Copying onto Windows Media Center?

Question

I am trying to figure out if there is a way to connect my TV, VCR, and Computer so that I can burn old home videos onto my computer (so that I can then burn them to DVD). If not, I will just buy a VCR/DVD recorder, but I wanted to see if there was a way to do it with the equipment I have.

Answer 1

The cheap and easy way to do this is to output your VCR coax into the coax input of your Windows Media Center Edition (MCE).  Tune the tuner of your MCE to channel 3 or 4 (whatever the VCR is set to output at), press play and you should see on the TV what's playing on the VCR.

Set MCE to record for the duration of the home video and you should be set.

The bad news is that this is not a good way to keep your videos as you won't be able to get the right metadata on the file (it will tag the video with whatever show it thought was on channel 3 or 4 at that time)

There are separate hardware solutions like Plextor's offerings (link below) that come with software to do what you're looking for.  Or if you have a video camera that has analog pass through you could connect through the camera and record using windows movie maker (although it's starting to get a little complex)

good luck!