Stand-alone DVD is by far the easiest technical solution and I suspect most cost effective solution. A decent TV card will cost over £50 approx and you may have to buy additional software. Anaologue TV cards convert to digital format (mpeg or equivalent). Your initial problem stems from the fact you have a digital (freeview) TV card not an analogue card.

A basic DVD recorder (which does convert from analogue to digital) can be bought from ASDA for less than £70 now and you only need one scart lead as a minimum (usually included with recorder anyway). Interestingly, you have spend £28.20 on cables. A VCR has no way of converting an analogue signal into digital format (nor does the Humax) A Humax can only input a digital signal (freeview) via the ariel. A VCR can only output an analogue signal. Hooking the VCR to a HUMAX via ariael (or scart) will not work. I have copied many videos to a 4hr mode DVD and you can barely tell the difference. Your picture either fills only a small part of the screen and looks ok or else you expand it to fill the screen and the picture looks blocky! You can't expand to fill the screen and use the higher resolution at the same time!

a web picture) viewed on a high resolution screen. You cannot basically improve over the original lower VCR resolution by recording at a higher resolution (2 hr mode). Although the resolution in 4 hour mode is lower than 2 hour mode, it is still as good as VCR resolution (actually the two are quite close: VCR is around 300 lines, 4hr mode around 350 lines). To be honest simplest solution to this problem is to hook up VCR to a stand-alone dvd recorder (sub £80), and write direct to a DVD and not bother with a PC at all.īy the way most DVD recorders will also record 4 hour (extended play) mode. This will not work as HUMAX cannot record an analogue signal (it only decodes digital signals).īy nature a VCR only outputs analogue signals, and so you will need a analogue/digital conversion at some stage.

Vcr to pc