VHS to DVD help

Mr Unoriginal

Mr Unoriginal

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I'm looking to burn a bunch of 30 minute shows from VHS to DVD (not television shows, cable access archive). I know there are a few burners out there where you basically press play on the VHS and record on the DVD player. My question is this: I am probably going to want to put four 30 minute episodes on each DVD but I don't want to have to babysite the machine, i.e. be sitting right next to it as the first show is done so I can stop the DVD from burning blank space. Does anyone have any experience with these machines and can let me know if any have a timer function etc? Thanks.
 
[quote name='Mr Unoriginal']Anyone?[/QUOTE]

A few years back I tried to transfer stuff from VHS to Dvd. Its a brutal bitch to do so. I went the pc route. I'm not positive about how the vhs to dvd recorders your talking about work. The worst thing you could do is buy one from walmart, and try it out. I would think you would have to stop the tape. As the player has no idea when a show ends.
 
I think it depends on the model of recorder you get.

The basic option is just straight dubbing where you insert tape and dvd, and whichever runs out first is when it stops. Doesn't sound like what you want though.

You can also manually dub the tapes, by coming in whenever the show is over and stopping it, then starting the next one, but you don't want to do that either.



My best recommendation as to something you can do is just try and set a timed recording. You may have to have a separate vhs tape player though, and just set it on one of the input channels. And if you know the show is half an hour long, just set up the dvd player to record the input channel for half an hour. That would also leave you with built in separations between the shows.
 
This may be more work than you're looking for, but the way with the least amount of new equipment to buy, would be to get a PC capture card or USB, then use a normal VCR to play to your PC and capture what you want. That way, you can dump it to DVD and add whatever codecs your player might support, as well as separate the episodes into chapters. I've never used a standalone VHS to DVD recording device, but have spent far too much time capturing things from VHS tapes on my PC to reformat and spit back out on DVD.
 
I've never seen a machine that doesn't straight dub (keeps recording, so you have to babysit). I'm sure there's something out there that does it, but I don't know of it.
 
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