My parents had two cardboard boxes full of old VHS and VHS-C tapes from the 1990s in our hall closet. Every time we moved somewhere, my mom remembered that these tapes with our family videos needed to be digitized before the magnetic tapes degraded, but commercial labs werecharging $25 per tape.  
I did some research on how this digitizing process works and discovered that one does not need to spend a fortune on professional-grade equipment from a studio.  
I only bought a cheap video capture card with RCA inputs (yellow, white, and red) at Amazon for $21, connected our old family VCR player in the basement with a video cable via yellow and white ports to the capture card, and OBS Studio software (open-source graphic design platform).  
By simply pressing the record button in OBS while my VCR played back videos, I could encode high-quality digital copies of our VHS tape recordings in MP4 format in real-time.  
After I digitized all 14 of our family tapes, I showed the digitized videos to my aunt, and she agreed to pay $80 for the same service for her 6 VHS tapes with my cousins’ childhood birthdays.  
I decided to post little flyers around the neighborhood and advertised on a community website for our street:  
“Local student\_digitizing family records for video tapes. $12 per tape, and $20 for two.  
The converted file will be available on a USB flash drive or Google Drive link”  
During three months of summer break, I digitized more than 60 tapes for different families in our neighborhood. It was all very simple: while I did my homework or video games, my computer captured the VHS videos without any manual input.

How I made $700 my freshman summer converting old VHS family tapes to MP4 files