firewire port????

[efiste2]

can i plug a DV camcorder/a to d converter straight into my PCV RX 514 desk top via the FIREWIRE connection port to put my vhs/home videos onto DVD ,

[chuckalicious]

Not sure what you mean there. However, any DV camera should be able to plug directly into the firewire port, and if you have the right software, such as click to DVD, then yes, you can put anything that comes through the DV camera onto DVD. Not sure about VHS etc though, I personally do that via a TV card with a composite in, but if you can get them onto DV, then yes you can put them onto the PC and thus onto DVD

[tellingd]

 I personally do that via a TV card with a composite in, but if you can get them onto DV, then yes you can put them onto the PC and thus onto DVD

Chuck
You mention using a TV card. I'd like to get some (analogue) home videos onto DVD so that they will play in a 'normal' home DVD player. I've got a desktop with a TV card and a laptop with a DVD +/- writer.

In your opinion, what's the best format to save the analogue files onto the desktop - so that when used on the laptop (with whatever software Sony have provided) I can produce a reasonable quality DVD.

Any thoughts?

[Snipes]

 can i plug a DV camcorder/a to d converter straight into my PCV RX 514 desk top via the FIREWIRE connection port  to put my vhs/home videos onto DVD ,

yes you can, via firewire, make sure you have the right firewire cable IE 4-4 pin or 4-6 pin, dont make the mistake i did and buy the wrong 1 lol :smileyblush:

[chuckalicious]

Well, it depends on what your TV card can do. Firstly, you need to have software which will display the video you are playing in to your TV card. Normally the software which came with your card will do this. I suggest watching some of each film or tape before you go and record it as some just don't come over very well, for some reason. As for the best format. That's a hard one. As far as I know, DVD players play MPEG-2 format, so if you can record in that format, then the creation of the DVD SHOULD be quicker due to less conversion. However, some programs are funny and do it anyway.
Basically record it in the best format you can. MPEG-2 or AVI are normally pretty good, and I think using an audio sampling rate of 44.1Khz (which is what I think DVD uses) is also worthwhile. Do note that these files can be HUGE for a full film or such like. I personally record things onto my PC using a program called Showshifter, which allows you to record in DivX format, which is small and good quality, but your DVD player would hate it!
When I say huge, I mean a very high quality recording of a movie would be many many gigabytes, and I mean MANY!
Best thing to do is to mess around, but www.dvdhelp.com is also a good place to look, they have lots of tools which can help. Please remember that putting anything copyrighted from VHS or other source to DVD or other source is ILLEGAL. Only do it for home movies etc. That's my suggestion anyway.

[efiste2]

Im planning on buying a analogue to digital converter called an ADVC-100 that converts vhs-s,composite signals into DV so i can firewire it into the PC to get the best quality possible, will click to DVD this??

[efiste2]

and also is click to DVD easy to use and how long does it take to do around one hour of footage?????

[Snipes]

Cick to DVD is very easy to use, and it depends on what DVDRW you have for the speed,

[chuckalicious]

Now, this is just me being cautious, but I have no idea whether that converter will work. It most likely will, but it sounds odd. Anyway, enough of the paranoia. Yes, CLick To DVD is pretty easy to use, although it is time consuming. To make a 20 minute DVD, including the 20 minutes of capture, with no editing (quite basic on CLick to DVD as far as I know) and burning at 1x (that's all my RX405 2400+ can do) took about an hour or so, so it does take a while, but the results are pretty cool

[chuckalicious]

Actually, and this is just a thought. Can you plug an input into your camera? Such as composite video? If you can, it may be worth playing VHS via the video player into the camera, and then seeing if you can grab the video via firewire that way, I think I read somewhere that you could do that. If you could, you'd save yourself a packet on that converter I would have thought