How to digitize VHS tapes the cheap way

Preserve your old video tapes with an inexpensive capture card and free software. 

- JARED NEWMAN

Good news, everyone: My bar mitzvah videos from the mid-1990s are now digitized for the ages.

While I have no intention of actually watching them—oy, the embarrassment—I recently received the original tapes from my parents and felt like they were worth preserving in a more enduring form than VHS. I was able to do it for cheap thanks to my USB capture card, which I originally bought to take screenshots of streaming devices for my TechHive column on cord cutting (fave. co/3QDz7SJ), but which continues to have all kinds of other neat uses.

Below, I’ll walk through how to digitize your own VHS tapes or camcorder footage using the same methods, plus a few extra tricks that might make a USB capture card worth considering. 

THE HARDWARE

The USB capture card is a thumb-size device with an HDMI input on one side and a USB plug on the other. Connect the capture card to your computer’s USB port, then hook up any device with HDMI output, and you can record that device’s video using a free program called OBS, fave.co/3WA6NEq (more on that shortly).

Amazon is filled with capture cards from no-name brands for under $20. While the particular one I purchased is no longer available, this one (fave.co/3wiUPVi) looks pretty similar: It’s able to capture video at 1080p up to 30 frames per second, or 720p at 60 frames per second. It uses a USB-C connector, but also has a USB-A adapter. (Alternatively, this one works the other way around, fave.co/44C97gg.)