[retiredguy123]

Originally Posted by genobambino

About '20 years ago I bought a Samsung dvd player recorder with vhs. Just drop in the vhs tape and a cd and hit record, sounds simple enough, not. Problem was the dvd's wouldn't play on the same machine they were recorded on, or hardly any other dvd player, rarely on a computer. I think it was too many different formats of dvd's, I used the one's they recommended, but no luck. I want to transfer the tapes to a flash drive so I can play them on my big screen tv, hopefully those will play on anything.

Note that flash drives have different formats also. You can check the format for a flash drive by inserting it into a computer, right click on the flash drive, and select "properties". If you are playing the flash drive on a device, you need to check the device specifications to see if it is compatible with the flash drive format. You can reformat a flash drive, but doing so will delete everything on the drive.

[Tunesmith]

Originally Posted by DaddyD

My 86yr old father has probably 100+ tapes (mix of VHS, Betamax, and maybe even Super 8?) of family videos that I'd like to have transferred to either the cloud and/or a thumb or hard drive.

I've called two local places, and they quoted $20 per tape. That seems high to me, as I'm not asking them to do any editing or anything--just transfer the videos to a different format--so presumably they don't have to do much beside pop the tape in the player, hit play, and then record on their computer.

Anyone got any better (and by better I mean cheaper!) suggestions?

We are from a small town (population ~7000) in Wisconsin. At the local library they have a variety of equipment that I used to convert video tapes to digital format (for free). You might try checking the local libraries to see if they have something similar.

[retiredguy123]

Originally Posted by genobambino

About '20 years ago I bought a Samsung dvd player recorder with vhs. Just drop in the vhs tape and a cd and hit record, sounds simple enough, not. Problem was the dvd's wouldn't play on the same machine they were recorded on, or hardly any other dvd player, rarely on a computer. I think it was too many different formats of dvd's, I used the one's they recommended, but no luck. I want to transfer the tapes to a flash drive so I can play them on my big screen tv, hopefully those will play on anything.

When copying music and videos to CDs and DVDs, the most common and universal formats for blank discs are "CD-R" and "DVD-R".

[villagetinker]

Originally Posted by genobambino

About '20 years ago I bought a Samsung dvd player recorder with vhs. Just drop in the vhs tape and a cd and hit record, sounds simple enough, not. Problem was the dvd's wouldn't play on the same machine they were recorded on, or hardly any other dvd player, rarely on a computer. I think it was too many different formats of dvd's, I used the one's they recommended, but no luck. I want to transfer the tapes to a flash drive so I can play them on my big screen tv, hopefully those will play on anything.

This was a problem i had with mine, it turned out that I had to go back to the machine and preform s few steps to finalize the CD or DVD. For some reason these were MANUAL steps and were not completed automatically.

[newgirl]

Following

[Zincbemi]

Do you have a vhs player I could borrow or rent??

[rogerk]

Originally Posted by Berwin

I saw a place on 441/27 in Belleview the other day coming back from a doctor appointment in Ocala. It's called Video Vault Productions and they do transfers like this. No idea of pricing or quality.

Not sure about pricing anymore but they do a great job. I used them a 10-15 years ago and they were very reasonable and did an excellent job.