Roxio Easy VHS to DVD (PC)

HOW IT WORKS
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If your wondering, here is how it (is supposed) to work.

1) From your VHS player or camcorder, you connect some wires into the AV ports. Then, you plug the other end into a USB port on your PC. Its very easy.

2) On your PC, using the supplied software you simply play the film and its captured on your PC and saved as a digital file which you burn to DVD etc.

QUALITY OF CAPTURED VIDEO
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This is one of the most important things for me, after all what is the point of having it on DVD when the quality isnt good. And, unfortuantley it isnt. Even though the source was VHS, the quality is bad. The odd time i did get footage capture, it was Grainy and had plenty of colour inaccuracy.

THE FEARED 'PROTECTED SIGNAL' MESSAGE
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This message pops up randomly (yes anytime) and stops your conversion straight away. This is meant to stop you from capturing copyrighted material, but i was trying to capture a birthday video -- i have my doubts that i was so conscious about people copying my masterpiece that i installed copyright encryption on it.

I try to give things another chance, but this message came up for 4 out of 5 of my home videos, its not good enough. This should not happen, its pathetic.

This error has happened to countless users, Roxio offers no support on their website. Their reply took 8 days, and did not solve the problem. Do not make the mistake of buying this item. Even the huge manual has nothing to offer you.

OVERALL
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Simply put, this item does not work. It has major faults (just do a google search and you'll see the long list of problems). Avoid at all costs... please!

In the box is a hardware capture device and a software CD. The capture device is about the size of USB memory stick and comes with phono sockets for video and audio, a s-video socket and a USB extension lead; you have to provide a cable with plugs on to go from the device to your VCR. I tried a lead with phono plugs (composite video) but found a s-video lead gave better results; I had to change the options in my VCR to output s-video.

The software was slow to install; the capture device installs as a USB 2861 device from Empia Technology, it is USB 2 only.
Initially I crashed the software but then realised that it was slow to respond to commands and I was giving it multiple commands. I have a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz with 2.5GB RAM.

You can capture at different levels:-
DV 720 x 576 AVI
DVD HQ 720 x 576 MPEG-2 8Mbs (recommended)
720 x 576 MPEG-2 4Mbs
352 x 288 MPEG-1 1.7Mbs
352 x 288 MPEG-1 1.12Mbs

There is a Plug and Burn option where you can burn a VHS tape directly to DVD. It creates a DVD menu and the results were good, especially considering how easy it was. I have some VHS-C camcorder tapes from the early 1990s and I didn't experience any problems. A normal DVD holds an hour of video at the best quality.
You can also input into the program where there are ample editing facilities and then you can make the DVD. There is an option to transfer to IPod or PSP, although I've not tried that. There is also software to create the labels if you wish.

The software has a clear, uncluttered interface with quite a lot of help available. It was slow but considering the price and the fact you get hardware and software I would recommend it.

As a video editor who tends to use a Mac primarily, I often get asked to transfer VHS footage onto DVD for family members, so I figured this would be a pretty good item to run on their Windows PCs, to give them the freedom to transfer the VHS to DVD themselves, as well as taking video direct from their camcorders. Running Toast Titanium, I had always found Roxio to be pretty good, so figured using this product would be just as effortlessly simple and painfree for even the most inexperienced user.

Installing the software onto an Intel Dual-Core processor PC running Windows XP, with 2GB of RAM, took around half an hour; this was followed with an upgrade from Roxio's web site, which again took a few minutes to install. Finally, up and running, the software looks as good as you'd expect The quality was not great, but then VHS never matches what we expect in our pristine digital age, however, there were major issues with transferring older, lower quality footage that could be filtered digitally - random messages popped up about the material being copyrighted, presumably mistaking the poor quality for Macrovision copy protection, which was applied to a lot of pre-recorded VHS.

However, with the right footage and time, you can get this product to work well, capturing video, editing it before burning to DVD (a minor niggle is the not exactly user-friendly DVD burning options menus, but it's not a major concern) or compressing them to transfer onto an iPod or iPhone. There are plenty of capture quality options to make sure you get as decent quality as you can, although coming from a VCR, it's not going to be too great anyway.

Overall, with some perseverance, you can get this product to work, and work fairly well, but if you're really hoping to bin the VCR forever, it might be worth borrowing a VCR-DVD recorder, and burning directly from VHS to DVD, then editing appropriately using other video editing software, or using a Scart-based input device, as they generally have less problems confusing poor quality with copy protection.