VC500 USB 2.0 One Touch VHS to DVD Video Capture Device with for Win7, Win8 & Win10

Works fine and is easy to use. Latest version requires Windows 10, and once you install the drivers, you can install Cyberlink PowerDirector and capture there with ease. You need to select quality of recording (MPEG2 is best for interlaced material and can be set to be near lossless at 15000kbps, plus AC3 at max bitrate) and the source (play around with the few choices until you see and hear the signal, defaults rarely work). Button on product is useless. PowerDirector is a bad program for this however because every time there is a non-recorded part in a video, it complains of copyright abuse and deletes the video recorded thus far. This is the same for all commercial programs, since the snow effect of a blank VHS has been used for copyright protection at some point. Work around that (check the end of videos and be sure to program the end of recording at that mark or manually interrupt recording), and it is a simple way to save your videos. It is not worth going for free programs, as they complicate other matters. Just know that the hardware and drivers of the current version are for Windows 10, and you need a previous version for older Windows. The VCR needs also a TBC no matter what version of the product you use (either integrated or separate). SVHS PAL to MPEG2/AC3 on Windows 10 x64 works fine here. Quality is excellent (I used a DVDR previously), but not comparable to old TV or DVD quality. The finest of my SVHS has 450 lines of definition, VHS 250 lines on PAL (576 full SD resolution), and it is not even NTSC (480). But that is not the fault of the product. Don't use MPEG4/H264 as it works poorly with interlaced materials, and don't increase resolution above SD (no 720/1080).

It does not work for me at all in terms of capturing videos from my analog machine. In fact it does not capture anything. Had to be returned. Very disappointed.

Good quality kit - works as it says on the box. Software is much better than most others and actually works. A good option.

I chose this product as it had more positive reviews than other similar capture devices.After a few days use, I think that this is an excellent product.Connect to vcr, plug in to PC, install capture software, install dvd authoring software, away you go. It took me about 15 minutes with Windows XP (SP3). Capture is very easy, either via the EZ Grabber software, or the one-touch button on the dongle, however this button doesn't stop the recording. The video is captured as MPEG or AVI or WMV directly, no conversion needed.I haven't tried the dvd authoring yet as it offers many options, I need more time to asess it.I agree that there is a lack of a proper instruction manual, however it is so easy that it won't take long to familiarise yourself with this great little piece of kit.The capture software has contrast/brightness controls WHICH AFFECT THE OUTPUT - so this is useful for tweaking videos where necessary to improve quality.Highly recommended.

I bought this device to convert some old VHS tapes to digital video. It comes with two pieces of software, EZ Grabber and Showbiz, both useless, at least with Windows 7. The EZ Grabber didn't let me see what I was recording, because as soon as I clicked Record, the program's monitor filled with horizontal lines, so I could only hear the audio. Another problem, of which the cause I located after much head-scratching, was that if I had simultaneously open a professional subtitling software I use for my work, then the image of the recorded video was choppy, not synchronized with the audio. So, in order to record in EZ Grabber, I would have to not do work at the same time on my computer, and spend all my time waiting for the videos to be recorded.Then I tried the Showbiz. It seemed to work perfectly, none of the above problems, but: after a few minutes, it stopped and declared that "You can't record this video because it is copyright-protected". Which of course was not true, because these are home videos. Searching the Internet I found out that this is a setting which can be changed by registry editing, not in the regular setting of Options, so I didn't look any further into this.I had started thinking that my money had gone down the drain, but then I tried my old and trusted Nero, which I haven't even updated for many years. I chose the "Capture video from capturing device" and it worked like magic.So, this is a useful device, but their software doesn't work. Still, one can use any dvd-making software with "Capture" option.

This is now the 3rd capture device I have purchased. The first one was from Aldi some years ago and to be fair it kind of worked but it had limitations, the quality was poor and the capture time was limited but the main reason why I wanted to upgrade was it only worked on Windows 7. The next capture device was purchased from amazon for £12 and it claimed to work on Windows 10, It didn't, waste of money. I spent a day researching on the internet and trying alternative drivers etc, no good, it went back. Consequently, I was a little nervous about paying almost 3 times the price for something that had a slightly lower rating. When I received the Diamond VC500, it looked similar to the last one although it was packaged better and came with a RCA cable to connect to my Camcorder. I followed the instructions to connect it to the PC but only loaded the driver from the disc. From my previous attempts I had come across some free software which works very well. I found a video on Youtube which guided me how to download, deinterlace and compress my VHS using Virtualdub software. The video on Youtube is called "How to convert VHS videotape to 60p digital video (NTSC)" (Because I am in the UK I used PAL b, 25 fps rather than 29.97 and 50 fps instead of 59.94.). I have since connected the device to a VHS player and again had really good results. My PC is a desktop with a Intel Core i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz 2.66 GHz running Windows 10 Pro 64 bit.