VCR tape to Computer file

I am a novice, so be gentle!

Situation: I'm making highlights tapes of my son's football games to send
to college recruiters.

I need to take video from video tapes provided by the high school football
program, so I have no control over the quality or type of video input.

I will try to capture video clips while playing the tapes in our VCR.

How do I determine the existing video capture capabilities of my GATEWAY
4540 / CENTRINO and WINDOWS XP?

Should I be visiting the Windows site (like I am) for help or the Gateway
site?

It sounds, from what I have read, that people have problems doing what I
want to do on a laptop. What computer capabilities should I have and how do
I determine if I have them?

Thanks for your help.

If you have tv in,or rca jacks-in,on youre computer,youre all set,s-cable
works
also.Once video-in is available,connections set,all one needs are the drivers
current for the video-in card,then download windows media encoder plus all
the utilitys for it (except acrobat).The WCAP9 utility works great for
previewing,
the encoder needs to be set for capture audio/video.Also,XP movie maker will
work with all this too,but i never got that far.Good luck,my nephew
quarterbacks
unc...

"rusty97015" wrote:

> I am a novice, so be gentle!
>
> Situation: I'm making highlights tapes of my son's football games to send
> to college recruiters.
>
> I need to take video from video tapes provided by the high school football
> program, so I have no control over the quality or type of video input.
>
> I will try to capture video clips while playing the tapes in our VCR.
>
> How do I determine the existing video capture capabilities of my GATEWAY
> 4540 / CENTRINO and WINDOWS XP?
>
> Should I be visiting the Windows site (like I am) for help or the Gateway
> site?
>
> It sounds, from what I have read, that people have problems doing what I
> want to do on a laptop. What computer capabilities should I have and how do
> I determine if I have them?
>
> Thanks for your help.