For longer-lasting memories, convert old tapes to DVDs

Not that long ago, it seemed wondrous that you could save your holiday memories on videotape.

But now videocassettes seem poised to join 8mm film, reel-to-reel audiotape and floppy disks in basements and landfills everywhere as fallen tech formats.

These days you gotta be digital, baby, and not just to be hip. The current crop of digital video cameras allows you to store your precious family events on a format that is more convenient and allows for editing right in a home computer.

But what about preserving all those videocassettes of holidays past? The tapes and the VCRs you play them on (which are getting increasingly scarce in electronics stores) do break down over time.

The solution is to convert your old videocassettes to DVDs -- a far more handy and stable storage medium.

This can be accomplished in several ways. You can send your VHS videocassettes to one of the many services that do conversions. But it’s not cheap if you have several tapes -- the going rate to convert a two-hour tape to a true DVD generally starts at about $30.

It also means sending your tapes away to a business you probably don’t know.

To find a service, put “VHS,” “DVD” and “convert” into an online search engine, and you’ll come up with plenty of them.

If you want to do the conversions at home, you could get one of the new DVD recorders (sometimes called DVRs) that have many other cool uses.

You can use them to record programs directly off the TV onto blank, writeable DVDs, even when you are not at home. In this way, they are just like videocassette recorders, or VCRs. But in general, the DVRs are much easier to use. Because they’re digital, they have far fewer moving parts (no rewinding!) and operating them is more straightforward.

I tested the Pioneer DVR-310, which sells for about $400, and although I’ve always found VCR programming to be a hit-and-miss art at best (I am one of those people who stared at a flashing “12:00” for days on end on VCRs), I had the DVR up, running and recording programs in less than half an hour.

Copying VHS tapes to DVDs was only slightly more complicated, and the DVD copies looked great. More-expensive DVD recorders have hard drives or even TiVo functions.

One caveat concerning the DVR-310: It works best with analog cable TV systems. If your cable service is digital, you’d be better off with the higher-priced DVR-510 that goes for about $600.

Given that DVRs are relatively new on the consumer market, you might want to wait a bit before buying one. If they are like almost every other tech gizmo, they’ll get more sophisticated and cheaper as time goes on.

There’s another way to do the videocassette-to-DVD conversion, but it takes more tech savvy. If you happen to have a DVD burner in your computer, it’s possible to transfer the contents of a tape onto the computer’s hard drive and then transfer to DVD.

But even if your computer has a DVD burner, it’s not likely to have the analog input needed to accept video content. You’re going to need some kind of digital video converter.

This could be fairly easy if you have a digital camcorder that has an analog input. You can transfer your videocassette content to the camera and then download it to the computer.

Or you can get a separate digital video converter to do the job, but they cost almost as much as a DVR. For example, the DV Converter Pro, which works with both PCs and Macs, is available from SP Distribution for $325.