As well as developing your holiday snaps, lots of chemists now offer to convert your old VHS tapes into DVDs at about twenty quid a go. Nice and easy if you can afford it, but if you have more than a couple of tapes you want to convert it would be cheaper to buy a video capture device and do the job yourself.
Terratec's Grabster AV150 is just such a gizmo. You don't have to open your PC to install it, it plugs into a USB 2 port (not an older USB1.1 port, they're too slow). It couldn't be simpler to install; just run the driver software, plug it in and you're ready to go. As well as its USB connection, the Grabster has two composite connections, one for capturing video and one for feeding the same video stream through to an external device such as TV. This allows you to preview the footage you're capturing while you're capturing it. There's an S-Video connection too, but no audio inputs. To capture your video's audio track, you plug your VCR or camcorder directly into your PC's soundcard. The Grabster comes with a phono-to-3.5mm jack cable for capturing audio - probably because these are relatively rare - but doesn't come with any other cables. If your VCR doesn't have any of these connections, the manual suggests you plug the Grabster into a composite-to-SCART adapter, but none is provided.
When you buy the Grabster you also get Ulead VideoStudio 7 for capturing video, and Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 7 for creating your own DVDs. Both are a couple of years old, but they're good programs nonetheless. VideoStudio is easy to use and detects the device automatically. It captures to MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video formats, as well as letting you create video CDs and streaming files for uploading to a website.
The footage we captured using the Grabster was of good quality - as good as the original VHS tape. You can try to get things a bit closer to DVD quality with VideoStudio, but don't expect miracles; you can't add details that weren't there in the first place.
If you have more than three VHS tapes that you want to convert to DVD, then Terratec's Grabster AV 150 pays for itself. It's easy to use, straightforward to set up, and does the job it's designed for.
System Specifications
CONNECTION USB2 INPUTS composite/video, S-Video VIDEO FORMATS NTSC, PAL REQUIRES 800MHz processor, Windows XP, 256MB RAM, 400MB hard disk space, USB 2 interface
Verdict
An easy -to-use video capture device for digitising footage from video tapes and analogue camcorders.
A handy little video capture device that works with any PC that has a USB 2 port.
Computer Buyer Online