In today’s modern lifestyle, where digital media, DVDs and CDs are used for almost every facet of audio and video documentation, there is no more room left for VHS tapes. VHS has reached its demise in an industry where size, portability, compactness, and quality are major factors and highly valued. Given the bulkiness of VHS tapes and the kind of maintenance and storage they require to keep them in good form, it has now been ousted out of the scene by the sleek, thin and high-quality digital discs which can store gigabytes of data. However, there are still those who have a mammoth VHS collection covering diverse private keepsakes such as pre-nuptial video coverage, wedding celebrations, birthday bashes, graduations and other milestone celebrations in the family. If you want to preserve these mementos for the longest time possible and free your storage for other things, there is a need for you to convert your VHS tape to DVD. You can actually do it on your own if you have some know-how and the right equipment and peripherals to successfully convert your video tapes to DVD.

If you don’t want to unnecessarily stress yourself but still want to copy VHS tapes to DVD, you can hire the services of a professional. Depending the amount of VHS video that you have to convert, this option may be more expensive than doing it on your own. However, if you’re the kind of person who gets high satisfaction in achieving things which are normally out of your comfort zone, it’s worth the effort to convert all of your VHS videos to DVD. Who knows? You might enjoy the undertaking and even make money out of such an endeavor. There are a lot of people out there who also have a gigantic collection of VHS tapes which needs to be converted to DVD format but just don’t know where to start. You can offer your services to them for a fee. Before embarking on such a project, you have to prepare all the necessary equipment and software that you will use. If it’s your first time to undertake such a project, there are several tutorials online which you can use as reference in your work and you can utilize free DVD burner software available for download on the internet for your project. There are also numerous free DVD decoders online and free DVD converters which you can make full use of without incurring additional costs.

There are actually more than a few choices for methods of conversion which you can select from if you want to transfer your VHS tapes to DVD format.

DVD Recorders

With this method, you need to connect your VCR or VHS camcorder to a separate DVD recording device which acts just like a VCR. This is perhaps the quickest and simplest way to transfer your tape to DVD. This option takes just as much time as it takes to watch the VHS tape.

Video Capture Card

Transfer the video to your PC using hardware that will accept the output of your VCR and convert the video to MPEG-2 format. Once captured digitally, you can then burn a copy to DVD. This is a quick way to convert VHS video to DVD and is highly recommended as it is the most flexible option. If desired, you can use a software video editing program like Windows Movie Maker or Apple iMovie to edit the captured video before transferring it to DVD. You also have the ability to create and customize menus for your DVD with software.