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“Disappointing”

written by clgonline on 08/09/2015

I was left disappointed by the service that this company provided to me.

I had made an order for a VHS to be converted to MP4 and supplied a USB stick for them to place the converted file onto.

Firstly, despite that their website explicitly advertises the fact that the file will be converted from VHS to MP4, the file that they put on my USB stick and sent to me was an MPEG-2 file. Therefore, this was not as advertised.

I then went to play the file. There were visuals but NO SOUND.

I firstly assumed that it must be something to do with the audio on my Macbook, so I spent an hour with Apple online support (who did a screenshare so they could properly interrogate my macbook); Apple online support confirmed that the sound issue is not with my Macbook.

I then assumed that the issue must be with the VHS tape itself. I therefore contacted the person that I received the VHS tape recording from, who assured me that there shouldn't be any issues with the audio.

I then gained access to a VHS player and tested the actual VHS tape on a VHS player, playing the VHS tape from start to finish. There were no issues with the sound whatsoever on the VHS tape from start to finish.

In addition to my macbook, I then played the converted file on a number of different computers (PCs, laptops etc), so this covered both windows and mac platforms, using VLC player, Quicktime etc. No sound was playing on any of these tests.

I then looked at the website of a different VHS converter company, and it was interested that they stated that MPEG-2 is the standard file format for actual "DVDs" (i.e. not for a file to be placed on a memory stick, which makes sense given that the VHS Converter company advertise that they convert to MP4 for memory sticks rather than MPEG-2).

Therefore, I can only conclude that for some reason, they converted the file to MPEG-2 as if it was intended to be put into an actual DVD, but nonetheless still put the file onto the memory stick, when they should have ensured that the file was converted to MP4 (i.e. as advertised) before being placed onto the memory stick.

Irrespective of the sound issues that this caused, they should have ensured that the file was converted to MP4 as advertised, as the other company also state that MPEG-2 is not a file format that most software editing programmes can import (i.e. if you want to edit the file etc). Even though in my case, this is not applicable (I have no intention to edit the file), it would have caused me import issues if this is what I wanted to do.

Whilst the company agreed to re-convert the file after their mistake, the fact of the matter is that I paid a lot of money to get this file converted, and I expected to be converted correctly. I had paid for next day delivery (which is of course more expensive) as I wanted the file back as quickly, but this problem has obviously caused hassle and delay, and I have ended up having to pay more due to the postage costs of having to send the file back to them for re-conversion.

As such, this was a very disappointing experience and I will go elsewhere for future VHS conversion services. I have a number of other VHS tapes that I need to have converted but I certainly will not be using this company for these conversions.