Anyway to convert/burn beta tapes?

[Maurice]

My dad has 2 beta machines, and about 100 beta tapes. He asked me if there is a way to put these movies on dvd's, or such, and since I have no idea I thought I would ask you guy's.

Thanks.

[digitaldd]

If you have a working betamax player its pretty simple as long as you have some sort of video capture device for the computer. connect Betamax player to video capture device, most capture devices come with some sort of software to capture video, put tape in player load capture software, press play on betamax machine. it will capture the video in real time so an hour tape will take an hour to capture.

video files are huge and you will notice the quality is kinda crappy, but no more than the output of a betamax would look on an HDTV, you can try to clean up the video but once you have the digital file it might be too late to clean it up without doing way too much work, there are some capture programs that have plug in for certain types of capture from tape (they usually can fix things you will notice after capturing the first tape like if the video is too dark or needs more color saturation, or hissing in the audio).

[Maurice]

what kind of device would I need for the computer?

[species8472]

That depends on the output of the beta player. I would guess that it would have some kind of coax connection like an old VCR would.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815116043

Something like this might do the trick.

[Maurice]

Ok cool. What type of software would I need? and what would be the best format/ way to convert burn.

[digitaldd]

Not sure the type of card species suggested would work if the beta player only has a coaxial connection for video out, seems like it has the coax for the TV Tuner and uses a breakout cable for composite video, if the beta player only has coax output you might need an RF converter to hook it up to a capture card.

eHow has a few guides you might want to have a peek at.

http://www.ehow.com/how_6668904_conv...-tape-dvd.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_6605713_hook...-make-dvd.html

As far as software I had an old capture card which came with a program called PowerDirector which worked well with a USB capture card and a VHS player, for something free a few old programs like Virtualdub, Avisynth, or maybe even AVIdemux and I'm sure you can do it with Windows Movie Maker but the Live version of it doesn't support video capture I think.

[Maurice]

Ok guy's thanks. Seems like it's going to be a lot of work. I ask my dad if he wants to go through all this or not. Thanks again.