Tech talk: With David Behrens

YESTERDAY’S shiny new toys are today’s landfill, and there can’t be many of us who haven’t consigned the expensive video tape recorders we used to show off to our friends to the loft or the skip.
By The Newsroom
Published 30th May 2011, 01:00 BST

But what about all the VHS tapes we amassed through the 1980s and ’90s? Are they doomed to stay for years at the back of a cupboard until they’re finally carted off to the Oxfam shop in a sudden burst of spring cleaning?

It’s entirely possible to copy your most treasured video recordings on to DVD and enjoy them all over again. But it’s a tedious process, and I’d recommend it only for tapes you really can’t bear to be without.

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You will need two things: a video recorder on which to play the old tapes, and a DVD writer or recorder to transfer them on to. You’ll also want some blank discs, which you can pick up cheaply in supermarkets. They come, confusingly, in two formats – designated by a plus or minus sign respectively – so check which your recording device supports before buying.

The easiest way to transfer is on a standalone DVD recorder, not a computer. That way you can do the job in real-time, trim any bits you don’t want and then “finalize” the discs to make them compatible with other DVD players. You just need to run a standard video cable from the output of your VHS player to the input of the DVD recorder. A Scart cable will do, but for best results use an S-Video lead if the sockets are there.

Even so, don’t expect normal DVD quality from your transfers; there is no way to make the pictures better than they were in the first place, and – though we put up it with for decades without seeming to notice – VHS quality was really quite ropey.

If you haven’t got a DVD recorder, you can run a cable from your VHS player to your DVD-writing PC – but you will almost certainly need an adapter like the Roxio Easy VHS to DVD device (£30 on Amazon), which plugs into a USB socket and comes with the necessary cables and software to capture the video, create a basic DVD menu and save the results to disc.

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Either method works fine for home-made recordings, including programmes you taped off the telly – but, sorry, unless your VHS player dates from before 1986 it won’t let you transfer commercial tapes. They will have been encoded with anti-copying signals, and for them, it really is the Oxfam shop...

* If you have questions, leave a comment with the online version of this article on our website at yorkshirepost.co.uk/lifestyle. I’ll answer as many as possible.