Power Converter Question

[curtklay]

Wondering if anyone has experience with this:

I have a lot of VHS video tapes made in the US that I want to bring with me when I move to Thailand. Knowing they won't work on Thai TVs or tape players, my plan is to also bring a VHS player, small TV, and a step down power converter. The idea is I would have a playback set up exclusively for these tapes. It seems to me that with the tape player and TV plugged into the power converter, I should be able to view the tapes without problems.

Anyone see anything I might be missing?

[jombom]

You may need to check the equipment specs for frequency.

Thailand supplies power at 50 Hz and USA is 60 Hz. The power converter would normally only change the voltage. Televisions can be affected by this.

[Hssl]

Step down Transformer shouldn't be a problem and you should be able to change a Thai TV to NTSC from PAL in the menu section

[garvin123g]

Many of the VHS units were multi voltage machines.... If yours is not, an electics shop should be able to convert the player to 220 V for very little money, 500 B or so..

[Crossy]

Many VHS players bought in Thailand will actually play NTSC tapes on a PAL TV, they output a format called PAL 60 which works with most modern tellys.

Don't bother bringing a TV even if you bring your player, 100% of LCDs here are multi-standard and will happily display NTSC

[curtklay]

Many VHS players bought in Thailand will actually play NTSC tapes on a PAL TV, they output a format called PAL 60 which works with most modern tellys.

Don't bother bringing a TV even if you bring your player, 100% of LCDs here are multi-standard and will happily display NTSC

Thanks for that info, Crossy. I sure don't want to ship a TV if I don't have to.

[jfchandler]

I took a different approach that you might consider...

When I knew I would be moving here to live, I had about two full book-sized moving boxes full of VHS tapes of various ages and qualities, some original, some self recorded. No matter which version, all of them were clearly getting old and older...and ultimately headed for decay.

So to avoid that and avoid shipping two additional heavy boxes of dusty old VHS tapes, I instead bought a Panasonic DVD recorder-VHS deck before I moved for about $200, and then pretty quickly proceeded to convert all the VHS tapes into DVDs, recording one, two or even three movies per DVD, depending on how much I liked that particular movie or what DVD quality I wanted to obtain. I ended up, when finished, with a single 50-disk DVD spindle pack with all of the VHS movies converted to video DVDs.....

DVD's, of course, won't last forever. But I'm betting they'll likely last a lot longer that the tapes I had.... And of course, I used good quality TDK DVDs for the recordings...

[astral]

The conversion of VHS to DVD is sound advice for any collection of old tapes.

The tapes do degrade, particularly in the tropics.

[jfchandler]

Yep, in addition to what Astral advises...

1. Once I was finished the conversion process, I didn't take the VHS-DVD recorder deck here, although I could have and used it with the power transformers in my house. Instead, I gave it to my parents, so my father can record basketball and football games shown on TV to DVD.

2. As I mentioned, I had a broad mix of original VHS tapes...some self recorded, others commercial. And among the commercial ones, some were relatively recent, and others much older. The newer ones, of course, had the VHS copy protection scheme on them. A lot of the older commercial ones did not.

I found that once I got into the whole copying process. But I still wanted to convert the newer commercial VHSs, after all, I bought them and own them. But the copy scheme would cause the DVD recorder to fail any time you'd try to record from a protected VHS. So I ended up having to shell out, maybe another $50 or so to buy, off the Internet, an exernal converter box with S-Video and RCA audio connections that allows the user to bypass the copy protection scheme on the DVD recording deck. And so, once I used that, even the newer commercially recorded VHSs were converted to my own DVDs lickety split...

I've gone down the same road with a couple of boxes of older LPs.... But I've been doing that with a turntable and USB connection to my computer here, re-recording all of them to high quality 320 kbps MP3s... That's a whole lot more time consuming and involved than the VHS-DVD conversion process. For the latter, you just start the VHS, start the recording DVD and let it go... Nothing to edit. No files to mess around with. The DVD recording deck formats everything nicely and burns it to DVD. The only thing I had to do was key in the VHS titles, if I wanted them to show in the DVD's internal menu structure (for example, if I was recording two or three different VHSs to one DVD).

[curtklay]

Yep, in addition to what Astral advises...

1. Once I was finished the conversion process, I didn't take the VHS-DVD recorder deck here, although I could have and used it with the power transformers in my house. Instead, I gave it to my parents, so my father can record basketball and football games shown on TV to DVD.

2. As I mentioned, I had a broad mix of original VHS tapes...some self recorded, others commercial. And among the commercial ones, some were relatively recent, and others much older. The newer ones, of course, had the VHS copy protection scheme on them. A lot of the older commercial ones did not.

I found that once I got into the whole copying process. But I still wanted to convert the newer commercial VHSs, after all, I bought them and own them. But the copy scheme would cause the DVD recorder to fail any time you'd try to record from a protected VHS. So I ended up having to shell out, maybe another $50 or so to buy, off the Internet, an exernal converter box with S-Video and RCA audio connections that allows the user to bypass the copy protection scheme on the DVD recording deck. And so, once I used that, even the newer commercially recorded VHSs were converted to my own DVDs lickety split...

I've gone down the same road with a couple of boxes of older LPs.... But I've been doing that with a turntable and USB connection to my computer here, re-recording all of them to high quality 320 kbps MP3s... That's a whole lot more time consuming and involved than the VHS-DVD conversion process. For the latter, you just start the VHS, start the recording DVD and let it go... Nothing to edit. No files to mess around with. The DVD recording deck formats everything nicely and burns it to DVD. The only thing I had to do was key in the VHS titles, if I wanted them to show in the DVD's internal menu structure (for example, if I was recording two or three different VHSs to one DVD).

Thanks for the conversion advice, guys. It's definitely the way to go, but with only 3 weeks until departure it looks like I'll be shipping the tapes and VCR, then doing my converting in Thailand. I already have a "black box" that removes copyguard, and a recently acquired DVD recorder. Wish I had more time.