press the record button to stop and save the recording this talks about the play mode settings playback how to show recordings on a TV so you can play this on an older TV with composite cables or using HDMI this talks about copying it to a computer so I assume this will probably show up like a drive I'll check that out and then we have some troubleshooting here then they talk about converting recorded files here okay so I don't think I'm going to need these cables right now so put those aside so to test this out I have my Panasonic camcorder this is the last traditional camcorder I ever purchased so plug that in now I'm going to use the cable that came with it for AV but it looks like it came with one that would also work so I'll plug that into the AV out actually I'll get a tape in here first now plug into the AV there it's been a very long time since I used this then I'll plug into the cables here yellow is video Red Is Right Channel white is Left Channel and I'll plug my monitor in tier two so this is just a computer monitor I'll turn it on with the menu button it says digit now okay so it's showing up on the monitor now so I'll probably continue on using it on this device I like that you can view it on the monitor my eyes aren't getting any better it's easier to see than a smaller screen so let's hit menu here see if I can zoom in a little bit so the resolution is currently VGA let's see what else we have it also supports qvga so VGA is 640x480 qvga is 320 by 240. so that's a lower resolution and we have date and time stamp I'm going to turn that off auto off is off language is English Basic input enter sound on I think that's everything for now so go back to the screen let me turn my light off here there's going to be glare I don't see glare looking at it but there's glare from the camera from my studio light so I'll open up my camera now and I'll turn the camera on and I'll hit play so hit record on here okay so I can see it on the screen here so that looks like a preview I'll press record again and now we're recording so stop recording I'll hit pause on my camera or stop okay so now I'll hit mode and we're back in play mode I'll hit play here and now we're playing the video so I'll load this clip on my computer and I'll splice it into this video so you can see the native capture [Music] okay so I'm at my computer I'll plug in the capture device with the USB I'll power it on it says no name here I'll open this up I'll open up DCIM I'll just go in here and here we have the video file so let's look at the specs of this so I'm using some command line software that I can look at the format so it's encoded in h.264 at 640 by 480 29.8 FPS the audio is PCM that's pulse code modulation 44.1 Hertz one channel so this doesn't look like it's recording stereo but it is a pretty good bit rate now I can't double click on this and open it in QuickTime on a Mac I can use VLC so I'll use that and now I can watch it on my computer so that's looking very nice now needless to say this isn't going to be as sharp as an HD video but that really isn't the goal with old videos like this when transferring these I want to preserve these things these tapes might go bad so it can be nice to convert them over to digital you can put it on thumb drive and if you want to backup you can easily copy to another thumb drive you can transfer them to other people it's much more convenient than all these tapes so that's the digit now full media recorder I found this really easy to use you don't have to have a lot of skill to convert things from your legacy tapes to digital now I hooked this up to a video camera you can also hook it up to VHS you can hook it up to a legacy gaming system I like that it has a screen on here if you're doing a bunch of conversions you can have this sitting on your desk you can glance down on occasion and see the progress now if you want to do more detailed work it has that HDMI out which is really nice I like that it has both options of course this also has a battery in it so you can use it cordless and since it's powered with USB you could actually power with pretty much like a power brick even if you want extended run time on it but if you're looking for a device to convert Legacy stuff I think that's a great option now a couple things to consider is that the audio is not stereo output it merges them into mono that's not going to be an issue for me when I'm trying to save memories but if that is a concern this may not be the best option for you but otherwise I think it was very easy to use I think it's going to be a great tool to have okay so I did a little runtime test with this and you can see the battery here this is after about two and a half hours of transferring videos so there's a little bit more battery I could maybe get another third hour but the SD card was filling up so we can see the SD card here the first two videos were about an hour and they're 1.4 and 1.2 gigabytes the third one was about a half hour and it was 680 megabytes and we have about 638 megabytes left so it looks like you can get at least two or three hours out of this now I'm doing the 640 by 480 resolution the smaller would give you more space on here so I'll typically plug this in when I'm using it but it is nice that you can use it with the battery for those situations where you don't have a plug-in or just for convenience sake so that's all I'm going to cover in this video if you have any questions please leave them in the comments if you like this video please click like if you haven't subscribed to my channel I'd appreciate if you could do that and thanks for watching until next time goodbye you got him I'm getting them I'm pretty close aren't I it's hard paddling with one hand foreign [Music] foreign I'm okay put this paddle backwards here just one hand I'm getting good at this we'll see how good this turns out [Music]

Channel: RickMakes

Views: 11,778

Keywords: DIGITNOW Standalone Composite Video to Digital Converter, video capture, capture box, video to digital, vhs tapes, vhs to digital, video capture card, digitnow review, video capture device, 8mm tape, beta tapes to digital, digitnow video to digital converter, hi8 to digital, old video, vhs to computer, capture card, digitnow video capture, digital video, convert vhs to digital, video converter

Id: -yhTkEg5inU

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023