There is nothing better at Christmas time than getting together with the whole family, gathering around the TV and watching old home videos taken at Christmases gone by. Whether it’s footage from just a few years ago or even many decades past, there is nothing more wonderful than showing the kids and grandkids Christmas celebrations from before their time.
But if your videos were filmed a long time ago, chances are you recorded them on a camcorder, and only have the footage available on an old VHS tape. VHS tapes were great back in the day, a real revolution to the home film industry. But their time has long past, and VHS tapes are obsolete. If you still have some lying around, make sure you transfer video to DVD now in time for Christmas. Here’s why you should get those Christmas films updated onto a DVD:
Better for Transporting
VHS tapes are clunky and bulky; there’s no denying that, especially when you compare them to their slender DVD counterparts. People can travel quite far at Christmas to visit relatives, so if you’re visiting the whole family and want to bring along those old tapes of Christmases gone by, you don’t want to be laden down with bulky videos that take up a lot of space in your overnight bag.
DVDs are much slimmer and lighter, and their boxes take up hardly any room at all. If you want to save even more space in your bag, you can put the discs into a plastic wallet and forgo the box entirely. The disc will remain protected, and you’ll be able to take dozens of discs with you to enjoy at Christmas with hardly any extra weight to carry at all.
You could even go one step further with a VHS to MP4 conversion and bring your Christmas films with you on a USB stick. Either way, a DVD or MP4 version of your footage will be much easier to carry when you ditch those VHS tapes.
Easier to Watch
How many people still have a VHS player in their homes? The answer is not many, and that number is decreasing all the time.
As more and more people abandon the VHS in favour of the DVD, it’s going to be more difficult to play those tapes at other people’s houses. The last VHS player was manufactured in 2016, so it’s virtually impossible to buy one new, and charity shops rarely sell them. They are truly obsolete.
While you may still have one of your own, you can hardly expect to cart it to your child’s home for Christmas dinner just to watch your old Christmas films. But when you have DVD copies of your footage, you take away the problem.
DVDs are playable on a range of devices, rather than just being limited to one like the VHS. They can be played in DVD players, on computers and laptops and even on game consoles. Virtually everyone owns a computer, and many people have game consoles. So when you take your converted DVDs round to your relative’s house, you can rest assured that they will most likely have a device capable of playing it.
Customisable Menu and Skipping
The problem with VHS tapes is that what you play is what you get. They play through from start to finish and need to be rewound at the end to start it from the beginning again. DVDs do not have this issue and instead offer a menu option at the start so you can choose where to play the footage from. You can also skip through the footage to get to the bits you want. No need to sit through the entire ten-minute segment of Uncle Joe trying to carve the turkey, you can skip straight past it to the good stuff.
Menus can be added to DVDs relatively easily, so you can pick where in the footage you want to break it up. You can also customise the titles for each section of footage and add images and text to the menu. So not only do you get your footage backed up onto a more reliable format, but DVDs offer you the chance to customise certain elements and create a more pleasing medium for watching old Christmas films.
They Make Great Christmas Gifts
Finally, a DVD conversion of an old film makes an excellent gift for Christmas. If you have a relative that just loves re-watching family footage, then give them a gift they will really love this year by updating their VHS tapes onto a reliable DVD format.
At Video2DVD, we have decades of experience transferring treasured memories, dealing with all manner of formats such as Betamax and Hi8 and producing them onto DVDs and digital file formats. As we head into the Christmas season, give your loved ones the precious gift of their home videos on DVD or MP4 format. Contact us today for more information.