Saving Your Analog Data From Oblivion - » Linux Magazine

Saving Your Analog Data from Oblivion

Transferring VHS tapes, audio cassettes, and other analog home media formats to a digital format, such as Ogg or Matroska, can be a complex and expensive process with archival-grade conversions. In this article, I show you a simple and inexpensive method for digitizing your VHS tapes that is perfect for personal use.

Shopping List

To convert a VHS tape to a digital format, you need two pieces of equipment: a playback device for the original medium and a capture device to read the playback device's output. In addition, you need transcoding software to process the data that the capture device retrieves from the playback device. For a list of what I used in this project, see the "Software and Hardware Requirements" box.

For the playback device, you can find a used VCR for less than EUR100 online ($100-$200+ for NTSC/PAL/multisystem). Keep in mind that your chosen playback device must match the color encoding system of the VHS tapes you intend to transfer. Trying to play a PAL VHS on an NTSC device won't work (see the box "PAL vs. NTSC").

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