Hooking up Pinnacle Video Transfer direct to PC?

[drjayphd]

I have one of these beauties, an SVHS VCR, and 500GB external hard drive sitting on a desk. As you can see, it records to anything that you can hook up via USB 2.0. I also have eight boxes of VHS tapes I'm looking to convert to DVD. While many of the tapes aren't a full two hours or 2:40, I don't think I'm going to be able to fit everything on that one drive. I'm also planning on building a server or adding some sort of NAS for storing, well, a ton of crap. Being able to access the raw video from the PC where I'll be doing my editing without having to switch cables around would be nice as well.

So even though it would completely defeat the purpose of that device (in that you don't need to hook it up to a PC), how could I hook this device up to record to a PC? Do you think that it would work if I were to hook it up to an NAS device?

[XCVG]

I'm not sure if you can hook it up to a pc or not.

[bicostp]

It might be easier for you to use a set-top DVD recorder if you have that many tapes to copy. That way, you can just hit 'record' on the DVD recorder, and 'play' on the VCR and not have to worry about messing with codecs and bitrates. You'll get a high quality 1 to 1 copy of your video with no compression artifacts (aside from inherent DVD compression), which is good because you're coming off analog tape. The only downside is you don't get to make your own menus; you get stuck with the default the DVD recorder generates.

I backed up some old home-recorded tapes with a TV tuner card, and it wasn't the easiest to get everything working right. (Plus Nero didn't want to use the .MP4 file, so I had to transcode it to an MPEG 2 that was four times the file size... )

[drjayphd]

The only downside is you don't get to make your own menus; you get stuck with the default the DVD recorder generates.

Which is exactly why I didn't want to do it that way. I want chapter breaks and purty menus and all that nonsense. (Hey, I just got sacked, I've got plenty of time. )