Video to DVD, Sans PC

Hard-Drive Option

If you're interested in doing a fair amount of editing instead of just making direct copies, consider purchasing a DVD recorder that has a built-in hard drive, such as Sharp's $800 DV-HR300U. With this kind of recorder, you transfer video from VHS to the hard drive before burning it to disc.

Using the Sharp DV-HR300U's 80GB hard drive, you can do the same kind of editing as in VR mode on a rewritable disc. But the main advantage here is that you can burn the result to a DVD-R or DVD+R disc; both are affordable, write-once formats that play in almost any current DVD player.

I ran into many of the same editing difficulties with the Sharp device as I had with GoVideo's; I had trouble controlling the timing, and using the remote control (rather than a mouse) wasn't easy at times.

On the bright side, a hard-drive recorder makes creating multiple copies of a home movie a snap. As the eager grandparents-to-be clamored for copies of our ultrasound movie, I cued it up again from the hard drive instead of redubbing the entire thing.

The Sharp DV-HR300U offered significantly better menu options than GoVideo's unit did. Thanks to movies, we're accustomed to attractive visual menus on our DVDs, with thumbnail pictures that show the start of chapters. But on DVD-R videos that I created using GoVideo's recorder, the menus were text-only (though VR mode did allow thumbnails). The Sharp recorder created menus with thumbnails that I could easily select from any frame in the chapter; but the result did not look as polished as a professional DVD.

Speaking of polish, I had to choose a quality level to record at. Settings differed, but the main modes available were SP (Standard Play) and LP (Long Play); the Sharp unit offered several other choices as well.

SP mode gave me about 2 hours of recording time; in LP mode, I could squeeze in 4 hours. When using DVD-R and DVD-RW discs, I could see the difference between the two speeds in copied home movies, but it wasn't glaring. Backgrounds seemed slightly rougher in LP mode, and facial features were less sharp. My goal was to preserve family events for posterity, though, so it wasn't worthwhile to pack in an extra 2 hours; instead, I just used another DVD-R disc. (I bought a five-pack for $10.)