Save Your Best Memories

I want to thank the great staff at AV Conversion Services for inviting me to write a blog based on my experiences. It all started with a letter of appreciation to them. So here goes.

Converting your VHS videos to DVDs is the way to go. I know this by experience. My husband is an ardent baseball fan. We have videos of many games they played from the 80’s and 90’s. They were stored away in boxes when shelf space became too crammed. Then we had collected many, many boxes of VHS tapes. Then the rise of DVDs was on top of us. Not only did he tape baseball games but he started taping movies from the tv. And collected more videos. It was one of his favorite pastimes, buying tapes, recording, and putting them into boxes.

We moved houses and had to move the boxes since John would not part with them. What a challenge! Trying to convince him they weren’t worth keeping was not happening. So I had to figure out another way to store them and keep them.
During the move one of the boxes broke, and out fell a few tapes. I thought I might as well see if any of them was worth keeping, or perhaps I could just ditch them without John’s even knowing they were missing.

One day when John was at work, I tried to play one on our VCR. What did I get?? Gobbldy gook. Nothing, zilch. Just a lot of static and sticky tape syndrome. I immediately removed it because I thought it would ruin our VCR, something precious to John. Of course that tape went right into the garbage. Two more videos to try. The next one wasn’t too bad, just a few sections of static but a lot of humming and crackling sounds. I put that one to the side and thought we could still use it. The last one was the best one of the three. It seemed that the color on the screen was distorted, faces too orangy or reddish, blues and greens faded out. But it was worth salvaging.

After looking at these videos, I realized something had to be done with the tapes to preserve them. Because we also had many tapes with family get togethers, weddings and holidays, with grandparents and relatives, many of whom had passed on, we really wanted to keep, preserve and protect them.

After a bit of research and chatting with co-workers, it was suggested that I have the tapes converted to DVDs. What a fabulous idea! A bit more research and I found AV Conversion Services, a company that would take great care with my special memories. I contacted them and made arrangements to send my VHS tapes to them so they could be transferred to DVDs. I was told they’d be digitized and we could play the tapes on our computer or on the tv. And we even had options on how we wanted to see them. Even edit them together!

About a month later we were notified that the DVDs were ready. When we got them – with all our original tapes – we were blown away by the difference in the sound and detail the new DVDs had, compared to our old tapes. It was like we just recorded them… most of them anyway, but no matter, they were saves and preserved.

We are so grateful for the service AV Conversion Services provided. They were able to restore our videos so that now we can watch and enjoy them and also our grandchildren and possibly our great grandchildren. It seems our family heritage was preserved – and great moments in baseball too – with the conversion to DVD and my husband continues to enjoy past ball games with his favorite team and the old time movies that he watched years ago.

This post courtesy of our happy customer – Sadie P. Cleveland, OH. Thank you Sadie!