I'm trying to figure out the cheapest way to back up some VHS videos onto my harddrive. My VCR is a piece of shit and it doesn't have VGA or S-VIDEO it only has those 3 coloured slots I can't remember what you call them. You know the 3 slots where 2 are for audio and the yellow one is for video. I doubt I can get a VGA adapter for that. Do I have to get a video capture card?

I wouldn't mind being able to record shit from the TV onto my harddrive so I like the idea of getting a video card. Is there any difference between a video capture card and a TV capture card?

No VCRs will have VGA sockets - at all. ;)

High-end ones will have s-video output, but that will only be true s-video output if the tapes were originally recorded on an S-VHS VCR.

So in short, your VCR is fine for transferring tapes.

You don't want to convert the composite video output to VGA as you still can't input that into the computer to capture. Buy a cheap TV tuner card with composite input on ebay for $10, and that will suit your purposes perfectly. Run the yellow lead to the TV capture card, and use an RCA to 3.5mm cable to take the sound from the left and right audio outputs into the line in of your sound card.

A video capture card is essentially a TV card without the TV tuner bit. More expensive capture interfaces put greater emphasis on quality, but for your purposes, that really isn't hugely important.

Capture Card

RDP

Cool Im gonna get one of those TV tuner cards. Thanks. Something I was thinking about there though is that MythTV program for linux. Its supposed to let you watch TV on your laptop. I already have a VGA wire to hook my TV up to my laptop so I wonder if I can use MythTV to burn shit straight off the TV onto a DVD or something.

NM I found out MythTV is just software to go with the TV Tuner card.

Would it not be cheaper to get a netflix account and rip the movies at greater than dog shit quality?