How To Transfer VHS Tapes To Your Computer

hey everyone in today's video i wanted to show you how to digitize a vhs tape so when you have these vhs tapes laying around you could turn it into a video file with couple of different things i want to show you what you need and how to do it so these are the few things you need obviously your tape that you want to digitize that's one you need a vcr and what's important about a vcr it needs to have these video and audio connections so the yellow video input and the white and the red audio input you need those because the device that we're going to use is going to use that connection to connect it to your computer then you need a computer so vcr vhs and the computer but what you need the most is this thing i will link to it in the description it's a video capture device so this is what's going to take your vcr feed and feed it into a computer and this is going to basically take care of the analog to digital conversion this works for mac pc ipad iphone it's really a great device and i'll have a link in the description you could just pick one up there so let's go ahead and connect this then i want to show you what happens on the computer this comes with a software that makes this super easy you just simply putting your vhs tape into your vcr make this connection pop up the software and then you could start recording and basically putting it on your computer on a usb wherever you want you could even turn it into a dvd i have a different video about a dvd conversion if you want to take anything and make it a dvd you could do that but obviously nowadays a digital file is much better than a dvd so let's go ahead and connect this i'll show you the next step so this is that device this is the device that we're going to connect right into our computer and it's a usb connection so pretty much any computers have a usb connection where we're going to plug this part into and then the other end is this part where we're going to connect this into our vcr and it does actually come with this piece that i've never used before but if you have a really old-school vcr you could basically convert it into getting this connection out of it but this rca connection could be made with this connection but i just recommend you pick one up that already has this connection if you look here this one already has that connection and the nice thing about these vcrs is i bought this one for 13 on ebay so you could pick these up pretty cheap so first we want to make sure our vcr is turned on here and we want to put in our vhs tape that's pretty simple just go ahead and put that in right here and go ahead and rewind it back to the beginning of the tape we're going to capture it from the beginning of the tape and then you just press pause when it's done or we'll stop by itself next we're going to take our cable from our converter here and we're going to go into video and audio and then take the usb end and plug it into your computer device here next we're gonna go to this website and i'll put a link in the description to this website where we wanna download the software the video capture this one in this case is for mac but it will let you know which software to download depending on your device go ahead and download it and once it's downloaded is over here this dmg file on my mac here i'm going to go ahead and open it if you're on a pc it's a different process but it's basically the same as downloading and installing a software go ahead and add it to your application folder in the case of a mac and i'm gonna go ahead and open it now here it is in my application folder now i could double click and open it i'm gonna press open and i'm going to go ahead and install that right here on my device and now it says what is your movie's name so i'm going to call this first vhs and it says how long is the movie you may not know this sometimes on the vc vhs type you actually tells you but you could just choose one of these i'll just choose 16 minutes and it's just basically telling you how much gigabyte space in this case if it's 90 minutes it's about a gig worth a hard drive space nowadays this should not be a problem any computer is probably going to have plenty of space press continue now we use the composite connection the rca connection the yellow and the white and the red cables there's a s-video connection too i did not show you but that might be the connection that you used and here the aspect ratio most likely is four by three this is the old-school tv sixteen by nine is most likely not a case of a vhs tape so i'm going to press continue here and then it says connect the audio cable again we did that as part of connecting our three cables and now i need to press play on the vcr so press play on the vcr so the signal could actually show up over here so you could actually start recording it once it starts playing we want to press the record icon obviously from the beginning of the tape this one i did not rewind all the way but if i press start recording it's gonna start recording so you could see the duration of it gonna start recording right here and at any time i could stop recording let me just press mute on this and then you could also mute sound if you just wanna capture the video so let's say i was done recording just for the sake of the time here i'm going to just press stop and here it's going to allow you you see on the side it's going to trim mode so you could change the beginning at the end of it if you want to here i'm going to go ahead and press continue and now it's gonna actually save it to my movies based on the file name i gave it what would you like to do play with quicktime add to itunes upload to youtube i usually upload to youtube much later after this process not right now even if i wanted to put it on youtube let's say you just want quicktime player this is again based on a mac you could also get quicktime for a pc and there it is it's just been right there playing and i could go ahead and check my movies folder here and here's my movie folder and i'm going to press spacebar and there it is it's been captured right into my folder and i could always go ahead and play it it's a mp4 file which is a file that's great for just about any way you want to use it it's a great file format now you could go and repeat this process again name something go ahead and change the duration press continue and it's going to play right here and if you press stop on the vcr it should go ahead and stop it right there if you have any problems making this connection just make sure you try the back the front the variety of different ways it has to be a video output there in my vcr actually the line didn't work but it should be a line out you're basically putting an output so if the line in doesn't work the line out is what you're looking to use so make sure you look for a line out on your vcr i hope you found this useful and you could capture your vhs tapes this way link to everything is in the description and you could pick up the old vcr on ebay for just a few bucks please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel for daily tech videos and i'll catch you next time thanks for watching

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 292,547

Keywords: howfinity, how to, tutorials, video capture, digital video, convert vhs to digital, how to convert vhs to digital, how to convert vhs to mp4, convert vhs to mp4, convert vhs to digital windows 10, convert vhs to mp4 windows 10, vhs to digital, convert vhs to digital pc, convert vhs to mp4 pc, convert vhs tapes to digital, convert video tapes to digital, convert beta tapes to digital, convert beta to digital, betamax to digital, vhs to digital converter

Id: YUxyPAljx5M

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019