Plextor PX-TV402U-NA ConvertX PVR Personal Video Recorder for PC

I was nervous about getting any converter after reading reviews of quite a few of them here. I have never done any video conversion or editing before, and I had about 2 days to transfer an analog videotape and clean it up for a work project.

The Plextor installed and ran perfectly under XP with absolutely no problems. Since I had the unit, I also took the opportunity to convert about 15 VHS tapes I had to DVD :) with no problems on any of them, even older ones. Specifically, I had no video or audio sync problems with anything, commercial or non-commercial origin. If I could give a separate rating to hardware, I'd give it a 5 and give the included software a 3.

Intervideo's WinDVD comes with the product and is generally usable, but has installation issues, at least one persistant bug even with the current update, and a generally non-intuitive interface (YMMV). Please note that, contrary to common practice, the product serial number contains the letter "O" and alphas *must* be in upper case. I couldn't get font size changes on title screens to stick--they looked right on author playback, but reverted to the default (huge) size when the DVD was actually recorded. Otherwise, most basic stuff appears to be there if you click around, and the help isn't bad.

Completely met my needs. Thanks to prior reviewers for the info I needed to make my decision.

Still embarking on spooling off all the Hi-8 tapes I have, but I've been VERY satisfied with the Plextor unit so far. First thing I did was to spool one Hi-8 tape and then make a DVD, using the functionality of the bundled WinDVD Creator software. Good news: it worked, and a few hours after I started, I was watching the DVD I created, on my bedroom DVD player. Bad news: the software is full of minor and sometimes more than minor annoyances. It may be that I'm still climbing the learning curve with it, but I think it's just not very good. I'm looking into other solutions, such as Pinnacle, Adobe Premiere Elements, etc. Meanwhile, I keep spooling.

I haven't yet tried the TV capture in any depth. It looked like it worked, but again, with some annoyances on the software side. Plextor could improve this offering vastly with the addition of some better bundled software.

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I was seeking a fairly inexpensive method of doing it all with video capture: getting cable televsion, VHS tape, and old DVD footage into the computer. After some tweaking and playing, I've successfully accomplished all of the above using this products' HW and SW package. Although DivX is the best format for recording off of cable TV, remember its 4 GB file-size limitation. The biggest concern for most home video editors is the ability to edit your footage in the common editing software applications. So far, I've not been able to edit my VHS-now-PC-(MPEG 2 & 4)footage in Pinnacle 7, but I'm hearing it might be possible in Adobe Premiere and Pinnacle 10.

Nevetheless, the product works, and has proven itself reliable.

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The hardware is very good. Software is easy a bit buggy and leaves room for more control. I can watch TV on my computer with the USB2 connection and capture like a VCR. I can capture 3 hours of video input on a DVD with OK quality. With the best quality of capture to DVD directly you can fill two hours on one layer DVD much better than I as able to do with my JVC camcorder software.

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I have been looking at these capture units for a while. I have only used one before this. [Dazzle] As mentioned before the Ulead software is a flop. I'm using Easy Media Creator 8. My DVD 8 sees the capture unit, and works great with it.

One little quirk is that there can be nothing else USB plugged in while the unit works. It will not work on a hub. But I can work around that. I have had no audio sync problems and the video quality is as good as the tapes I have been feeding in. I have noticed that if I feed in more than two tapes at a time however the size of the output file often exceeds 5-6 gig. This for a 100 minute tape seems excessive. I can restart the computer and do it over and the output file will fit a DVD-R5 disk. Someone smarter than I will have to figure that out.

Overall this was money well spent and I would do it again.