Ok, so I have baby brain lately…so I got out the videos of when my son was little. Have you looked at yours lately? He was so stinking cute! I watched part of the video starting at his first birthday, and then some of the video when he turned three and got his baby brother. Oh! How he tried to pretend that baby didn’t exist when he was visiting me In the hospital, just wanted me to play with him. The baby had brought him a Sesame Street tea set with dishes and food. He was making me dinner.
I enjoy watching the videos now and then, so I wanted to suggest some of you try it when you get bored.
Some years ago we bought a DVD player/recorder. I was able to connect the VCR to it to copy the tapes onto DVDs. Once I figured it out, it was easy. I didn’t want to take the chance that the VHS tapes would go bad in the future.
I have so many random clips now on my computer from my phone and stuff. Someday I should copy them all over onto one DVD. I have to figure out what windows program would be best for that.
I have no idea where any videos are. I hope they are in my storage, but I haven’t thought about them in years…perhaps when it is warmer, I should look !
I converted mine to DVDs, also. Then we got a blu Ray player and they wouldn’t work on that. Had to find a professional company to convert, cost me $100… But worth it. The kids and I watch them at times and we have such fun. I’m so glad I spent the hours doing that. When they became teens they really didn’t like it so much, so I hardly have any from then on. Plus, I was a little burnt out from doing it all those years.
My kids converted most of our VHS tapes to DVD as a Christmas gift one year. They love watching them and so do I. Not sure my DVD player works right now so I should get another or convert to something that will last forever. What would that be?
Now that my kids are having kids it’s so fun to go back and watch when they were that age and compare. Priceless
I just wanted to add, please look for your tapes now. If they are in an attic or a damp place it might hurt them. I don’t know for sure, but better safe than sorry.
I was considering figuring out how to move them to little SD cards, like we have in the phones and cameras. I think they should be pretty safe because they have no moving parts. I think I could copy the DVD onto the computer and then back out to a memory card. Just imagine the tiny little pile you’d have that could go into a safe deposit box or wherever. I suppose you could skip the DVD and go straight to memory cards.
There are video capture devices for sale on Amazon etc. Some have mixed reviews, but you basically hook up your vcr (yes, you do need one of them–I think we bought an ultra cheap one for this project-maybe $20?)…so you hook up your vcr to the device with one of those cables with red,yellow, white cables, and then there is a usb to hook it to the computer. I had an actual DVD player recorder, so mine went straight to DVD from the VCR. If I want to copy the DVD I can copy it to the computer, then back out onto another DVD or a memory card.
This is a reminder to save your old DVD Player even though you use On Demand and netflix!
I played my dvd on my computer using a free program called VLC media player. All I had to do was hit the spacebar to pause it (or the pause icon) and then “shift” and “s” to capture a screen shot. It’s not crystal clear, but looks ok.
Obviously if you have a lot of tapes or a lot of $ you could pay someone to do it. I kind of liked doing it.
What is not fun to compare is how young and thin I looked then…My mom even looks good and I always thought she was overweight. I think I look now like she did then, and I don’t see myself as much overwreight…which means in 20 years I will be even chubbier…