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My dad bought some software to convert his old vhs tapes to dvds using a vhs player and his computer. The software was from a company called Pinnacle, and as far as I can tell, it's a useless piece of shit. I've tried all their updates and and patches, nothing works, the software crashes every time.

Is there any other software out there that can be used to do vhs to dvd conversion which actually works? The computer is running on 32 bit Windows Vista.

My dad did this using a TV, a VCR and a DVD recorder.

He just told the DVD recorder to record what was on the VCR's channel.

Is it the software that's crashing or is the driver for the dongle not working?

Roxio has a package available to do this, but they're $59.99. Can't vouch to how well they work, but Roxio is a fairly well known brand.

As best as I can tell, it's the software itself crashing. When I first installed the program, it got to a certain point in the sequence, then none of the buttons would work and it went non-responsive. After applying the patches and updates, it still crashes, just sooner, when I try to start the program up.

If I can't get it to work I might see if I can get the tv/vhs/dvd player method to work.

squidman001 wrote:As best as I can tell, it's the software itself crashing. When I first installed the program, it got to a certain point in the sequence, then none of the buttons would work and it went non-responsive. After applying the patches and updates, it still crashes, just sooner, when I try to start the program up.

If I can't get it to work I might see if I can get the tv/vhs/dvd player method to work.

You don't need a TV, unless you want to monitor what's on the tape, and in any case you will get slightly better quality by connecting the VCR directly to the DVD recorder. For that you of course need a VCR that has RCA outputs for sound and video (CVBS a.k.a. composite video). The only caveat is that if he has commercial pre-recorded VHS tapes, they might have Macrovision copy protection, which will make direct copying to DVD impossible. However, practically all movies that were available on VHS are also available on DVD, so transferring movies and the like from VHS to DVD makes little sense.

I bought a device called ADS DVD XpressDX2 from Wal-Mart a few years ago. It's basically a little gray box that connects to the PC per USB cable and acts as a "bridge" between VHS player and PC. Using the software that comes with it you can either directly record your tapes onto DVDs or record it to your hard drive instead.

All in all I'm pretty satisfied.

Some links:

http://www.adstech.com/products/USBAV-7 ... BAV-709-EF

http://dvr.about.com/od/productreviews/gr/dx2.htm

http://www.amazon.com/ADS-Tech-Xpress-V ... B000DZDMB6

We went with the Roxio option. We found it on Newegg for a bit cheaper than the website Zod posted. The best part of it is that the program is easy enough for him to understand without him calling me every 5 minutes. Thanks for all the suggestions.