The Best VHS Capture System Using Free Software?

mrcgran asks: "I have been trying to find the best solution to transfer VHS tapes to a digital format using Free Software only. I would like to lose as little as possible in the conversion, sampling optimally, minimizing noise and being in control of every step of the process. Storage is not a problem. I'm expecting to use around 5GB+ for each hour of raw captured footage." If you were going to build a VHS capture system using Free Software, how would you do it?

The software part seems promising: VLC and mencoder for conversion of raw footage, Cinelerra and many others for video editing.

However, the hardware is being tricky. Most try to bloat the device adding functions like TV/compression/edition instead of focusing on the raw A/D conversion. Chipsets are hidden, and parameters like signal-to-noise, sampling rate etc are unavailable for comparison. Information is scattered and very difficult to find.

Which chipsets/products should I look for, specially for use with Linux and BSD? Which ones allow oversampling of pixel resolution and number of frames (in order to average the values and reduce the noise)? Which setup should I use: S-Video/Composite, sampling rate/oversampling, suggestions on high-quality VHS players/heads/tape cleaning processes, etc? Has anyone tried to use scaling algorithms such as hq/scalenx to upscale video and sound resolution? Pitfalls?"

Dscaler?

[kninja]

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I've used this for some basic tape transfer. It was messy, but I think that was due to the TV card I was using. I think if I had a better quality TV card and a nice fast hard drive, I could have gotten a very nice picture indeed.

The denoising part is probably going to require some serious ASICs if you want a clean copy.

Good luck!

Re:Dscaler?

[MrShaggy]

I was looking into stuff for a linux myth-box, and got reasonably far.

If you are using Linux, you must make sure that you can use HDPARM on your drives.

There are a tons of websites out there that can explain how to get that going.

MS tends to make that happen, while Linux doesn't. I went from stupidly choppy video, to almost real-time, using a relatively older harddrive.

Even on newer drives, you won't see much difference until you can get hdparm on.

You also have to make sure that its in the boot-scripts.

Re:

[Minwee]

Running hdparm isn't the problem. It's setting the drive to use DMA that will solve most of your choppy video problems.

There are a number of gotchas that can cause problems such as buggy motherboard support or using the wrong cables. R'ing t FM [mythtv.org] can help out a lot.

Re:Dscaler?

[evilviper]

If you are using Linux, you must make sure that you can use HDPARM on your drives.

Not at all. hdparm was needed to enable DMA in the past, but since latter versions of 2.4, and with all 2.6 kernels, DMA is enabled by default, if at all possible.

You can run hdparm to enable 32bit transfers as well, but that's not going to make a significant difference, unlike DMA.

Re:

[MrShaggy]

Its been a while, however I remember setting this on the newer version of MythDora, which AFAIK is Fedora5.

TV card quality

[dpilot]

I picked up a cheapo TV card to set up my Myth box, mainly because in the long term I want to migrate to HD, and the NTSC card was just a stopgap. But at this point I'm beginning to think I might want a better quality card, since the cutover date has moved out another year, and depending on features may not be expensive.

When comparing video cards most of the energy of the reviews on NTSC cards seems to go into the on-card encoding, but aside from the ATSC cards there isn't much talk about front-end quality.

Hardware

[seinman]

First, get an S-VHS deck. They'll play back VHS tapes with higher quality than a standard VHS deck will. Then, run the footage through a time base corrector. Look on eBay for that, but expect to pay a decent amount of money (the one I use is part of a $1000 video switcher, i've seen basic standalone TBCs for around $400 if memory serves). Then use whatever capture card you can find that works well with whichever distro you're using. Don't bother using an s-video connection (assuming your deck has one, chances are good it won't) as VHS is a composite signal to begin with. There will be no quality gain using s-video over composite in this case. I don't know much about the software side of things, unfortunately, as all the tools I use are commercial software for Windows and Macintosh systems.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, VHS is *not* natively composite. You want to check your facts there. S-Video outputs do not engage a comb-filter because the luma and chroma are separate on the tape. This is the way to go. A simple moire pattern A-B will show this characteristic clearly.

Re:Hardware

[fyngyrz]

This AC is correct. Use S-Video from a good SVHS deck; that's the best signal source. Also a TBC and a good digitizer - I use a datavideo [datavideo.us] DAC-100 which has firewire, composite, S-Video in *and* out, converts any to any and does a very good job. It also lets you select 16- or 12-bit audio conversion (for firewire output.)

Since you're not using a Mac, I have no suggestions for software. The Mac itself is so friendly to this process, I've never experienced any problems of any kind.

Re:

[cayenne8]

"Since you're not using a Mac, I have no suggestions for software. The Mac itself is so friendly to this process, I've never experienced any problems of any kind."

I'm considering using a Mac to do this. Can you elaborate on what software and processes you used/went through to convert VHS to digital?

TIA!

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Sure. The first thing I tried worked perfectly; that was a free program called Hyper-engine AV [sourceforge.net].

I bought the DAC-100, and the day it arrived, I downloaded Hyper engine AV. I plugged in the firewire cable between the DAC-100 and the Mac, plugged the SVideo cable between the deck and the DAC-100, pressed play on the deck and record in Hyperengine AV and had no problems. Soon, I ran into an older tape of one of my students that wasn't recording (digitally) well, or playing back well, so I dragged a TBC out

Re:

[cayenne8]

Thank you, VERY informative. If you see this reply, can you tell me more about the DAC-100? What brand is this? Also, I'm a little hazy about what a TBC is?

Again...many thanks!!

Re:

[fyngyrz]

TBC == Time Base Correction/Corrector. They can fix sync width and levels, chroma phase, overall video timing, black levels and sometimes even more. Think of them as an all-round cleanup device for video. There is some discussion of this, plus this link [mediacollege.com], higher up in the thread. There are tons of them out there from el cheapo to thousands. The more switchable features, the better, generally speaking, and the more expensive.

My DAC-100 is by Datavideo. I bought mine here. [synchrotech.com] It is a stand-alone box with comp

Re:

[fyngyrz]

...and I just noticed that my saved link now points to the DAC-200, rather than DAC-100. I presume this is a minor upgrade; same price, and it looks the same, I don't see any new features listed. Might be better specs, too. Just a heads-up.

Re:

[dgatwood]

Actually, both VHS and S-VHS are natively composite (sort of). With VHS, the chroma is downsampled to a lower frequency than with S-VHS, but in both cases, there is one single analog stream of data going to a pair of heads. The Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] entry explains how this works.

Short form: when playing back the tape, the luma and chroma are split apart, the chroma is frequency shifted back up to the normal subcarrier frequency, then merged back together to form a traditional composite signal. With an S-VHS record

Re:Hardware

[fyngyrz]

Why is an external time base corrector required when you are going to sample and process the signal anyway?

TBC's do a lot - you should read this short page [mediacollege.com], it is very concise and to the point.

The other two questions are not relevant because you were fed misinformation. You do want an SVHS deck, and you do want to use S-Video as the source if humanly possible. Composite video is more of a compromise than S-Video is. Keeping the chroma and luma separate resolve interference issues you have seen many times such as ties with stripes turning colors.

Re:

[Cygfrydd]

TBC's do a lot - you should read this short page [mediacollege.com], it is very concise and to the point.

Reading that particular link, TBCs seem problematic if you're doing capture; the TBC converts the analog signal into digital, lets it hover in a framebuffer, and then "squirts" it back out as analog at the right moment... at which point, the capture device takes the analog, converts it back to digital..... this is bound to degrade the video.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

Conversions of otherwise pristine signal could indeed introduce an LS bit or so of degradation; however, depending on the precision of the conversion, this may or may not actually be visible. The more high quality bits used in the various A/D and D/A systems the less of a problem this is. But the presumption that the signal is pristine is a bit unlikely. TBC's can do a lot to fix things, from adjusting sync levels and widths to getting the black level back where it belongs to skewing timing and tweaking ch

TBC used with low-end Canopus box

[Megajim]

Question about using a TBC: Will that take care of Macrovision? I currently use a SVHS deck plugged into a Canopus ADVC110, and unfortunately discovered that Macrovision was trippping up the entire process for some source material. Putting aside copyright issues, will a TBC basically eliminate the Macrovision effect? Thanks to anyone who can help.

Re:

[fyngyrz]

The general answer is yes. Macrovision is basically a process for ruining the sync signal, and TBC's like to fix exactly that kind of problem. But to be certain, ask the manufacturer of the TBC. Who knows; perhaps they've entered into some unholy pact with the Macrovision people to keep the signal hosed.

Re:

[mink]

I dont know about the ADVC110 but my ADVC100 can be set into "ignore macrovision" mode by holding the signal select button for I think 30 seconds..

Re:

[Phreakiture]

I have an alternative suggestion to getting an SVHS deck.... many of the newer VHS models, especially those that are DVD/VHS combo units, have a feature called SQPB, "SVHS Quasi Play Back". It's capable of playing SVHS tapes, not as well as an SVHS deck, but pretty well, and also benefits from the improvements to regular VHS playback that you would get from using an actual SVHS deck, at a fraction of the cost.

The time base corrector is a good idea if it is in your budget. If not, don't sweat it.

If it

Re:

[GoRK]

Then use whatever capture card you can find that works well with whichever distro you're using. Don't bother using an s-video connection (assuming your deck has one, chances are good it won't) as VHS is a composite signal to begin with.

While it's true that the on-tape signal is composite, it will be the job of a comb filter somewhere to separate chroma and luminance from that signal for display or capture. If you rely on the (probably cheap) comb filter in "whatever capture card you can find" you will be pa

Re:

[Cowclops]

Except that its not true. If this were a discussion on laserdisc, you'd be 100% right. However, VHS DOES NOT record composite video, and outputting it as such requires one more conversion than it would for s-video.

Re:

[evilviper]

Then use whatever capture card you can find that works well with whichever distro you're using.

Congratulations on spending $2,000 on equipment, only to end up recording noisy crap...

Most popular TV capture cards are low S/N, and very noisy. That applies to any BTTV cards.

I would, at the very least, suggest getting an SAA71xx card, because the quality will be much better, and it's one of really the only 2 non-BTTV card well supported under Linux. (The other being Zoran)

Mencoder is really all you need on the

Virtual VCR

[toasted_pants]

I've found the Doom9.org's Capture Guide [doom9.org] as the best place to get information.

1. Use Virtual VCR to capture from the VCR going to the huffyuv lossless codec.
2. Use AVISynth to fix up the degraded tapes (also in the guide).
3. (Not free) Use Tmpg Encoder 4.0. It was worth the money for me because I wanted a fast, reasonably high quality mpeg2 encoder. But there are certainly free options instead.

Re:

[Ecuador]

He is asking about Linux, and Virtual VCR is DirectShow based.
Well, in the end I would also recommend to use Windows for capturing, as much as I love my Suse for developing, my HTPC runs Windows for various reasons.
Oh, if he did go to Windows, why Virtual VCR and not the best? I am talking about VirtualDub of course ;) From then on (Huffyuv etc) you are right.

Re:

[Cowclops]

Because, barring a recent update or something, virtual dub has always been VFW-only, which requires the windows WDM->VFW wrapper which only captures half of all the video fields. Now maybe they've fixed it in like the past year or something, but barring that, virtualVCR IS in fact the best capture program.

Re:

[Ecuador]

FYI VirtualDub supports WDM directly since late 2004 ( your "recent" update ;) ) and it is in fact the best capture program but for rare hardware configurations. The only reason Virtual VCR is on some of Doom9's guides, it is because they were written even before VirtualDub 1.6.2. I suggest you give VirtualDub another try.

The sky's the limit

[moosesocks]

You're right that you're going to run into hardware problems unless you choose very carefully.

As is the case with most things related to analogue/digital conversion (and also to video editing), the sky's pretty much the limit when it comes to the amount of money you can sink into your equipment.

For starters, a broadcast-quality VCR will set you back quite a bit. Great capture hardware's going to do you no good if the quality of the source is poor. We'll leave this part as an exercise for the reader.

Now that you've got a decent VCR, you can go splurge on an expensive Analogue-Digital converter. Any decent-quality device won't offer all of the unnecessary "bells and whistles" (such as hardware-based MPEG/WMV encoding) that the parent poster describes. Instead, most pro-grade boxes will take an analogue signal (RCA, S-Vid, or even BNC if you want to go all out), and output a standard FireWire DV signal that any decent video editing software should be able to handle. Canopus' hardware [canopus.com] is very well-regarded for these purposes. Their products range from somewhat inexpensive (~$150) for consumer-grade products to appallingly expensive for the pro-grade stuff.

However, the fact that you were considering using a TV-tuner card to do the capture seems to indicate that you haven't done anything like this at all. If your content is bad enough that you really NEED to be "in control of every step of the process", you're better off outsourcing this to a professional. Otherwise, a decent VCR and A/D converter should clean up the signal pretty well for you. You can always take care of things like de-interlacing in software later on.

I might also recommend stepping down from your podium, and considering editing your video with non-free software. I can't help but think that the gap that exists between Cineleera and Final Cut Pro is even bigger than the gap between Photoshop and The Gimp (which is pretty huge). Most professional studios use either Avid or Final Cut (and I'm really not trying to be an apple fanboy here -- Apple and Avid basically jointly own the entire industry). Compared to the rest of the costs of video production, Final Cut is a steal.

Alternatively, there are VHS/DVD-R decks out there that will automatically make dubs for you. Sony makes one, and it costs around $200 the last time I checked. Quality's not going to be the absolute best, but will still be pretty darn good. And it's easy as long as your source doesn't have macrovision.

Re:

[jbarr]

And it's easy as long as your source doesn't have macrovision.

There's the rub. I have a small library of commercial VHS tapee, and I would like to convert some (not all) to digital. Most are certainly available on DVD format, so I've already "paid the tax" of re-buying most of them on DVD, but a small handful of tapes are not available on DVD. They are obviously MacroVision-protected, so what is a good solution to convert those few tapes?

Re:

[CastrTroy]

One way to remove macrovision is to use the coax out from your VCR, which doesn't do macrovision. Just set your TV tuner to channel 3, and away you go. You won't get great quality but it works. There's also a lot of devices out there to remove the macrovision. It's probably illegal to remove macrovision protection, but they say they are for hooking up DVD players to TVs without composite cables by routing them through the VCR. As far as I'm concerned, if you're just backing up for personal uses, then it

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

Well, if you get an old enough S-VHS player, it won't have Macrovision on it, and life's peachy keen. I forget the date of that nastiness, but it's been a while. Oh, and even if it does have Macrovision, it's easy enough to defeat with a "bad" cable.

Re:

[mink]

Some DV bridges can be set to ignore Macrovision. ADVC100 can, not sure about others.

Re:

[stubear]

"Apple and Avid basically jointly own the entire industry). Compared to the rest of the costs of video production, Final Cut is a steal."

I think you're seriously underestimating Premiere Pro from Adobe. There was enough of an outcry from the Mac community that Adobe is now releasing an OSX version of Premiere Pro with their new CS3 Production Suite. Premiere Pro is a very capable video editing tool which does everything from standard def to HD with no problem whatsoever and it integrates well with After E

Re:

[GWBasic]

Now that you've got a decent VCR, you can go splurge on an expensive Analogue-Digital converter. Any decent-quality device won't offer all of the unnecessary "bells and whistles" (such as hardware-based MPEG/WMV encoding) that the parent poster describes. Instead, most pro-grade boxes will take an analogue signal (RCA, S-Vid, or even BNC if you want to go all out), and output a standard FireWire DV signal that any decent video editing software should be able to handle.

O.K, let's assume that the OP can buy

Using a DVD recorder

[Rastignac]

Plug the VHS reader with the DVD recorder. Play the tape and record it on a DVDRW (using highest available quality). Voilà. That's the easiest way to do it, and the quality is good. Now put the DVDRW in your PC, and get the files (MPEG2 VOB), and use any software for editing them.

Re:

[pyrote]

Plug the VHS reader with the DVD recorder. Play the tape and record it on a DVDRW (using highest available quality). Voilà. That's the easiest way to do it, and the quality is good. Now put the DVDRW in your PC, and get the files (MPEG2 VOB), and use any software for editing them.

Mod this up... I've worked retail electronics and tech bench, and you can have the most elegant computer solution and still yet, the customer will stare at you blankly as it is so complex.

Fair enough, your coming into this exp

Re:Using a DVD recorder

[gozar]

Plug the VHS reader with the DVD recorder. Play the tape and record it on a DVDRW (using highest available quality). Voilà . That's the easiest way to do it, and the quality is good. Now put the DVDRW in your PC, and get the files (MPEG2 VOB), and use any software for editing them. --

Yes, this is the best route to go. I purchased this DVD/vhs recorder: http://tinyurl.com/37ray4 [tinyurl.com]

I don't know if JVC still makes it, but it will upsample your VHS and DVD viewing to 720p or 1080i (using HDMI outputs, it only goes to 480p with the component output).

Re:

[alphamugwump]

I can't understand why you'd want to do that. You'd end up having to transcode the thing, which would screw with your quality. You'd have no control over the capture, or the encoding, or any part of the process.

Sure, your solution is probably just fine for transferring crap home movies or something. But, if, for example, you want to transfer some old, rare fansubs, you're not going to want to fuck around.

Hardware matters more

[VincenzoRomano]

I think that in cases like this, hardware is more important than software, that is the VHS player and the analogue-to-digital converter (aka framegrabber [wikipedia.org]).
If those cassettes contain private things, than you are on the right way though.
Otherwise maybe it'd be better to seek for a DVD edition/remastering of that content.

DV capture bridge

[jabuzz]

The best way to capture video is to get a analogue to DV bridge and put a Firewire card in the PC. Then you don't need to worry about drivers.

Re:

[rasper99]

Since you want to use free software it might be to save money along with your principles of avoiding M$. Quality may suffer a bit but you can use a DV camcorder (which you could probably borrow) that has analog to digital conversion for the DV bridge mentioned earlier. Hook the VCR analog video to the camcorder. Hopefully you can use S-Video instead of composite. Then firewire from the camcorder to the PC firewire.

This makes it just like a DV camcorder capture which is rather straight forward. No TV ca

hire a firewire deck

[DrSkwid]

Like a Sony DSR-11 [computervideo.net] this will bridge from analogue to DV.
We use them at work.

Re:

[morie]

>There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't.
And you're the other kind? The one who knows source code instead?

Oh, 10 types of people... Binary...

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

>There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't.
And you're the other kind? The one who knows source code instead?

Oh, 10 types of people... Binary...

Or 11 types... Roman...

Re:

[morie]

Wouldn't that be II?

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

Depends upon your font ;)

Re:

[DrSkwid]

binaries

Re:

[SlamMan]

Similar recommendation, but I use a JVC [jvc.com] deck.

Re:

[HungWeiLo]

My cheapo Canon ZR100 MiniDV camcorder also accepts analog input and the quality is good enough for home vids.

Re:

[DrSkwid]

The EU decided to add an import duty to camcorders that accept input as that made them a VCR.
So the manufacturers crippled lower end models to avoids the import duty.

http://forums.dvdoctor.net/archive/index.php/t-987 .html [dvdoctor.net]

Canopus AVDC300

[BigBuckHunter]

For professional quality VHS caps, grab a Canopus AVDC-300. They're a bit expensive ($250-300), but they're OS agnostic and achieve absolutely incredible results. There is really no competition in the consumer arena.

BBH

Re:

[WasterDave]

I have an ADVC-55. It is a thing of rare wonder. Best of all you put the video in one end, firewire in the other ... and that's it. You're up. No power bricks, no pissing around, it just goes.

Dave

Re:

[jalet]

Unfortunately the ADVC55 gives really shitty results compared to the ADVC700 (we've got several of them), but it costs 10 times less... The ADVC300 seems to be a good option, and also their TwinPack model which also does scan converter and have filters to improve bad quality VHS.

Re:

[BigBuckHunter]

Unfortunately the ADVC55 gives really shitty results compared to the ADVC700

Agree'd. The 55 and 100 are good for home users that are capping "decent" quality VCR tapes. The 300 incorporates a number of professional features (time syncing, chroma/lumina sep, sharpening) for those of us that have VHS tapes in various states of quality (or lack of). The 500/700 is something that a low end professional would use and is out of the price range of typical consumers. They're great for educational institution

Re:

[Hercynium]

I can vouch for that. I paid $380 for a Canopus ADVC-300 converter about two years ago and recently re-sold it on ebay for $350.

It enabled me to work wonders on some old home VHS tapes. The built-in TBC fixed the tracking and some nasty color-synch problems. The built-in luma, chroma, and de-noising filters, while sometimes difficult to get 'right' are top-notch and save you that much more time processing the AVI's on your CPU.

I'll also echo what's already been said several times in this thread: Get yoursel

Concentrate on the VHS player

[Andy_R]

With any reasonably modern video capture system (even the converters built into cheap consumenr DV cams), the weakest link in the chain is going to the be VHS deck. Being analogue, VHS decks are not all equal, they wear out, and they need to be kept well maintained and have the heads cleaned. To get the best results, I'd spend more time finding and maintaining a good, well built VHS deck that hasn't been used for years with no cleaning regime, and less time trying to post-process the recordings.

Getting the

Re:

[redtux1]

I have an gui application which among other things does this see http://www.redtux.org.uk/cgi-bin/burn_360.pl [redtux.org.uk].

Points to bear in mind (most of which my app does automatically)

using vcr_hack makes a big difference
as said above VCR player/tape quality is crucial
often you will get better quality captures by encoding on the fly rather than encoding losslessly. This is because you will get more issues with pci hd bus bandwith than cpu use. I find ffmpeg native codec works fairly well. Dont get perfection but pre

Video capture hardware

[rwa2]

The more signal wires you use to get the signal across, the better the video quality you'll get from your cable:

Component (3 signal pairs for YUV) > SVideo (2 signal pairs for luminance / chrominance) > Composite (1 signal pair for everything!)

It's easy cheap to find SVideo capture cards, the Osprey brand is well respected and has good linux support, but so does most of the things from Hauppage. You'll have to search a bit harder for a professional VHS / S-VHS deck and capture card that supports

Good VCR w/TBC and Hauppauge PVR-250

[general_boy]

I've digitized a LOT of video tapes, some of them for money (i.e. a small business) and over the years tried many techniques.

Best found and what I use now?

1. Good VCR with time-base corrector. Mine's a JVC HS-S7600U, about $350 several years ago and still works like new. Higher end "broadcast" VCRs will *record* better but not necessarily *play* better - don't bother.

2. Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 taking S-Video input from the VCR. Uses the Linux IVTV drivers. Hit play on the VCR, "cat /dev/video0 > file

MythTV

[Gothmolly]

Install KnoppMyth, plug the VCR into the video input of the Hauppage card, and hit play on the VCR. Profit!

The best way to capture VHS...

[grub]

The cheapest way to capture VHS tape:

1 - Aquire discarded cardboard box, stick, string.
2 - Get some bait. VHS tapes love jam.
3 - Prop up box along one length, open side down, on stick.
4 - Attach jam to stick with short length of string.
5 - Place bait under box.
6 - ... wait for your prey ...

Re:

[HungWeiLo]

Remember, the bait must be accompanied by a 12-ft length of Monster RCA cable from Best Buy.

Trying to start a business...

[Thumper_SVX]

... or trying to capture your home movies to digital format for archival? This makes a big difference.

If you're looking to start a business to do this, then the software should be the least of your worries and you should be looking at broadcast quality hardware to do the conversion. An OTS VHS recorder strapped to a PC with a raw capture card (they do exist for Linux and they're pretty good with minimal features... check the MythTV Wiki for info on those) is going to give you something that's going to look/sound worse than VHS no matter what you do. But again, if you want to do this commercially, then there's no replacement for quality hardware and software.

An Apple Mac Pro with capture cards connected to broadcast-quality SVHS playback hardware is going to be your best bet... and the software's readily available (though not cheap) and extremely nice to use. No, I'm not an Apple fanboy (though I do use a Mac laptop), but this kind of media manipulation is precisely what Macs are good at and the software/hardware available on that platform is still better than the equivalents on Windows in my opinion. At the very least, it's a more mature media platform than Windows or Linux.

The point I'm getting at here is that if you're going to do it right, you're going to spend $10,000 on hardware... why run free software when it'll only cost an extra grand?

(NOTE: For the pedants out there, I know the numbers are not precise... I'm just making a point, here!)

Now, if you're looking to just convert your VHS collection to digital... screw it. You're never going to get the economies of scale on the hardware you'd need to make the expense worth it. There are plenty of companies out there already who do this commercially, and have the commercial grade equipment to do the conversion. They can do this because they resell the service over and over... most of them recoup the cost of hardware pretty quickly... and they have professional, experienced people who will do the cleanup on the captured video before it's dumped to a digital medium.

I've watched some of these guys work, and they amaze me. You'll end up with something digital and indistinguishable from your VHS tapes... in fact with decent image processing by an experienced editor and some sound processing thrown in the results may appear BETTER than the source material played back on your average consumer-grade VHS player. They won't really be significantly better... but with corrected color balance and resampling and cleanup of the soundtrack you'd be amazed the difference it can make. Total cost might only be around 10% of the cost of the hardware that you're talking about needing to do the job right.

Besides, after spending all that money on the hardware (see above) and doing your captures, what then? eBay it? Good luck... you might get 30% of your money back at the end of the day, and that's presuming it sells!

dvgrab, vlc, rca - fw box

[i.r.id10t]

I'm working on doing a live broadcast for a local political thingie that has a lot of folks' panties in a wad...

I'm going to be given basically RCA/component output from the Big TV Stuff.

Went to a Mac using coworker, stole a box off his mac that takes RCA/Component input and outputs it to firewire. Stuck a firewire card in my Ubuntu box, apt-get installed dvgrab and had at it.

The component -> fw box is by Formac http://www.formac.us/p_bin/?cid=solutions_converte rs [formac.us]

Says its for mac, works fine on my PC r

I used a PVR-500 and mencoder

[pestie]

I just finished doing exactly this sort of thing, so I'll describe what I did, how, and why.

Some caveats: 1) I like working from the command line. 2) This was not a project for which I wanted ultra high quality - "good enough" was good enough for me.

I have a Hauppauge PVR-500 [hauppauge.com] (a hardware MPEG encoder/TV tuner card - basically, this card is a pair of PVR-250's on one PCI card). This card is well-supported on Linux by the IVTV drivers [ivtvdriver.org]. I decided to use its composite and audio inputs to convert some old VHS porn (gotta love that 80's-era stuff) to modern digital file formats so I could finally toss out the old VHS video tapes, some of which were quite degraded (they were formerly rental tapes, and some were nearly 20 years old). I used an old-but-decent-quality Sony VCR as the video source and fed its outputs straight into the PVR-500's first set of inputs. Capturing video was as simple as:

cat /dev/video0 >filename.mpg

How's that for simple? Heh... I "retensioned" the tape beforehand (fast forward all the way to the end, then rewind all the way to the beginnig) and made note of how long the tape was. I used a kitchen timer to let me know when the tape was nearly finished playing so I could stop the capture at the approprite time.

After the capture was finished, I used mplayer to find the exact end point (just after the credits faded to black, for example) and to find where to crop the video (most analog captures will end up with black bars on the left/right sides, and old tapes often have distortion at the top or bottom). mplayer's "cropdetect" feature was invaluable for that. I would play the file with a command like this:

gmplayer -vf cropdetect filename.mpg

To use cropdetect, you have to fast-forward into a part of the video where the picture doesn't have any black at the edges (no dark scenes, transition fades, etc.) Then you just look at the terminal window to see what cropping parameters to use (it spits them out continuously). I found that sometimes the default setting wasn't sufficient to eliminate the black bars completely, so I would occasionally use cropdetect=50 to make it a little less conservative about what it detected. That value of 50 was chosen by experimentation, so feel free to experiment yourself. 50 seemed to consistently work well for me. There are no units on that number, it's just a scale from 0 to 255. In the end, I'd have a set of cropping parameters that looked like this:

-vf crop=704:476:12:0

Those numbers are: X dimension, Y dimension, X offset, Y offset. Offsets are measured in pixels from the upper left corner.

Cropping the distorted crap at the top and bottom isn't quite so easy. It's not all black, so cropdetect doesn't detect it. So I had to manually adjust the parameters. The tricky part is the way mencoder/mplayer wants its dimensions specified. It would be much simpler if it used a format of startx:starty:endx:endy rather than the size/offset described above. As it is, if you want to crop pixels off the top or left side, you have to shorten the appropriate dimension by N pixels and then add N pixels to the offset. This sounds like a pain in the ass, but in practice it's not so bad. You get used to it very quickly.

Now that I had my crop values, I'd use mencoder to resize, deinterlace, and transcode the whole thing into h.264 video and variable bitrate MP3 audio. I experimented with AAC audio, but for some reason I kept having much better results with VBR MP3. I think the FAAC codec (the one bundled with Ubuntu Dapper) I have is just too old to be efficient. When Feisty comes out this month and I get around to upgrading, I'll try AAC again. Anyway, this is a complex command line, so I wrapped it in a script:


#!/bin/bash

# Bit rate at which to encode
# Formula for h.264: X * Y * FPS * 0.125
# Common

Re:

[Cervantes]

This has to be the longest, geekiest, and least-erotic porn post ever on Slashdot...

Re:

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Sob. Now I feel old, thanks a lot. Now I have that beat in my head. Great.

Virtualdub

[DigitalCrackPipe]

I had good results in past years using Virtualdub [virtualdub.org] to capture video from a capture card/video card combo in windows. I used the huffyuv codec to losslessly compress down to about 30GB/hour for DVD resolution capture. There are a lot of free video processing plugins that can really clean up the video and make the encoded video much better (noisy video gets noisier when you encode to mpeg for DVD, particularly at lower bitrates). You can serve the filtered stream directly to your encoder (I used the non-fre

camcorder

[BillAtHRST]

I've had reasonably good results using an old Sony camcorder which can convert SVHS in to Firewire out -- then use your favorite software to go from AVI to MPEG. The files are large, but the results are generally better than trying to go from SVHS to MPEG on the fly.

As for which software to use, I haven't found any that I like, free or otherwise.

Hauppauge PVR-250 / 350 / 500

[pyite69]

I have a PVR250 and I have sampled recordings from my old standalone Tivo, which was the same signal type as a VCR.

Here's what I use

[lhand]

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino [kinodv.org]. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what