Peter is wondering what formats he could transfer his VHS tapes to? Whatever you do, I’d hurry up, says Jack Schofield

I need a good quality video capture lead or card to make copies of old VHS video tapes. Can you recommend a good device? I have two video tape players and a cheap video capture lead that only produces AVI files. I bought it a few years ago, and I am wondering if there are other leads / devices available that can produce other formats. Peter

The simplest way to convert VHS video into a digital format is to use a VHS/DVD player/recorder, which will probably have the word “combo” somewhere in the title. Personally, I’d go for one made by Panasonic, but there are alternatives from Toshiba, Philips, Sony and other companies. The best of these will transfer your VHS tape to a DVD, and some may even improve the mediocre mage quality that is inherent with VHS.

There were lots of combo players around a decade or so ago, and you can pick up a second-hand models on Amazon or eBay for anything from about £45 to £200. It could be a bit harder to pick a new one, but Amazon.co.uk has a new Toshiba DVR20 Digital DVD Recorder and VCR with Freeview for £287.48 or a Toshiba RDXV60 3-in-1 for £550. These models were discontinued in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The drawback is that most of these machines record using DivX or MPEG-2 rather than MP4, but if you really needed to transcode them, you could do that on a PC.

I assume a lot of people bought these machines to copy their VHS tapes and then sold them when they’d done the job. If you want to follow their example, sooner is better. The stock is aging and getting more unreliable every year.

The alternative, which is almost as simple, is to plug your best VHS player into a DVD Recorder or PVR (Personal Video Recorder). However, following the arrival of Freeview, modern recorders are going all-digital, and you will need one that accepts an analogue video input. I’d guess that your VCR has a SCART socket, in which case, a 21-pin SCART cable would do the job. SCART supports several different types of video (composite, component and S-Video) so you might manage with a SCART conversion cable. Check the back of your VHS player for output sockets.

You want to do the conversion with a PC, so you are looking for another device like your “cheap video capture lead,” which includes an analogue-to-digital video converter of the sort built in to combo player-recorders. There seem to be dozens of these, at prices from about £6 to almost £150, and professional products can cost even more. Unfortunately, most of them have not been reviewed, and I have no idea which is best.

Sorting Amazon.co.uk results by the Average Customer Review score suggests the Video-2-PC DIY Video Capture Kit is worth a go at £33.95 because 93 of its 107 reviews give it 4 or 5 stars. This is on a par with the well-established Elgato Video Capture lead (£72.71), which is regarded as one of the best of its type. If you want to spend less, then I’d try a ClimaxDigital VCAP lead such as the VCAP800 (£19.99). Unlike many cheap video capture leads, this is sold and supported by ClimaxDigital UK, based in Durham. The cheapest lead I’d risk is the August VGB100 External Video Editing Card (£12.25), but that only seems to convert videos to MPEG format.

Before buying a converter, check to see if you need a SCART-to-RCA phono plug adapter.

The simplest way to copy VHS tapes is just to dump them to DVD. It’s time-consuming because the tapes have to be played in real time, but it does the job. The alternative is to save them to your hard drive and then either trim or edit them before burning them to DVD or, possibly, not. This is even more time-consuming and means you will also need video editing software and, ideally, the most powerful PC you can afford.

Standard DVDs store videos as video object (.vob) files, which are in MPEG format. You can copy them, rename them with an .mpg or .mpeg extension, and then import them into your video program for editing. You can then save them in whatever format you like, though bear in mind that MPEG is “lossy” (like MP3) and transcoding may not improve the result. You can even try to “upconvert” videos to a higher resolution, though again, it may not be worth the effort. Modern DVD players with built-in upscaling usually make a better job of it. Either way, editing MPEG and MP4 files seems to me to be more difficult and much more unpredictable than editing .avi files.

There’s a plethora of free programs to try and the VideoHelp website is a good source of software and advice. Doom9.net is another good resource, especially for DVDs.

When it comes to video editing, it’s mainly a matter of finding whatever works for you, whether it’s something as simple as Windows Live Movie Maker or as complicated as the free version of the professional Lightworks software. But this is an area where, if you do a lot of editing, it’s probably worth splashing out on a cheap commercial program such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio or Adobe Premiere Elements, to name but two.