VHS Capture

[Psittac]

Just looking for some quick advice about capturing VHS to a PC.  I did it many years ago with my All In Wonder gpu and I'm sure I can figure it out again, but thought I'd ask for advice from the people in the know.  I have a VCR that connect's via RCA so I was planning on getting an RCA capture card, a quick amazon search shows this USB adaptor for $11, would this work or should I get something PCIe or a better unit?  Not looking to spend a lot

 

Also what software should I use?

[Dissitesuxba11s]

@handymanshandle might be able to provide some input.

[PlayStation 2]

The one you linked is a generic EasyCap. Unfortunately, the drivers for them really aren't worth the cheapness to work with and it's really a potshot on which EasyCap you get, because there's like four different chip variants of them, one of the most common of them being the SM Grabber.

I would spend a little more for something like this, which will have superior video quality (namely no forced sharpness) and will be easier to work with, especially if you're using something like VirtualDub or OBS Studio.

[Psittac]

what about this one from Micro Center

 

and thank you!

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, Psittac said:

what about this one from Micro Center

From the looks of it, it's just another shitty EasyCap-based capture card.

[Psittac]

1 minute ago, handymanshandle said:

From the looks of it, it's just another shitty EasyCap-based capture card.

Well thank you, probably just saved me a ton of stress.  My dad want's to make a DVD from old VHS tapes for christmas

[PlayStation 2]

Just now, Psittac said:

Well thank you, probably just saved me a ton of stress.  My dad want's to make a DVD from old VHS tapes for christmas

No problem. If ya got any other questions, just @ me or PM me.

[Psittac]

4 minutes ago, handymanshandle said:

No problem. If ya got any other questions, just @ me or PM me.

My dad just called and I'm going to spend the extra $8 to get it from Micro Center, going to head off to get it now.

 

Again thank you, it sounds trivial but you just made this a smooth process and I don't have any doubt's about what I'm getting.

 

Do you mind if I PM you or message here for help with OBS?  I've used it before but might have issues.  *edit: just saw that you said I could PM, tyvm

 

Now my dad just needs to find the VHS tape for me to copy.

 

OH MAN! I need a blank DVD too lol just remembered.

[mariushm]

I'm not sure OBS is the tool for such a project.  By default OBS is optimized for HD and unless you know what you're doing your video is probably gonna look bad when you're done.

I would use Virtualdub .. capture it using a lossless codec (like you would record audio to FLAC), for example with a codec like MagicYUV : https://www.magicyuv.com/

This would result in around 2-3 GB for 10 minutes of video, or something like that.

Once your tape is recorded, you can use MeGUI or Handbrake to apply deinterlacing if needed, and then compress to h264 using the best quality settings

 

[PlayStation 2]

8 hours ago, mariushm said:

I'm not sure OBS is the tool for such a project.  By default OBS is optimized for HD and unless you know what you're doing your video is probably gonna look bad when you're done.

I would use Virtualdub .. capture it using a lossless codec (like you would record audio to FLAC), for example with a codec like MagicYUV : https://www.magicyuv.com/

This would result in around 2-3 GB for 10 minutes of video, or something like that.

Once your tape is recorded, you can use MeGUI or Handbrake to apply deinterlacing if needed, and then compress to h264 using the best quality settings

 

You can realistically use OBS for it (I capture VHS tapes using OBS), but I'd argue it's all dependent on the workflow in general.

Frankly, with USB capture cards, VirtualDub is a hell of a lot easier to tolerate messing with than OBS.

[Psittac]

9 hours ago, mariushm said:

I'm not sure OBS is the tool for such a project.  By default OBS is optimized for HD and unless you know what you're doing your video is probably gonna look bad when you're done.

I would use Virtualdub .. capture it using a lossless codec (like you would record audio to FLAC), for example with a codec like MagicYUV : https://www.magicyuv.com/

This would result in around 2-3 GB for 10 minutes of video, or something like that.

Once your tape is recorded, you can use MeGUI or Handbrake to apply deinterlacing if needed, and then compress to h264 using the best quality settings

 

I would hate to say it but lossless has no place here, it's VHS.  The nitty gritty of it all doesn't have much weight with me because I'm just looking to get it done.

 

Also file size has no weight, I have all the storage

[mariushm]

19 minutes ago, Psittac said:

I would hate to say it but lossless has no place here, it's VHS.  The nitty gritty of it all doesn't have much weight with me because I'm just looking to get it done.

 

Also file size has no weight, I have all the storage

It's about giving you the ability to post process without quality loss or with minimal quality loss, not about keeping lossless for ever..

It gives you the option to apply a simple crop after you're done without causing recompression losses. You may want to crop to remove black bars or junk around the image frame. Some capture cards allow you to capture the full frame (like with my Leadtek Winfast2000 expert I can capture 768x576) and sometimes you get stuff you don't want on top and bottom (for example teletext and close caption data in the first horizontal lines of the frames, on SD TV broadcasts)

 

It gives you the option on how to handle interlacing, and how much quality you have in that deinterlacing. Most cheap software that comes with those video capture cards simply blend fields (cheapest deinterlacing, but can make image a bit blurry). You can either convert it to progressive using plugins like Yadif  or you can tell the software encoder to deinterlace it for you or you can tell the software encoder to encode interlaced and mark the h264 stream as interlaced and let the TV or video player to deinterlace the video (it's supported but not usually done because interlacing reduces codec efficiency by a few percentages, so h264 files are bigger for same quality compared to progressive content, so most people pre-deinterlace)

OBS and other software may assume the content is progressive and encoding straight to h264 and you'll get artifacts due to interlacing because it assumes content is progressive.

By default it's configured to use bt. 709 or bt 2020 color formats because that's what H264 decoders assume when they get a HD stream, but you're supposed to use the bt 601 / rec. 601 color format for SD content (in OBS you'd have to set that on some settings panel and also in the software encoder section maybe as custom parameters, I think the hardware encoders default automatically to the HD bt 709 format so your colors would be affected)

 

[Dataanti]

i recorded a bunch of VHS tapes for my grandpa a while back, i used adobe media encode

 

and the device i used was http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_usblive2.html

 

I had tried using OBS however i could not find any way to deinterlace the video, and unless anything in OBS has changed over the years i don't think it can yet or ever will. thats why i resorted to adobe media encoder, the program seemed easy enough to use and removed the interlacing so i was pretty happy  for bit rate and that sort of stuff, i just looked up the average recommended bit rate for what ever resolution the capture card was putting out, i think it was 640i or something, and used that.