I recently purchased a ATI All-In-Wonder (AIW) video card in part so that I could transfer some old tapes onto the computer. VCRs are getting more and more difficult to find in stores and it's starting to make less sense keeping them in that format. Some of the tapes I have were never actually released to DVD so I couldn't buy it if I wanted to, and included in the goodies are videos that I made with my best friend when we were in junior high.

So I get everything all hooked up, but it seemed like I couldn't get a solid connection from the VCR to the video card. The sound was choppy and the video looked like it was getting a bad reception or had a poor connection. It would only do so, however, when the VCR was playing. The blue screen was quite peaceful. Co-ax cables are sometimes spotty, so I tried hooking up my playstation with a RCA yellow-white-red cable. My video card apparently came with two "out" (PC->VCR) cables and no "in" cables (VCR->PC). Luckily I had an old AIW and could use that cable.

By this point I was getting pretty agitated, though I did feel better when the video started coming through.The sound was still choppy. When I tried to record, however, I got a message saying that it couldn't be done. Copy-protection, it seemed. Except that it recorded just fine. The sound even worked!

So determining that the problem may have been the co-ax cable the VCR was connected to, I took a special trip to the store to get the RCA cable. Unfortunately, the problem has persisted. It doesn't matter wether the tape is copy-protected or not, for some reason it's not going through. Last I checked, the VCR worked fine on the TV.

So I'm guessing there's some sort of universal copy protection coming from either the Philips VCR or the ATI video card.

If it's the VCR, that would be an odd thing because the VCR knows when a tape is copy-protected and when it isn't. I don't see why it would make the distiction going from VCR to VCR but wouldn't make the distinction going from VCR to PC. A brief scan of the Internet found people mostly wanting to copy protected VHS tapes and getting confronted with a different sort of copy protection. Also, the method of distortion seems to differ between VCR-VCR and VCR-PC transfers. The former is a color distortion, mild vertical flipping, and almost completely muted sound. The latter just acts like it's not connected right.

If it's the video card, though, I don't understand why a copy-protected DVD would work, but an unprotected VHS tape wouldn't. I also imagine that if it was coming from them, it would refuse to play copy-protected DVDs the same way that it refuses to play copy-protected tapes. At the very least, it would stop me from recording it (like it proclaims to do).

It could be that I just have a bum video card with a weak connection. That is the only explanation I can come up with for the sound. The computer is an Athlon 3500 with 2GB of RAM. I'm hard-pressed to say that it can't handle streaming audio from a card that itself has 256MB of RAM. But while that may explain the audio, it doesn't explain the video.

If it's the VCR, then, I need to find a VCR that is not so aggressive with its copy protection that it will block even unprotected tapes. This line of hardware has been recommended by some. The VHS clarifier costs $70. The fact that I'm willing to spend $70 to get copies of tapes that I spent less than $50 should make it clear that this is not about money. The problem is that if the VCR is not the culprit, I've thrown that money away.

If it's the video card, then I need to know where in the process this is getting distorted. Maybe there's another program I can use to rip the video? Or that will process it better?

The last strange thing is the degree of distortion. The one that comes out the best (some distortion, but only in the top 1/10 of the screen) may or may not be copyrighted, but the one that comes out the worst (Jay's and my home movies) is certainly not copyrighted.

Here's a rundown:

Good

Title	Tape Quality	Import Quality
Second Civil War	Good	Top half of screen is in black and white and distorted.
Wings of Honneamise	Pretty Good	Top half of screen has distorted color and bends to the right.
They Might Be Giants: Direct from Brooklyn	Decent	Nothing is visible, though sound comes in decently.
Evangelion Death (fansub release)	Pretty good	Alternates between "as good as can be expected" to "Am I having an LSD trip now?", just like the movie. Except that it's not supposed to do that.
Stuff taped from TV	Watchable, but Not Good	You can't see anything.
Matchbox Twenty: Live from Australia	Good

I'm kinda at a loss as to what to do on this matter. Does anyone know anything about this subject that I apparently don't?