sirat

I'll just say hello. I joined a few minutes ago. I'm very intimidated by the degree of geekiness of all you people. I'm just a one-time science teacher, one-time radio amateur who messes around with computers and bits of wire and soldering irons and things, generally making everything I touch worse. I also write stories and novels (some science fiction but mostly mainstream 'literary') under my real name David Gardiner. Greatest technical accomplishment was installing Windows XP on an Eee PC that came with Linux pre-loaded and getting everything to work again by downloading all kinds of weird drivers and what-not. Took me ages but it works nicely now. That's about it. Please be gentle.

I had a large number of children's films on VHS including a lot of Disney full-length animations that I wanted to put on DVD to send to my grandchild in Australia. I tried copying but of course Macrovision protection made it impossible. So I bought a device called the Macromaster Standard from these people: I.C.O.S. Technology MacroMaster+ from DVD European for £43.90 including delivery. It's a filter device with built-in mains power supply and SCART input and output, no controls or adjustments. Using this between cassette player and domestic DVD recorder I was able to copy all my tapes without any quality loss that I could see on either picture or sound. Not dirt cheap but worth the money in my opinion. No downside that I have been able to discover. I would recommend you use good quality DVD+R blanks for copying films. They seem to be better accepted than DVD-R, especially by older players. Since VHS video isn't very high definition to begin there is little or nothing to lose by recording in LP mode to get 4 hours on each disc. I am very pleased to have saved all my old films from the recycling centre.