I'm looking at DVD ripping software now. I have the time to do this. I can also store on the cloud for family.

It is so expensive to have them transferred; there are some machines out there for purchase to do these transfers, which although expensive, would still be less expensive than getting them done commercially. Any experience with those??????

I have digitized about 15 VHS videos using a Hauppauge USB Live 2 video capture device. It sells for around $50 on Amazon.

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_usblive2.html

It comes with all the software you will need. I put my videos on an external hard drive but you could also burn DVD's, put them on a USB stick, or even upload them to YouTube. You have to be careful not to have any copyrighted music or video. YouTube can detect that and will remove the video.

I would not mess with the cheaper ones. I tried one for $20 and it was junk. It used free software that was awful and the video would not sync (it had the streaks that you used to get with bad VHS tapes). I tried several VHS machines and it would not work with any of them.

The Hauppauge USB-2 Live performed flawlessly using my Hitachi VHS VCR.

Edited to add - this will save a ton of money. A ton.

Editing again to ask - do I need DVD ripping software to transfer from DVD to USB?

I am pretty sure you can find software to do that. The Hauppauge software saves the captured video in MP4 format. You can do about anything with that with the right software.

Edit: I read that wrong. The Hauppauge software does not burn DVD's but you can download programs like FreeStudio to do that.

Here is a list of free DVD burning software:

https://www.techradar.com/best/the-best-free-dvd-burner

Windows or the Hauppauge software will play the MP4 files stored anywhere.

If you want to play them on a DVD player you need to find software that will burn the files to a video DVD. The link I posted has several programs that will do that.

In fact it is easier to play from a USB file than it is to play a DVD.

The brands include Visio and LG.

USB sticks can last for 10 years, DVD's for about 20. Their are gold DVD's that can last for 100 years, kinda pricey and they only hold 5gb of almost always compressed data. Here is a link to one http://www.mam-a-store.com/mam43437.html. They can also be error prone and expensive to replace if they do get errors. I would go with a usb drive, you can store them on your computer and drive at the same time, easily transfer them, load them on another drive and give it to your family cheaply.

I uploaded some family reunion videos I had digitized to YouTube and made them private. You can share the link with whomever you want but they aren't searchable or available to the public.

or use a cloud, I do all the time.

is you have to convert them to a horrible quality. Even the HD coder takes away info, whereas the original file is still the original, it also depends on what they are converting them to in the first place. I would have them do the highest possible.

I think the original VHS was only 250 lines. I had one that was from 2002 that was recorded in S-VHS, which is double the resolution. Neither of these showed any degradation on YouTube that I could see.

you loose information.

I want some of my commercial VHS converted. Specifically, those that were never released in any other format.

Does *anybody* do this? Or is there a way I can do it myself?

Since any VHS player or VCR puts out analog signals for video and audio it should not matter whether it is a commercial video or not. A video capture device just converts the analog signals into a digital format like an MP4 file.

The Hauppauge video capture device I mentioned above will connect to either the yellow RCA NTSC analog video or S-Video connector on a VCR. S-Video would provide the best results but the yellow NTSC works fine. The audio uses the red and white stereo RCA connectors that about all VCR's use.

It's designed to ruin most sorts of video copying.

The copy protection on Disney video cassettes is especially aggressive.

Some video transfer devices will detect video cassette copy protection and refuse to work. Some will make unwatchable copies. A few will quietly remove copy protection, but none of the name brand devices that did this advertised the fact.

At one time I had a Linux machine I'd built with some no-name brand video digitizing card that would make flawless copies of any video cassette, copy-protected or not, but that's not what I'd built the machine for.

Supposedly it's legal to make copies of commercial video cassettes you own, but it was never easy.

DVDs were meant to be as difficult to copy as video cassettes but the digital copy protection scheme used on DVDs was soon broken.

Not all commercial video cassettes have copy protection, especially older titles.