Need to transfer something from VHS - any lightweight recording utilities out there?

[bgowland]

My wife needs me to transfer a short film from a VHS tape to a USB memory stick ASAP.

We still own a VCR and I still have my PVR-500 sitting in my PC although it's been out of the loop since moving permanently to npvr. In the old days I'd just set a manual recording going with gbpvr but I don't want the hassle of re-enabling gbpvr on my machine (or enabling the PVR-500 for npvr).

Does anyone know of any lightweight utilities that I could use with the PVR-500 to simply record for 30 mins to mpeg format?

Cheers,
Brian

[mvallevand]

I have the very old gbrecord command line program that should still work without installing anything else if you'd like.

Martin

[bgowland]

Might be worth a try, I vaguely remember it. You can send via email if that's OK.

Cheers,
Brian

[mvallevand]

Done.

Martin

[bgowland]

Thanks Martin, that did the trick.

The irony of the exercise was I was looking for something lightweight and easy (which gbrecord is) but...

I then discovered our cheap VCR doesn't have s-video out and after spending some time searching, I was unable to find my scart to svideo cable so realised I'd need to run from the UHF output of the VCR....

...at which point I realised I didn't know which UHF channel the VCR was set for output. So, after a few bad guesses, I ended up building a partial graph with GraphEdt to scan all channels until one locked....

Having done that, I realised I only needed to add a few more filters including a file writer and my own graph could do the job anyway. Funny how the easiest jobs often turn out to be quite the opposite.

Still, looks like I've got a few more VHS transfers to do so gbrecord will come in very handy (oh and I found my scart to svideo cable after all that).

Cheers,
Brian

[mvallevand]

I don't know why I didn't think of GraphEdit myself. I use it more than GBRecorder for this kind of thing.

Martin

[bgowland]

Well it was in the back of my mind when I first posted the question - I can run off a DVB graph almost with my eyes closed but it has been a lot of years since I played with analogue graphs. Crossbars, capture and encoder filters - I can never remember which bit goes where.

I've got a batch file for my needs for gbrecord now so things should be easier.

Cheers,
Brian