Countdown VHS Tapes

[Rhys Benjamin]

Having had a thought about the fact my house is still drowning in videotape (though without anything to play them on), I wondered about getting them converted to DVD/mp4/whatever, and that has led to a good rummage through the house. We must have somewhere approaching 200 orphan VHS tapes, and at least 3 of them have Countdown on it:

- 10 April 2000 (John Hastings vs Les Noble)
- (the tape just says "Countdown Semi Finals", no idea which series, but possibly S53 (John Mayhew vs Jon O'Neill / John Brackstone vs Richard Heald))
- 1 July 2005 (Richard Whiteley "day")

I say "at least" because we were terrible at labelling videotapes. We did try a system where we all "had" our own video for several days at a time, so I have no idea what "Rhys 23-30 Nov 2003" has on it, for example. Something like Thomas the Tank Engine or Pingu, probably.

So rather than get distracted by my childhood TV shows, to put myself back on topic, is there a cheap way of converting these to something watchable (and/or uploadable to a cloud/YouTube)?

[Ian Volante]

Get hold of a unit that converts analogue to digital and capture software (I've got a crappy one, EasyCap, but it works well enough).

Was going to digitise my run from years ago, but last week I discovered that I'd (I assume) taped over it with the 2007 World Championship men's 100m final. Ho hum.