On the Forbes.com website we can read
that Hewlett-Packard has announced a new product, called
the DVD Movie Writer, with which you can easily rip your old VHS tapes to
DVDs. The main advantage is of course that VHS tapes have a quality degradation
after five years or so while DVDs can last a lot longer than that:
It's an external DVD burner that connects to a
desktop or notebook PC via a USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 port. It allows you to
connect a variety of videotape players, including VHS, Hi8, Betamax and
others through an S-Video or Composite video input. The result is a DVD+R
or DVD+RW disc with the video from the tapes converted into MPEG2 format,
the same video format used on commercial DVDs you find at the store. It
supports both the NTSC video standard common in the U.S. and Canada; PAL,
common in the United Kingdom and much of Europe; and SECAM, the standard
in other countries, including France.
The unit comes bundled
with DVD-editing software called ArcSoft ShowBiz 2, which is
consumer-level video-editing software. A second program called MuVee
autoProducer sets home videos to music with a few basic editing tricks.
The Movie Writer is also a standard
CD/DVD burner, appropriate for saving data, burning music CDs and all the
usual things you'd expect from a CD
burner. |
The HP DVD Movie Writer is expected to ship in
September of this year for around $ 399. Discuss this new product in
our Recording Hardware Forum.
Source: Forbes.com
