VHS to digital? (question for community)

[The Beatles]

I have a PAL tape I picked up on a garage sale that I'm interested in watching & keeping. What should I do to transfer it to some digital format? Will local shops like the drugstore or some other service do it? I don't want to send it away to a service because of the shipping fees and because it's PAL. Does anyone here have equipment to digitise the tape? In my own circle of personal acquaintances there's only NTSC to digital capability.

Thanks,
~B

[bjornredtail]

My only guess is to get a European vcr off of e-bay or similar. As far as making a digital copy, I wouldn't know. I suppose there are tuners out there that can read pal data... I just wouldn't know where to look for one, asside from E-bay as mentioned.

[windhound]

I concur with Ebay for a PAL VCR

You might check your university's equipment, NCSU's Digital Media Lab lists a JVC DR-MV1 (VHS to DVD recorder) which may support PAL (a 5 second google says yes)
If the JVC would work I wouldnt mind converting it if you'd ship it

Seems a bit overkill to buy a PAL VCR just for one tape, but if you're interested in that type of show you could then seek out other PAL tapes. And I'd guess most of the analog to digital converters dont care about their input. IE, you hand them the yellow/white/red cables and it'll go fine... but I've never had to mess with PAL so I'm not sure

[The Beatles]

Sounds like a good idea, thanks! I'll look into what my Uni offers. And if there's nothing, I might take you up on your offer, although this being a big Uni, I do hope there's something.

The tape is a one-off, not a show, so I don't really anticipate needing to do this again more than very rarely (this is a first). It's a fitness vid and I only bought it because it was done by someone I remembered from television.

[Slasher]

I used a PAL VCR and a TV card I had in my computer at the time to copy all my video tapess to DVD

[The Beatles]

Our media lab does have the needed equipment, but it only reads NTSC format tapes. I'll hunt around at the University though; it's a big University and I would be surprised if it didn't have *some* equipment to do the job.