With companies such as Flip touting affordable digital video cameras that fit in your pocket, it's hard to recall a time when all video cameras were analogue. Have a search in the back of a few cupboards though and you might find the remnants of our analogue history gathering dust - the video of your wedding, which persuades you to keep your redundant VCR in the loft, or some old holiday footage stuck on a camcorder tape that you haven't quite worked out what to do with.
This handy converter from TerraTec will solve all those analogue-to-digital conversion problems. It plugs into the USB port of your computer and is also powered from there, so you don't have to find an adapter. Its two sides have sockets you can plug video sources into: S-video and composite video on one side, and a SCART socket on the other. The only thing you could get wrong is if you fail to flick a switch on the side to select which socket is being used.
Magix's ‘Movies on DVD' comes in the box, which will make short work of transferring the footage from the device to your computer. We found it very simple to use, despite having a few too many features for this particular product - there are options on the first menu, for example, for transferring video footage from digital devices, which you won't be particularly interested in. You can also do some editing after you've captured the video. The only drawback is you'll have to separately convert the video for sharing with services such as YouTube.
If you've got old video kicking around and still have a machine to play it on, this device is a good-value option that should work with most analogue players and will do a decent job of converting your old videos into digital. http://www.terratec.net/en/
