This is totally a late response on my part. Lalala....
Anyway, it's really not hard at all. And on mine you can make it as fancy or as plain as you like. Like, for example, back when I was using it to record Arrested Development off the TV I made fancy matching orange menus and such. I think you can put music on the menu screen too, but I never did that. But yeah, if you don't do the fancy stuff it's really pretty easy to transfer the tapes, just tedious because unless you're taping entire tapes and don't care if it's just all random stuff, you have to spend the time going through said tapes to figure out what's on it and what you want to keep or not keep or put on a different disc. Then it takes a long time because it will only record exactly what's playing. So say you wanted to transfer an entire season of BtVS onto DVD from a tape...you would have to play every single episode while it was recording. And if you wanted to not have commercials playing during the show, you'd need to sit there and pause the recording and then restart it. Even if you pushed record and walked away, you can only record so much in a certain amount of time anyway. So like a 22 episode season would still take 22 hours that you couldn't record other stuff during. What part of my problem is, like I said, is the commercial thing. Because I don't want them to interrupt my shows, so I want to pause the shows during the recording to avoid them, BUT I want to go back later and record all the good commercials on all my tapes onto its own disc. At one point I had gotten a lot of my Seth Green stuff transferred and all of my Caroline in the City episodes (which wasn't a ton of them) as well as the I Will Remember You episode of Angel. But I think that's it.
I paid about $100 like a year and a half ago (It came down to my VHS tapes getting just too overwhelming though and I needed to condense them down.). I can't for the life of me remember where I got it. I had gotten one prior to it for like $88 at Target made by Trutech. That one was a piece of garbage though and would never reliably record and would freeze up and stuff. It sucked, so I returned it for a full refund. This one I have now is Magnavox and also functions as just a DVD player and I've had no problems with it. It's also pretty cool because it uses the same DVDs that you'd use in a computer's DVD burner. I'm sure that the ones that are made now cost even less and are much better. A year and a half ago the technology wasn't brand new, but still not quite as common as it is now.
I'm glad I have it though, since my VCR died about a week ago and now I'll be less tempted to use tapes instead for recording shows on TV this fall.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2008-08-12 05:35 am (UTC)Anyway, it's really not hard at all. And on mine you can make it as fancy or as plain as you like. Like, for example, back when I was using it to record Arrested Development off the TV I made fancy matching orange menus and such. I think you can put music on the menu screen too, but I never did that. But yeah, if you don't do the fancy stuff it's really pretty easy to transfer the tapes, just tedious because unless you're taping entire tapes and don't care if it's just all random stuff, you have to spend the time going through said tapes to figure out what's on it and what you want to keep or not keep or put on a different disc. Then it takes a long time because it will only record exactly what's playing. So say you wanted to transfer an entire season of BtVS onto DVD from a tape...you would have to play every single episode while it was recording. And if you wanted to not have commercials playing during the show, you'd need to sit there and pause the recording and then restart it. Even if you pushed record and walked away, you can only record so much in a certain amount of time anyway. So like a 22 episode season would still take 22 hours that you couldn't record other stuff during. What part of my problem is, like I said, is the commercial thing. Because I don't want them to interrupt my shows, so I want to pause the shows during the recording to avoid them, BUT I want to go back later and record all the good commercials on all my tapes onto its own disc. At one point I had gotten a lot of my Seth Green stuff transferred and all of my Caroline in the City episodes (which wasn't a ton of them) as well as the I Will Remember You episode of Angel. But I think that's it.
I paid about $100 like a year and a half ago (It came down to my VHS tapes getting just too overwhelming though and I needed to condense them down.). I can't for the life of me remember where I got it. I had gotten one prior to it for like $88 at Target made by Trutech. That one was a piece of garbage though and would never reliably record and would freeze up and stuff. It sucked, so I returned it for a full refund. This one I have now is Magnavox and also functions as just a DVD player and I've had no problems with it. It's also pretty cool because it uses the same DVDs that you'd use in a computer's DVD burner. I'm sure that the ones that are made now cost even less and are much better. A year and a half ago the technology wasn't brand new, but still not quite as common as it is now.
I'm glad I have it though, since my VCR died about a week ago and now I'll be less tempted to use tapes instead for recording shows on TV this fall.