ClimaxDigital VCAP303 VHS & Camcorder USB Video Capture Kit for Windows 10, Windows 8/8.1/ 7- VHS to DVD/VCD Maker from video source: VHS, V8, Hi8 for laptop/PC,video recorder, camcorder, DVD player or Satellite TV receiver+ AV cable & SCART Adaptor

I wanted to digitise some old vhs tapes of the family and kids and so I bought a generic EasyCap type device. This wasn't very successful - I had driver problems and ended up with poor quality video and no audio.I decided to spend a little more and purchased the ClimaxDigital VCAP 303. What a difference! The drivers installed without fuss.I didn't bother with the bundled editing software and used my own copy of Ulead Video studio 11 instead as this is what I am used to using. The capture device was detected without problem in VideoStudio.I have now converted several of my old home movie VHS tapes using the VCAP303 on my core i7 laptop running Windows 8.1. I have not experienced any dropped frames and the quality of the conversion is very good.If you want to convert your old vhs tapes to digital don't bother with cheap generic devices- spend a little more on the VCAP303 and you won't be disappointed.

I wanted to convert all my old camcorder tapes onto DVD and before buying EzCap, I had a look at the reviews for similar products. Most of them seemed to have more bad reviews than good.I purchased the EzCap on the basis that most of the nine reviews given to the product were good.The EzCap was used with three different types of tape format and produced good results with minimum effort. It was just a case of wire everything together and start recording. Both picture and sound quality were good with no need to mess around with the default settings.Had some problem with capturing the sound, which was fixed by turning the computer off and on. However not sure it this was a problem with the device or the computer.Did not have much success with old VHS tapes, as the recorded picture quality was poor.With regard to the ArcSoft Showbiz software that was supplied, I can't recommend this as I found it un-useable as it kept closing down and saying that my camcorder tapes were copyright protected?Instead I used Corel VideoStudio X2 Pro and found it very quick and easy to use with no problems. The range of effects was more than enough for want I wanted to do.The EzCap is a good device and does what it is meant to do. For the best results I would recommend that you invest in some decent software.

I tried this on two laptops running Windows XP (one a 3GHz Celeron, the other a 1.3Ghz Celeron M, both with plenty of RAM) and had serious problems with sound recording on both of them. The video recorded perfectly (very impressive, in fact), but the sound had so many drop-outs (fraction of a second silences), plus occasional pops and crackles, that the recordings were unuseable. The device itself seemed OK (I was able to record audio from it using other programs) - it was the ArcSoft 'ShowBiz' capture program, which actually compresses the video and sound into MPEG files, that didn't seem able to keep up.Doing anything else while recording (such as clicking on My Computer) created dropouts to order, so it looked like a performance problem. However changing the program priority to 'real time', disabling wireless, anti-virus etc and running nothing else alongside it still didn't solve it. ClimaxDigital, who were very helpful, said to check that the correct audio driver had been installed. It hadn't, but when I installed it (replacing the generic Microsoft one) it made things worse.In fairness it's asking a lot of any 'ordinary' computer to compress video and audio together in real time, and although the Celerons on these two machines should match the stated minimum of a 1.7Ghz P4, they might be borderline. However I also tried it on a newer Vista laptop with a 2.0GHz Core Duo processor and 3GB RAM, which is way ahead of the minimum spec, and while it worked OK the first couple of times (oddly, there were audible crackles during recording, but not on the recorded MPG file), after a few more tests dropouts began to appear in the sound recording, quite badly in one case. On the faster of the two XP laptops ShowBiz also had problems recognising the video stream, indicating compatibility problems. The program also has an audio-only recording feature, but this didn't work on any of the three machines I tried.Overall the ezCap seems a functional piece of hardware let down by poor-quality, ill-matched software (not an unknown situation with kit like this). My feeling is that if it works for you then you've got a real bargain, but you are taking pot luck with it - and you'll definitely need way more than a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 to run ShowBiz successfully. After failing to get reliable results on three different machines, I've sent mine back.