Legacy hardware: VHS, phono, cassettes

[kaulike]

I have been thinking about building a home theater PC but it would be pointless. I have a ton of ancient media, and in fact one of the motivators is to be able to cross-record at will---to make CDs from my vinyl collection, for example, without dragging the turntable and preamp into my office. Ditto for VHS tapes.

Has anyone put together a HTPC, fully modded, with legacy media support? If so, where did you find hardware? I can mod my turntable easily enough, but making the circuit board in the VCR talk to the PC could prove to be an exercise in frustration.

thanks

 

[Bighitter]

Why would you need to modify the circuit board in the VCR? Get a IR blaster and you can control it via the htpc and just use S-Video or the A/V cables to input into the htpc. I do not know of anyone doing anything with turntables but it would not suprise me if someone has already done so. Check out www.avsforum.com and hit up thier htpc section.

 

[kaulike]

Thanks for the innovative solution! I'll wander over to avsforum and see what they say as well.

 

[Othersider]

There's even a 5.25" cassette "drive" on the market. Obviously you'd get better quality with a real deck plugged into your sound card though.