The Elgato Systems USB Analog Video Capture Device is a compact USB device, perfect for converting analog video to a digital format. You'll be able to use the device to capture old home movies, VHS recordings, or any other analog media to a modern digital format. Simply plug your playback device into the S-Video or RCA composite input of the device, and capture. Video is digitized into a format that is compatible with iTunes, any iPod, the iPhone, the Apple TV, YouTube, and iMovie. This gives you extreme flexibility as to how you utilize the captured video, without having to jump through the hoops of manual file format conversion.
Elgato's Video Capture is an excellent tool for any Mac or Windows user who would like to bring their old analog videos into the digital age. It was time: I had some important VHS tapes that are more than twenty years old that were deteriorating because of age. Elgato Video Capture is the device to use.
It costs less than $100 and I ordered it from Walmart. It arrived in California from Arkansas within a week, a business day earlier than promised. In my garage I found an old stereo Video Cassette Recorder (old school VCR), made sure the four heads inside were shiny clean, and powered it on. No sparks, so I connected the Elgato Video Capture Device to red, white, and yellow output jacks of the VCR. A s-Video plug is also included, but that is for DVDs. The other end has a USB plug that fit into the USB jack of my Macbook.
No need to hook up the VCR to a TV; the laptop suffices. Software is downloaded from the Elgato website. Minimum CPU requirements are specified and after installation, a straight-forward window pops up with easy to follow steps. One can clip the beginning and end, but no advance editing tools are included. An hour-long tape uses about one gigabit of storage space. After transferring, I backed everything up on an external harddrive, Over the holidays, I plan to add titles and subtitles in iMovie and stabilize the video in a couple of places, before sharing the clips with friends and family.
Best Buy Usb 2.0 Video Capture Adapter For Mac Windows 10
Perhaps they will enjoy seeing my old VHS tape as it enters the digital age. This product met all of my expectations. Simple, quick, worked right out of the box. I went to the website indicated in the instructions to download the driver and software to make sure I had the latest. Within minutes I was capturing video from my VHS player. I am using it to transfer home movies to digital. I am using the 'high definition' (default) resolution setting.
This gives just over 2Gb per two hour VHS tape. I like the ability to set the software to automatically stop recording after a preselected amount of time. This allows me to start a tape being captured and walk away.
I don't need to come back at any particular time since it will stop on its' own. It looks like it was supposed to come with an S-Video cable, but that was missing. Luckily, I didn't really need it, but it might've been a nice option instead of the included composite cable (in my experience it wouldn't make a difference with the work I was doing). The software was pretty straightforward. But editing wasn't very precise, I really had to fiddle with it to edit the video the way I wanted it.
And it would've been nice to have a 'back' button to click onto to make some last-minute changes before it's completed. Most importantly though, the final product turned out very well. All-in-all a nice unit, but it would be improved with the above changes. Had no problems setting up or using the Elgato. Transferred hi8mm video with no problems. I only mention the following in case you are considering different products.
I Had previously tried a Honestech 8.0 and that was horrible. The Honestech video was very grainy, had audio hum, and would not work at all with the supplied USB cable (they even sent me another which made no difference. I had to use my own without the noise suppressor and the only way I could get usable video was to run the output of the camera through a high quality VCR first. No such troubles with the Elgato.everything worked perfectly. For someone with not a lot of technical/computer skills, the Elgato Video Capture is a fantastic device!
Although it's slightly more pricey than other devices.it makes up for it in quality & ease of use (and it does work on a PC or a MAC). I had lots of old VHS tapes of the kids growing up over the years.
I looked high & low for a way to convert these to my PC. I first bought a VHS to DVD player/recorder, which enabled me to go from VHS to DVD-R. I thought.until I tried playing the DVD-R in my PC's DVD drive.it wouldn't read it! A lot of time & money wasted. With this Elgato Video Capture, I just plugged one end into my old VHS player, and the other end into my PC's USB port. Then played the VHS tape in the player & watched/recorded the video on my PC monitor.
When I press 'Stop Recording' on my PC, it instantly converted the video clip to an MPEG or AVI file! It couldn't be easier! I would highly recommend this product to anyone.
Correction on my previous review VHS to Mac with JPEG works fine.however it does not work when you use it directly with MPEG-4. The voice desynchronizes with the video. I was told by the support team of Videoglide that you need to do a conversion 1st on JPEG and putting through IMovie to get the MPEG conversion with the voice and correct size,so you need to spend more time for conversion and it is not according to their user manualThe Diamond physical product is fine. The Videoglide software is not adequate.