Roxio Easy VHS to DVD for PC [OLD VERSION]

I recommend this product 100%. I would say I am a 'moderately tech savvy' person and I had absolutely zero problems installing the software (my computer runs on Windows 10 Home) and it worked like a charm. I bought this product it a couple months ago (in October) to convert all of my family's old VHS home movies as a holiday project for the entire family. It worked great, I converted over 30 VHS tapes with ease, then later copied the files onto flash drives and also uploaded videos to a private family YouTube channel. It was a huge hit, and required only this product and time -- no need to expensive conversion or shipping tapes off to another company. Some additional information that you may find useful: The device itself doesn't have a very long cord (it's a connector) but that is really not a problem because the VCR I used of course had its own RCA cable that was attached to the TV. I just took the VCR and RCA cable (that's the red-white-yellow cable) and set it next to the computer and plugged it in. The adapter has both an RCA (red-white-yellow) connector and an S-video connector, so in addition to using a VCR, any video input that comes through one of those types of connections can be imported. Also, the software can be used to create and burn DVDs (it can make a DVD menu, and you can combine multiple videos into one DVD) or you can simply record the video input directly to a file and save it to your computer. This 'quick edit' mode also gives you the ability to trim the video start and end points (or create multiple pieces of video) and save those to a single video file, which is very convenient. Highly recommend this product, five stars!

I saw many reviews for this that were bad but on an older Core i3 Windows 7 PC the installation was fluid. Asks to reboot. Launch program. Start new project, name if you want, press red record button, press play on your input device. Watch the video in the program window while you are recording. Press stop at the end of the tape. You can also set a recording duration. Like 32 min. for a 30 min tape just to catch any extra. I recorded directly out of an old JVC Compact VHS camcorder with rca jacks. You can record several videos in one project. You can also export many different clips out of one recording in a few different formats. MPEG2, H.264 and WMV 30 min takes up about 2GB of hard drive space. Editing is very simple, just move the marker to the start point, double click the start point marker and it moves to the marker point....move the marker to the end point, double click the end point marker and it snaps to the marker. click export and then you can choose computer, DVD, iphone, ipad, android, facebook, youtube, DivX. I choose computer then upload to cloud separately to make sure the video is good first. Help section is good with graphic of editing trim options. Cons: Doesn't like ant races between shots, if too long it stops recording. Has some overscan lines at the bottom. I read on a similar product: "A note about overscan lines at the bottom of captured video: As documented all over the Internet, when capturing digital video from an analog video source like an analog magnetic video tape, you will end up with some additional fuzzy lines at the bottom of the captured video. This is totally normal. When played back on a regular TV, these overscan lines are usually chopped off because they appear "below the bottom of the screen," but the digital capture grabs them. To get rid of those lines, you can crop or zoom in slightly when you do your video editing. "

Though you can convert a VHS tape directly to DVD with this program/hardware combo, most likely you're going to want to convert your tapes to files on your computer first and then assemble them into a project for burning (or uploading to YouTube, etc.). The dumbed-down interface can be pretty frustrating, so here's a few things I learned which you may find helpful. First: when the program starts up, there's two giant icons. The one on the left is for converting a video directly to a DVD. The one on the right is for starting a project, opening the last project you were working on last time (most programs just do that by default), or you can choose a different project. Create your new project, and then import the video (easy peasey). Now you have a video in your project. There's no "save project" option, but that's ok, it's saved. You can close the program and your project is saved. But let's assume you do that: you close the program and come back later. You start up the program, and there's those two icons. Where's your project? Use the icon on the right, *or* go to File, Open Project. Ah, there it is. A project, by the way, is just a container for your videos. You can convert a bunch of videos into one (or more projects), and when it comes time to burn a DVD or whatever, "import" your files into a project and you're ready to burn.The video files remain on your computer, just make sure you don't check the box that says "and delete the source video while you're at it." Which leads to... Second: where are my files? By default, it puts them in your User/Video folder on your C: drive. Again, go up to File and go into Preferences, and you can select where you want your soon-to-be-huge video folder to be. A 30 minute video tape equals 2GB of file space, and it adds up quickly. If your C: drive is running out of room, change the default directory, under Preferences. It may take the program a few tries to figure out what you did, but it will find the files eventually. (It's not the brightest bulb on the tree, this program.) By the way, a regular single-layer DVD holds about one hour's worth of video (4GB), and a double-layer DVD holds 2 hours (8GB). Third: If you don't title your video BEFORE you start recording, it's too late. You can't change it now within the program.Wait till the recording is converted, close the program, and go to the file itself using File Explorer in Windows. Rename the file. Reopen the program, open your project. It will panic and say "I can't find the file!" It's looking for "My Video" or whatever dumb name it gave your video file. Just use the Import button to re-add the file (with it's new name) to your project. Phew! Wasn't that Easy? Fourth: The program will build a nice title menu on your DVD, using the filenames of your source videos (see above). HOWEVER, if you decide to use the transition option (add wipes/dissolves/etc between videos), the program gives you a menu with just the title of the first video in your project. So, if you burn a DVD with, say, two videos on it and a transition between them, all you'll see on the menu is the first video. DO NOT PANIC. Both are there on the DVD, with a transition between them. Only use the transitions if you want to combine videos into one unit. Oy. The program and hardware work as advertised. No bells and whistles here, just basic convert your VHS tapes before they deteriorate stuff. It does the job. You can edit the video before burning it -- simple clipping of sections, that's all. So when that ex-girlfriend or whoever shows up in the video, you can cut that part out. Not that I would know about that. Heh. The S-Video cable did not fit my old VCR camera, so I had to use the RCA jacks (one for video, one for audio) which resulted in one-channel videos. You can use a Y-adapter, I suppose, to get around that. So, that's it. I hope you find this helpful. By dumbing down the interface and supplying insufficient instructions, this "Easy" program took more work than usual to get to work. But it does work. Good luck!

I have just returned this product. At first things went well. I successfully hooked up the VCR to my computer and transferred video files complete with sound. These files were 70 year old 8mm family reunion films that had been converted to VHS 20-30 years ago, so I cannot speak to the transfer video quality. In another case, I had Video_TS files that I converted using a different product to MPEG-2 files and it seemed that they were successfully imported into Easy VHS to DVD 3 Plus. The problems began when I tried to edit the video files, e.g., the Play button plays at at least 2X the normal speed so it was difficult to find the short parts that I wanted to edit out. Although two other products play the video files successfully, the Easy VHS to DVD software only played the first 1/3 of my first video file and because of all the other issues (see the next paragraph), I haven't checked the rest. RE: Support - The software comes with a getting started guide that pretty much only addresses how to hook up the equipment. The packaging says there are tutorials available but many searches of the Web site only turned up one -- and that was the getting starting guide. I contacted Tech Support and they sent me a link. However, it was to the same location which I had previously searched. The in-product help is extremely limited, giving a brief overview of trimming and previewing a video and, due to very slow response within the software, it occasionally did not open at all. (Note: I have a very new Win 8.1 computer with tons of memory and storage space.) Also worth mentioning, the software failed during startup about 50% of the time but then opened fine when shut down and restarted. I only encountered one Tech Support person who actually answered my questions, the rest sent answers that sounded like an automated response system that had picked out a few keywords and responded with "answers" that did not match my questions. Over a period of 10 days, every time I went to the Web site to check the status of my trouble tickets, that page was down with a message to check again later. Although my tickets were closed, I continued to check the page and it was always down. Will no longer try to get this to work and will check out Win Movie Maker and other products. If it didn't take my personal involvement to identify all the parts of the videos to edit out, I would turn this over to a pro.

Corel tech support deserves all the bad ink they’re getting. I contacted them four days ago, and so far all I’ve gotten are emails suggesting I try their knowledge base, which I can’t seem to navigate at all, and a support code allowing me to submit my question on a website that doesn’t list Easy VHS to DVD 3 as one of the programs it supports. So if you want tech support, don’t buy this software. Nevertheless, this software has worked for me except for one confusing glitch, and I think my experience may explain why there is such a wide variation in the evaluations here. First, I had no problems with installation. I’m running Windows 7 in a two year old machine with plenty of speed and memory and hard drive, but it’s no hotrod. I had no problems with overheating of the USB. The converter got warm but not hot. My first project was simply to put a one hour video onto a DVD. To do this, you put the DVD into the optical drive and it burns while you’re running the VCR in real time. So the process took an hour, but the result was a DVD that did play in all my DVD players. The picture quality was horrible, but when I looked at the VHS, I found its picture was just as bad, especially blown up on a 48 inch screen. I didn’t see significant degrade from the VHS to the DVD. But then I wanted to put four half hour videos onto a DVD. To do that, I first recorded the four half hour clips onto my hard drive and then tried to burn them onto a DVD. After an hour and a half, it said twenty percent of the job was done, and nothing had been burned onto the DVD. So, since I’d read all the bad reviews here, I assumed the program was stuck and gave up. That’s when I tried to get tech support unsuccessfully. But eventually I tried to burn a compilation DVD again, letting the process run, expecting an error code. Instead, after two and a half hours, my two hours of videos were burned onto a DVD which has a menu and plays on all my DVD players. The glitch is that the progress bar never got over fifty percent. The DVD was finished when it said it was only 48 percent done. So the progress bar is completely inaccurate and had led me to believe that the program wasn’t working. Because of this, I find I prefer to burn DVD’s of compiled videos using another software. Roxio VHS to DVD 3 Plus did capture the VHS videos and convert them to mpg files on my hard drive. Roxio Creator (I have just the Starter version, but that’s adequate, and I suspect any video burning software would work) will burn the mpg files onto a DVD, and I can watch it doing this in a way that doesn’t leave me wondering what’s going on. So I can see why people who are converting one whole video at a time onto a DVD are perfectly happy with this product. As are people who are putting VHS videos just onto their hard drives to watch from there. But anyone trying, as I did, to burn a compilation of videos onto a DVD gets frustrated, believing that it’s not working and then gets even more frustrated with Corel support.

I did a fair amount of research before buying this - including reading many reviews. People seemed to love it or hate it. I figured I'd take a chance. I got mine last week and installed it on an older computer. I checked the system requirements etc and all seemed like it should work. It didn't - but I blame it on the computer, not the device. The computer processes at a snails pace -- like over 5 min to boot. Since we don't use this computer anymore, I figured I could dedicate it to the transfer process. Oh well. Plan B -- I installed it on our newer computer (16G Ram, etc). Success! I don't consider myself overly technical, and I like "Easy"! This device fits the bill. I transferred 3 VHS-C home movies so far and instead of burning them to DVD, I've transferred them right onto the computer hard drive. Probably my biggest challenge was hooking up the cables to the VCR correctly. My VCR has audio and video jacks on the front and also on the back. When I first connected to the front, it didn't work at all. Maybe those are input vs output jacks. When I moved to the jacks on the back, it worked very well. I've been wanting to transfer my home movies for years but didn't like the idea of buying a $300 device, nor paying $10 or more per unit to have someone else transfer them. Considering I don't have a VCR hooked up to a TV anymore, I haven't even been able to re-watch those old home movies. Now that I've started transferring, I've been watching them as they transfer. I transferred a couple from 1996 -- I was pleasantly surprised at how well they turned out! I would recommend this device, but I would strongly suggest you make sure your computer meets or exceeds the minimum system requirements. If your computer is a 'dog' like my old one, I think you will run into issues.

I have read some of the other reviews and decided to write this to add to the plus side. This could not have been any easier to use. My goal was to take some 20 year old VHSC tapes and get them copied to my computer and backed up before they were no longer readable. I was able to copy my first VHSC within ten minutes of installing software. I was able to use the edit function on SHORT videos. Caution If you say proceed right after you finished copying tape ,stand by it will take almost as long to let the editing process finish. That is OK if you need to edit them. Most of my were simply just copy them to the computer. I found that once you have completed the coping do not edit or preceded to next step, simply start new project. The tape you just recorded is in the Captured Videos Folder. If you decide to proceed then you are giving options for tablet computer etc. Standby it's a long process after that. I just wanted them captured on my computer in a Windows Media Player file. So I just exit and started a new project and the file was there without that extra step. Remember this is only is you do not edit them or want them converted to something other than a Windows Media Player file. This was exactly what I wanted and worked great without any problems. My only real surprise was how big the file was. (edited or not) a one hour tape was 4.to 5 gigs.

I have mixed feelings about this device. On one hand the hardware to transfer my VHS tapes onto my PC worked great, but using the software to convert and burn the files to DVD was a nightmare. The biggest problem I ran into with the software was when I tried to burn the converted video to DVD using the software. I must have tried 20+ times and the burning process always froze at some point stating that my DVD's were corrupted in some way or another leaving me with a bunch of coasters. At first I thought I just got a bad batch of DVD'S, but I then tried a few of them in another program and they all burnt flawlessly so the problem had to be with the Roxio software, but trying to get support was also a nightmare. For starters, quality support for this product is non existent. It is obvious that the "techs" are just reading off some canned response to basic questions which for the most part had nothing to do with the questions I was asking, but the kicker was that one tech actually suggested that I purchase another product from another company to resolve my issues. I can say with 100% certainty that I will never buy another piece of software from Roxio ever again and I will NOT be recommending this product to my friends and family, which is a shame because the hardware portion of this product worked out great, but as the title says, it's let down by poor software implementation and support.