itsybitsy s.

I purchased this service in order to create DVD backups of old family VHS cassettes. From the most basic perspective, this expectation was fulfilled. However the customer service was horrendous and details of my order were so grossly flawed that I will never recommend this company or use it again.

Before placing my order I did a lot of research on similar companies and to find reviews for this company's service. I felt confident that my family videos would be in good hands and I liked the idea that my package and conversion would be tracked online with updates.

When I noticed that my box of 10 VHS cassettes, very carefully packaged and using the printed label received from Southtree, had not yet been received by the company I contacted customer service via email. The reply said that it was normal and probably the result of "the weekend". Assuming a delay of about two days due to "the weekend", I expected it would be received and processed shortly thereafter.

After three weeks went by since my shipping date I again checked the status online, and again saw that the package had not even been received by Southtree. It is worth noting that I was shipping from Ohio to Tennessee, according to the Southtree mailing label.

I contacted customer service and was given a generic copy/paste response about how secure and special their shipping method is - but no response or explanation whatsoever about why it was taking so long, and no apology. Nothing on the Southtree site indicates such a gross delay in shipping *to* their facility, and all the website content assures buyers of a smooth process with updates at every step.

Within a day or so of my third message, now containing a lot of all caps words, I magically received a notice that my package had suddenly been received. (No human reply to my last message, however.) Then the tracking emails began trickling in, informing me of the each step in the process. I awaited the return of my originals and new DVD backups, hopeful that the result would make up for the horrific customer service.

When they arrived, my cassettes were not packaged nearly as carefully as I had sent them out. One of the cassettes was outside of its case, and there was no padding in the package. Then I opened the DVDs and started noticing that one, two, then *all* but two of the 10 DVDs had gross misspellings on the labels. Each of my VHS cassettes had properly spelled labels and all Southtree had to do was copy what was written, but they obviously did not. "Concert" is spelled "Concet". "Spring" is spelled "Sprinmg". And so on. Some letters were added; some were omitted. A simple spellcheck would have caught every single error - now printed on the labels of DVDs which were intended to be "archival" quality.

Next I watched the DVDs to see what the quality of the recordings might be. It's awful. Beyond terrible. There are no indexes, and the formats are different between different DVDs - some have tracks, others are all on one track. The video quality skips and is snowy / pixelated. The sound is distorted or missing altogether. Some DVDs appear to repeat the entire cassette's content a second time, which I suppose might be considered a bonus, but it makes it very difficult to fast forward or rewind to a specific spot. One might assume that these quality issues reflect the quality of the VHS cassettes, but it does not. In the majority of cases, the issues I found on the DVDs are not present on the original VHS cassettes.

This service really was a waste of my time, energy, and money, and was absolutely NOT worth the risk of sending out our family's original videocassettes. I would like to have my VHS cassettes backed up to DVD but I will look for a different company to convert the rest. I absolutely DO NOT recommend this company.