Grab VHS and BETA video and audio on Windows 98

If you’ver got lots of memories or footage on VHS or Betamax and are still using Windows 98, usually there aren’t many options to transfer footage. However, Bao TV allows you to do this even though it takes quite a bit of configuring and setting up before your captures are performed properly.

Firstly, you’ll need an AverMedia Phone98 card and a video codec such as DivX or Microsoft’s V8 codec. You may find that on installation, it warns you that certain drivers or files are missing namely Istrmdll.zip, drmclien.dll, mfc42.dll or Wmaudsdk.dll. You can find links to them on the developer website however. Once started, you don’t need to open the AverMedia Phone98 program anymore as BaoTV initialises the hardware on its own. In Options/AVI Capture Options toy can choose the Frame Rate which should be set top a low number if you have a slow processor.

Once you’ve selected “Set Capture File” and select a directory for the capture files, you’re ready to go. The sound takes a lot of configuration however and you’ll have to experiment until you find the right bitrate to achieve decent quality captures.

For Windows 98 users, this is a rare and satisfactory capture program that allows you to rescue VHS and Beta tapes in digital format.

BaoTV is a free program for Windows 98 to capture video and sound directly to MPG4/DivX using a software codec. This program works by using your TVCard in Windows 98 and your installed codecs for compression of audio and video.

With this program you are able to choose a compression ratio for the video, a compression rate for the audio, and you can program an hour to start the VideoCapture.