Ripping a DVD-RW from Magnavox MSR 90D6 DVD PLAYER/RECORDER

[Rich]

Hi, I got about 30-40 old VHS tapes and about 2 years ago I bought a DVD Player/Recorder at Sam's Club to rip the tapes to DVD. I've never gotten started. Eventually (hopefully soon) I want to rip each tape at the 6 hour setting on the DVD recorder to be sure the tape will fit. Then I will want to rip the DVD to my laptop and preview it at work where I can write down parts if any of the DVD I want to keep. Then I can go back and record those portions of that VHS at High Quality and then set aside those DVD disks until I'm done and toss the VHS tapes. Then will be the time for Re-Authoring and a whole new project.

Well my question now is just a portion of this. A few days ago I recorded the evening news and wanted to take it in to work to watch on my laptop. Since I don't wanna use my optical drive on the laptop hardly at all in order to prolong it's life, I just my Plextor connected via firewire to rip to the laptop's hard drive.

This works fine for rented movies and I thought it'd work fine for my own unencrypted DVD's from my Magnavox recorder. It says in it's instructions, (I'm pretty sure) that it finalizes as it goes so it's always compatible.

Well first I tried DVD Shrink and it errored out.

Then I tried DVD Fab decryptor and it errored out.

Finally I copied the files with windows explorer which worked but took like 45 minutes.

This will become a big portion of my future conversion project.

Are there any tricks to ripping DVD-RW's from home video recorders?

Thanks for any help. I just searched all over on google and found nothing.

Rich

[Ian]

It could be using the DVD-VR format. More likely though, the disc wasn't finalized. I bet that if you finalize it, you won't have any problems reading it on your laptop.

[Rich]

Ok, I'll look and see if I can find how to do that. I'd swear it says it does it automatically.
Thanks! Rich

[Rich]

Yup, I just looked in the setup menu and under recording; Auto Finalize: both Disk Full and End of Timer Rec are set to ON.

?

[jacktheripper]

Well...the way you've described your process, it is -extremely- time consuming in the way your doing it.

You could do it a different way and avoid your problems now that your having though it would require an investement (small) into a piece of equipment. Either a Canopus ADVC 110 ($120ish) which is a Analog to Digital converter which you would hook up from your VCR to the box and then Firewire from the box to your computer which will give you a finished digital format that you can edit and chop up and then drop onto a finished (and authored if you chose) DVD instead of multiple steps of back and forth.

There is also the Capture Card option where you would go with a Hauppauge ($60-150) capture card (there is also ATI and others) but I've good things from Hauppauge for such things. It will do the same thing, leading your VCR into your computer and skipping alot of steps. Personally I don't use a capture card but a ADVC 300 but I use mine for more then just personal.

[Rich]

[quote="jacktheripper"]Well...the way you've described your process, it is -extremely- time consuming in the way your doing it.

Well, not exactly. The dubing from VHS to DVD can be when I sleep. The dumping of the DVD to my Laptop is the problem, currently. Which, actually, if I can just copy the files in 45 min that matches copying a whole movie dvd with DVD Fab, so maybe that's not so bad.

As far as scanning it once it's on the laptop, I get to take my laptop into the gas station where I work graveyard. I can scan 6 hours of video, I'd-guess, probably in 30-60 minutes with WinDVD. As I do that I can note times when something I actually want off of the VHS exists and that is when I'd go back and dub just these parts manually. That could take some time.

Ultimately I have VideoRedo for hacking the video to remaster it but that may not be for years.

Right now I'd just like to be able to get rid of the VHS tapes. I'll putz with this tv news thing some more.

But thanks for the reply!

Rich

[jacktheripper]

well in that case...you do have the time to do it the way your doing it. I was thinking in terms of sitting there and soaking your hours waiting for it to finish.

[CowboySlim]

I agree with JTR. I have the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 card, they have others that will also work, and have used it to copy a number of my VHS tapes to hard drive. I then use Nero to burn them out to DVDs. For those that I have captured from TV on my VCR and have commercials, I remove the commercials with VideoReDo.

The analog to digital conversion/capture software is bundled with the Hauppauge card.

I don't use any fire wire business. I connect my VCR to the Hauppauge card with the Red-White-Yellow composite cables.

10-4?