HowToDoThings.com Peripherals

How To Transfer VHS to DVD

Charles404 — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 03:48:00 -0500

VHS video is inconvenient in today's digital world, and there are a lot of people who want to convert their older video recordings to DVD. You can certainly find a service that will make this conversion for you, but these transfers can get expensive if you have several tapes to convert. This article will describe two ways to transfer that VHS tape of your graduation, wedding or birthday party to DVD so that you can have a more permanent digital copy to share with family and friends.

Recording with a DVD Recorder: A DVD recorder is a video device specifically designed for consumers to record to DVD, even if they don't own a computer.

How To Convert AVI to DVD

Charles404 — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:47:00 -0500

How do you take a movie that is stored on your hard drive in AVI format and burn it to disk so that you can watch it on a standard DVD player? This is an important question for most of us with digital camcorders. Even digital cameras take little movies as well as still pictures these days. You can simply burn them to CD or DVD as files to share with friends and family who have computers, but if you want to send a movie to grandma, and she doesn't have a computer, you are stuck. With the right software, making a DVD for grandma is not too difficult.

Get software that works for you. None of it is perfect. Some programs might be intuitive and easy for you, but someone else may hate them and vice versa. The best way to find the right software is to download several evaluation copies, try them, and then buy the one that works best for you.

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How To Clean a CD Rom Drive

Andy185 — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:21:00 -0500

Computer CD-ROM drives are fairly robust and need little if any attention. They can function even with a fair amount of dust on the lens, but on rare occasions, may get dirty enough to require cleaning. Symptoms of a dirty lens include long read times, problems recognizing that there is a disc in the drive, and skipping or repeating on audio CDs. These symptoms are often intermittent and a drive may function perfectly most of the time and have only occasional problems.

CD-ROM drives should never be cleaned routinely. Clean them only if you suspect a problem. The cleaning process itself carries a small chance of damaging the lens or other equipment.

If only one disc is behaving badly, it's likely to be just that disc that is the problem. Even if several discs have problems, your first step should be cleaning and inspecting the discs rather than the drive.