VHS To DVD 4.0 Plus

I purchased this item to transfer my home VHS tapes to DVD. Overall, I was not satisfied with the results. The picture quality was not a good as I expected and was noticeably worse than the original tapes. It was easy to set up and the directions were easy to follow. There are different levels of encoding quality to choose from. Evan at the highest quality setting, I was not satisfied and have returned the item.

I just received this product yesterday (5/12/2010) and got it going. I'm on windows 7 64 bit. I installed the software, then hooked up rca cables from my cable box to the converter to my usb so I could test it out. I opened the program, pressed 'advanced mod' and saw a window showing video. I did not see the output from the cable box that I had hooked up but instead saw my web cam output. I realized the drivers were not installed correctly for the converter box and it did not recognize it. An easy fix - just went to their website, downloaded the latest drivers, installed them and everything worked great. Remember to change the 'capture device' option to 'USBvhstodvd' in the software if you're still seeing your web cam video even after the drivers are installed. Once you do that, you'll see whatever is coming into the converter box playing on your screen just like if it were being output to a TV. You can press the 'record' button at the bottom whenever you want to start recording. Everything I hooked up via rca cables worked great (I don't have an svideo cable so I didn't test that). The capture quality was much better than I thought it would be. I really was impressed. Do not expect this product to turn VHS quality to DVD, but it does just about as good as is possible. You can record high resolution as long as your CPU is fast enough - I believe you need 2.5Ghz to record the highest res. You can choose 4:3 or 16:9 ratio and you can select from different quality modes to output to WMV or MPEG. There's a freeware program called 'super' you can search for online that will convert between practically any type video format if you want something else such as quicktime or flash. Just google 'super video converter'. Great little product. It's simple, it works easily as long as you have the driver updates, will take anything that has rca or svideo outputs, and it creates great quality videos. Worth much more than $45 in my opinion. 5 stars!

I bought this product in 2009 and have tried to use it numerous times. It does work but I've had numerous issues with dropped frames that I'm not sure are connected to possible lack of computer power although I'm using a PC with an i3 processor at 2.4 GHz and a hard drive with 7200 RPM. The latest issue now is that it APPEARS to record the whole tape, but when I view the video on my PC, it is not all there. I tried to convert a 13 minute VHS tape - the first time I ended up with a 2 minute video and the second time, a 10 minute video. Both times the converter software indicated it had converted the whole tape, but the whole thing was not on my computer hard drive. Baffled by what was happening, I submitted a tech support request on the Honestech web site. When I tried to register the product on their web site I received an error message that my email address was already being used, so I assumed I must have already registered. According to their tech support, I'm not registered. So I tried to register again using a different email address (which I recently created) and received the error message again. I emailed their tech support and told them I was unable to register, but included verification that I had indeed bought their product. They replied and said unless I register on their web site, they can't provide tech support. Pretty slick way to avoid tech support - make it so it's impossible to register on their web site and therefore no need to provide tech support. Their web site is pretty bad and basically tech support non existent. I'd recommend to stay away!

The system worked fine but seemed to be a bit cumbersome to install and use. Was worth the cost and effort to install.

This is just an update to my first review below. I completed my conversion project - over 35 video tapes (8mm, VHS-C, VHS) and this device worked every time - the cost for local commercial conversion would have been around $25 per tape. I was very happy with the quality, these were analog tapes, some of them 25 yrs old. However, I did not use the software included, and I used Freemake to burn the CD's. There are lots of variables as to how well these converters work, like the operating system, computer video capture hardware, computer speed and memory, DVD burner, media used, etc. so it is possible to get devices that do not work well for you. But for around $45 this was the perfect solution for me and I knew I could return it to Amazon if it did not work. Before buying this I reviewed a lot of other similar products, most of which got mixed ratings. Based on the good reviews here I went with this product as the cost was also fairly reasonable. I have Win XP SP 3 on a dual core 2.1 computer, 2 GB ram. The DVD 4.0 software installed easily and then I plugged in the USB, it was found OK and I did a test conversion from my VCR, worked fine and created a useable DVD. But, I found the software not so easy to use or understand, and the documentation gives few clues. Since I have used Microsoft Movie Maker in the past, the next time I just opened it up and clicked on "capture video", it found this input device fine and I was off and running. (This is the Movie Maker that came with Win XP) (Movie Maker sometime crashes when you are doing more heavy editing, but all I wanted to do was delete some clips and add a title at the beginning.) MM creates a WMV file that I then used input to a Roxio product for burning DVD's. By the way, my media included VHS tapes with converted 8mm movie film transferred to it a few years ago, reg VHS tape and VHS C tape and also 8mm analog tapes from a camcorder. Do not expect to get HD quality from any of these, but the conversions were still fine (some on the 8mm movies were from 50 years ago)and a great way to preserve many memories. You might want to keep all your converted materials, like WMV or MPG files as well as any DVD's you make so you can covert them to a future format/media when all these become obsolute. Finally, converting tapes takes a long time, it is done in real time and you might want to use Y connectors to feed the transmission into a small TV during the process although Movie Maker and probably others do have a preview screen, but sometimes you cannot hear the sound during the capture. Also, regardles of what software you are using, be sure to go through the whole process for a couple of conversions and check out the results before doing a big batch.

I have a video camera from the mid-90s that uses the 8mm tape. I was looking for a cheap way to transfer the videos to my PC. VHSToDVD 4 is cheap but did not do the job very well. The software included made the job easy but the quality of the transfer was terrible. Video was very grainy. Will probably have to invest in a more expensive solution.

This was my first run with this type of software and I thought my research was pretty good. I liked the idea of the interface since I don't have a TV card on-board my computer. This portion worked fine for transfering the VHS signal from the VCR to the program via the computer. Here is what I wish I had known before I purchased this product: The software is EXTREMELY basic. Editing is possible but it's clumsy and non-intuitive. There are only two choices, Basic or Advanced editing. Basic editing is point to where the video is and hit BURN, that's it. That's fine if that is all you need. In Advanced you have a few more choices but they are very basic, very clunky and very frustrating. I had transfered different chapters and didn't realize that I had more than the capacity of my 4.7 gig DVD so tried to eliminate chapters to meet the limit. Never could figure out how to do it. I tried to delete the title page after making a mistake and couldn't. I'd delete chapter after chapter, save it, close it, re-open it and it would still not burn showing I STILL had 5.3 gigs of data. I had to dump all record of the project and re-transfer it. This stuff will work for most beginners, I'm no expert but this was just too limiting for me. I will say that the software loaded well and seems to work within its limitations. I'd recommend taking a look at Cyberlink Power Director 8 for an option that gives a little more control and seems to be more predictable. Good luck!

The actual physical device included is fantastic. It's small, easy to use, and does it's job without any hassle. The software included is a little clumsy at first, but once you get the hang of it it's not a problem. I've spent about 20 hours so far recording from all of my family's old home movies and ran into very few problems throughout the whole process. Just make sure to do a few short test recordings to find the best format before you commit hours and hours of time. For me the WMV 4GB setting gave the best quality/file size ratio. But anyway once you figure out which format to record in everything's pretty easy. The only thing that was a bit frustrating was the editing component of the software. It's just sorta clunky overall, but it gets the job done. If it bothers you there are plenty of free programs out there that you can substitute in. The recording aspect produces normal video files which you can easily move to other programs. Where this product really shines is the ease of capturing video with minimal mess. I'd rate it a 4.5/5 if I could, but I'm pleased enough that I'll bump it up to a 5 rather than drop it to a 4 on Amazon's rating system. I did a lot of research before buying and I'm fairly positive this is the best video capture system available right now.