Simply dust any exposed tape and manually twirl the spokes to loosen them up before trying to play a tape. Do it yourself.All you’ll need is a scanner—a feature built into many home printers these days. Bear in mind that it does take time and patience to scan one photo at a time. Although Kodak released 16 mm Kodachrome film in 1935, then 8 mm film a year later, home movies didn’t really take off until the 1960s, when Kodak released Super 8. If you have mini-sized tapes (called VHS-C tapes), you might need a camcorder rather than a VCR.
Going local feels good and helps the local economy, although there is always a chance that any service loses a tape. Best to write your name and phone number on each tape, or simply transfer your VHS to DVD yourself. Your video will get transferred to the cloud at MemoryCloud and freely available for up to 60 days. The benefit of transferring to USB is that you can easily transfer these files to your computer as well as upload them to social media sites for sharing.
Legacy Box
These are becoming rarer in stores, but you can grab used ones on eBay for between $50 and $150 depending on the model (I actually found one at my local e-waste center for a measly five bucks). YesVideo is a popular option, and provides its service through local retailers like Costco, CVS, Walmart, and Target. Not only will they transfer VHS tapes for $25 apiece , but you can also digitize old film reels, photographs, and slides, not to mention Betamax, 8MM, and other kinds of tapes. “We do get customers basically every single day still buying physical media,” said Diana Hernandez, the deputy store manager at the Midtown Manhattan location of Bookoff, a secondhand store that sells DVDs. Some are nostalgia buyers; others are older and more comfortable with the format; and some don’t have access to the internet.
Put the tape to be copied to VHS or DVD in the Camcorder, and put a blank tape in the VCR or a blank DVD in the DVD recorder. Switch the VCR or DVD recorder to AV-in, Line-in, or Aux in from the input or source select button on the remote or on the recorder. Plug the camcorder directly into the VCR or DVD recorder and not the TV.
Connect the VHS or camcorder to the recorder via RCA, S-Video, or Firewire. With a DVD recorder, you don’t have a lot of flexibility as far as menus, buttons and chapter settings, but it’s the fastest and easiest way to convert VHS to DVD. Sign up for Tips & Tricks newsletter for expert advice to get the most out of your technology. Under the “Sources” panel on the bottom, click the plus sign and choose “Video Capture Device” from the list.
That gives you a lot of options; you can keep all your VHS movies on the same hard drive as all your other files, or put them on a special portable USB drive just for those kinds of memories. There was a time when you probably preserved family memories by saving them to videotape, but videotape is now completely obsolete. If you’re like a lot of people, you have a cabinet full of VHS tapes but haven’t had a VCR to play them on in 10 years or more.
Step 6. Start the VHS conversion
OBS will begin recording your VCR’s output to a video file. Let the tape play as long as you want, then press “Stop Recording.” You should see the resulting video clip show up in your “Videos” folder in Windows Explorer.
How do I connect the DVD Maker USB2.0 to my VCR and PC?
You’ll need a film-reel projector, a digital video camera, and a clean white wall or a projector screen. First, you can buy a film-to-video converter, which looks like a compact version of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel projector. These machines can be expensive—the Wolverine Data Film2Digital Moviemaker Pro, for example, costs about $400, though you might find other models for closer to $100. Consequently, your best bet for finding a VCR is to buy one from an online auction at eBay. Here, you can browse a large selection of used VCRs and pick one that, based on the photos and description, looks likely to work. They’ll all be used, and mostly from individual sellers—not refurbished or factory reconditioned—so you should not be surprised if your first VCR purchase is a bust and you need to return it for a refund.
Read more about vhs to dvd here.
If you’re persistent, though, you’ll land a VCR that works well enough to play, rewind and eject tapes. If you have an iPhone, you can use iCloud Drive to store the video and then access it via the Files app.