Rescue Your Videos From Old, Obsolete File Formats

Wayne Williams digs out his VHS and camcorder footage and shows you how to digitise your old home movies while you still can.

- Wayne Williams

Technology moves at such a pace these days that media stored in a once common format may now be difficult to access. A lot of people have treasured memories stored on VHS (or old camcorder tapes) with no way of watching them, and some newer PCs don’t come with optical drives, which makes viewing or copying videos on CDs and DVDs much harder. Not so long ago, digital video would have been stored in formats such as AVI or WMV, but they have been superseded by better, more modern formats, such as MP4 and MKV.

While you can pay someone to recover old video for you – transferring analogue video on tape to digital files, for example – it’s easy enough to perform the task yourself, and you’ll have the added benefit of being able to tweak and improve the quality of the finished result.

Copying from VHS

If you have a video recorder to play your tapes on, then digitising the contents is actually very straightforward. If you don’t, find out if a friend or family member has a VHS recorder you can use. Otherwise, you should be able to pick one up on eBay for between £10 and £20 (check the listing carefully to make sure the device is in good working order before buying it).

Electrovid (www.electrovid.co.uk) also offers a selection of refurbished VHS players and recorders. 

If you are willing to spend a little more money, you could buy a standalone DVD recorder, which will have a line-in connection; or a combination DVD recorder and VHS, which lets you record the contents of a tape directly to a disc.