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Most of us have piles of old video tapes and old camcorder footage that we’d love to be able to archive onto a longer lasting medium such as DVD. However, while it’s easy to get footage from a DV camcorder onto your PC through a FireWire socket, it’s less straightforward for analogue footage. And once you’ve got that footage on your computer, it’s a time consuming and often tedious process to edit and burn onto DVD.

This is exactly where the HP Movie Writer DC3000 helps out. It’s an external DVD drive that features an integrated analogue-to-digital converter with all the connections to get analogue footage onto your PC built-in. It’s simple to set-up, easy to use, and most important of all, does the job nicely.

The external drive hooks up to your PC via a USB 2.0 connection. While it’s backward compatible with USB 1.1, I wouldn’t recommend using this as it won’t be fast enough to watch or record DVDs.

The DC3000 makes no attempt to be compact and requires an external power supply, so you’ll need plenty of space and a free power socket. The large silver case surrounds a regular internal DVD recordable drive. Followers of the DVD recordable market will know that there are no less than three different formats available. The HP uses the ‘plus’ standard so only write-once DVD+Rs and re-writable DVD+RW discs will record in this drive. It was happy to read from a DVD-R disc however.

On the right hand side of the drive there are connections for hooking up external video sources via composite or S-Video, though there’s no cable supplied for the latter. Audio is input via two phono connectors. There’s also a SCART converter in the box if you want to connect up a VHS video recorder. A USB connector is also present at the side. This acts as a pass-through connector for external devices, so you don’t lose one of your USB ports to the drive and makes it easy to hook up devices such as a digital still camera.

Write speeds are pretty conservative with 4x write for DVD+R and 2.4x for DVD+RW. As with all DVD recordable drives the HP can also burn CDs, doing so at 16-speed and 10-speed for re-writable discs. There’s a 2MB buffer, which is fine now that burn-proof functionality is standard.

Installation is straightforward under Windows XP with the drive immediately recognised. Drivers are required for the use of the integrated movie capture, but these can be installed manually or via the software installer. It’s worth noting that only Windows XP and Windows 2000 are supported.

Many IT goods are supplied with software packages that are meant to persuade you that your getting a good deal, when often most of it is useless. The HP drive makes a pleasant change in that the software packages is actually appealing.

First, there’s an automated HP update wizard, which automatically searches for software and firmware updates. This did in fact download and install an update, though it wasn’t clear what the improvements were.

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