Memories and vhs tapes have one thing in common ? they fade over time. But fortu-nately, dvds come to the rescue. If you have a large collection of family memories and home videos on vhs tapes, they won't live for very long. As years go by, the quality of vhs tapes degrades and the more you play them, the more they wear out. If you want to keep these memories, you should transfer them to dvd. There are many ways to do it. The process is not as simple as converting from other formats because usually you have only one vhs copy to rely on.



Your movies can always be with you, if you have a portable movie player ? i.e. an iPod, or Zune, or a Palm or any other similar device. If you have a dvd, you can use a con-verter program and convert your videos to a format, which is playable on a portable vid-eo player. Among the many programs, which allow such conversion, Videora is one of the best because it is easy to use and you can quickly make your dvds playable on your iPod.

The easiest way to convert vhs to dvd is to get an outside company to do it for you; of course, this will not be the cheapest way. If you choose to get an outside company to do it, they will convert all your vhs tapes and you will get them back in the form of dvds. This makes it a more permanent memory and is easier to store.

If you want to transfer your vhs to dvd on your own, there are many opportunities but usually they take a lot of time. The step, which requires the most time, is the process of converting the analog video to digital via an analog-to-DV converter. The process in-cludes encoding in MPEG-2 format and authoring a dvd. This is the best way to go, if you need to make edits to your video. But you must be prepared that converting 1 hour of video from vhs to dvd can take many hours or even days!

Another option for vhs to dvd conversion that is a little quicker is if you capture the vhs video using a hardware capture device that will convert the vhs to MPEG-2. This limits the options you have for edit-ing, but one hour of video is one hour of work. Once you have it on your computer as MPEG-2, you can burn it to a dvd.

If your video is on your camcorder, then all you need to do is connect the camcorder to a standalone dvd burner. Vhs will automatically be converted to dvd and the dvds will also be created. If you want to transfer your movie from vhs to dvd without making whatsoever edits, this is the best way to do it.

Obviously, there are many ways to convert your vhs movies to dvd. It is up to you decide which way to go ? the fastest, the cheapest, or the easiest.