Honestech VHS to DVD 7.0 Deluxe

Honestech VHS to DVD 7.0 Deluxe..

Buy Honestech VHS to DVD 7.0 Deluxe By Honestech

Most helpful customer reviews

279 of 284 people found the following review helpful.
Eventually worth some frustrations
By Elmer M. Cranton
Caution: This hardware is powered only through the USB-2 port. USB-2 ports are notorious for being underpowered, especially on laptops or if not attached directly and closely to the computer motherboard, without a bridge, not a shared port, and not with an excessively long cable, etc. This may explain some of the problems reported by others. If your hardware and operating sysem match the manufacturers requirements, you may have no problems at all. Some users report a seamless and sucessful insatllion. Not the case with me, even with a good port and adequate power.

I had a frusrating time installing, but it eventually works OK and as as advertised.
I have a powerful desktop system, far exceeding manufacturer's stated requirements, operating under Windows 7 Professional, 64 bit version. After multiple attempts to install and connect with the device, I share the following.

The driver on the installation CD was out of date. After a failed installation, uninstall, multiple attempts to reinstall,I found it necessary to uninstall totally, do use a registry clean utility to delete many registry entries not removed and not deregistered by uninstall, and start fresh with an updated driver downloaded from the manufacturer's website.

The following procedure eventually worked. DO NOT connect the VIDBOX to the USB cable until step 4 below.
1) download manufacturer's latest driver from online and install this first, before an anything else. Then reboot.
2) Check "Device Manager" to insure that "HT VIDBOX" is installed and working normally under "Sound, Video, Game Controllers."
3) Install software from CD that came with the product. Then reboot again.
4) Only after the above do you connect the USB-2 to the VIDBOX.

Hopefully, that will sucessfujlly get the VIDBOX connected to your computer video/audio input

The sound card or system sound settings may require adjustments to record the sound properly, without clicks, squeals, whirring sounds, etc., depending on your setup.

Do not open or use any other application on the computer while capturing and recording video or video may get jumpy.

Once sucessfully installed and connected, this product worked for me as advertised. In the "Advanced Editing" mode I found that the merge/render function was quite slow, even on a powerful system, and I could not find a way to save a DV-AVI file for editing with other software. The editor provided was not very intuitive and quite limited.

Despite that above comments, I do not know of another capture product that will perform as well, especially not at this price, so it may be worth any potential frustrations. And you may have no problems at all!

170 of 178 people found the following review helpful.
Good Product
By Dave Jones
I received this product May 3rd. I had it working in about 5 minutes. It comes with all the necessary wires, one to connect to the vcr (rca cable) and one to connect via usb to your computer.

No need for a tv in the mix, just a pc, a vcr and the device in the middle.

The software installed easily and is simple to use.

I have already saved several old VHS tapes of family gatherings and such.

This is a good product.

106 of 112 people found the following review helpful.
Honestech VHS to DVD 7.0 Deluxe
By John Cockrell
I have a ton of old VCR tapess that go back into the early 1990's and need to convert them to digital format for burning to DVD. My choices were to outsource this at $10 per tape, purchase a VCR to DVd recorder (about $210.00), or take a chance on software. For the cost of the program, I figured there was not much risk in trying the software first. The beginning of the installation process was ok, but the program did not work after registration. It appeared that another option was going to be necessary. However; I kept digging around, and determined that the driver for the interface (a little white box which comes with the software) between my VCR machine and the laptop did not come with the installation disk. Worse, this problem was not disclosed in the installation instructions, so luckily I was tech savy enough to eventually figure it out myself. Go to the product website, sift thru the various drivers available, and find the one that matches (Windows 7, 64 bit). After that drama for several days, the next thing was to learn to work the program. The simple burn to DVD option worked like a charm, but the Advanced, which gives you a lot of options on content, etc. took some more time to use.

Anyway, now I am very pleased with this product, and I enthusiastically endorse it, if you are willing to get in there and get your hands a little dirty figuring it out. By the way, I have already more than "paid" for the software, and have over 20 tapes that I have already converted over to my hard drive, and some to DVD. Also, you can work with them once on the computer, because it creates Windows Movie Maker file formats as one of the options.

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