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  1. I have a few precious family memories on VHS that I amplanning to capture as raw uncompressed RGB to a hard drive. I know there are lossless codec's such aslagarith, however I would prefer uncompressed RGB so I don't have to use anycodec, thus making things easier for the future (as you never know what codec'swill be supported in years to come). Itis my goal to just do this process once without having to tinker in years tocome. When I first started researchingthis I was put off by reading about the "extremely" large file sizes,however it seems this is not the case. When I started looking into the figures it seems 1 hour of uncompressedRGB only equates to about 100gb per hour which really is not that much in thisday and age. I have just built a newsystem and now have 4x4 TB drives equating to 16TB of total storage, so haveplenty to play with considering that I only have a few hours of VHS video toconvert. is anyone able to confirm thatmy figures are correct? Does one hour ofVHS equate to as little as 100gb per hour uncompressed RGB?

    As a side question if I were to capture uncompressed RGBfrom VHS would a standalone Blu Ray player recognise and play this if I burntthe uncompressed avi as a Blu Ray data disc? My logic is telling me it would have no problem playing this as themachine would not have any codecs to deal with to complicate things due to thefact it is raw uncompressed video? Iknow I could just burn the footage to a DVD but I don't see the point (I havejust bought loads of the 50gb blu ray discs). As any discs I make will be under 20 min and it seems a Blu ray disc of50GB would be perfect for holding less than 20 min of raw uncompressed video.
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  2. Member hech54's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    As a side question if I were to capture uncompressed RGBfrom VHS would a standalone Blu Ray player recognise and play this if I burntthe uncompressed avi as a Blu Ray data disc?
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  3. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    silly newbie question. to build on hech's terse answer of no. first, vhs has about 240 lines of resoultion, and doesn't need or even look good blown up to 1080 in most cases. second uncompressed isn't a blu-ray format in any way, shape or form. you could use it as input in a blu-ray encoder if you had to. dvd is more suited to hold a hour of vhs though, as it fits on one disc at a high bitrate.
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  4. Member hech54's Avatar
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    I had to Google "terse"...
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  5. As others have mentioned, Blu Ray is not an uncompressed, "Raw" format and does indeed use a compression scheme/codec (MPEG4/H.264, VC-1). The player does not support uncompressed video in any format, so you'll have to encode your video to one of those standards in order to use it with your standalone Blu Ray player.

    As far as the 100gb per hour, that's probably a fair estimate (maybe a bit high) if you capture the video at 720x480. It would be drastically higher if you captured it as uncompressed RGB at a 1920 x 1980 resolution.
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  6. As others have mentioned, Blu Ray is not an uncompressed, "Raw" format and does indeed use a compression scheme/codec (MPEG4/H.264, VC-1). The player does not support uncompressed video in any format, so you'll have to encode your video to one of those standards in order to use it with your standalone Blu Ray player.
    So are you saying there are no standalone Blu Ray players that will recognise a data disc and let me play an uncompressed video file from it?

    It seems crazy that I can have a 50GB uncompressed file I captured from a VCR sitting on my computer, but you guys are telling me to compress that to fit on a tiny DVD when I could just burn the file with no compression to a 50GB Blu Ray disc (as a data disc) that I have plenty of. How can compressing something be better than no compression?

    As far as the 100gb per hour, that's probably a fair estimate (maybe a bit high) if you capture the video at 720x480
    Thanks for confirming this, so as I thought the space required for this project will be minimal with my current system.
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  7. Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    So are you saying there are no standalone Blu Ray players that will recognise a data disc and let me play an uncompressed video file from it?
    Yes, that is the case. There may be some standalone media players out there (not sure, but doubt it) that can play a 24bit uncompressed RGB file. Very few consumers would be interested in it as a feature, but perhaps there are professional units out there capable.

    Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    It seems crazy that I can have a 50GB uncompressed file I captured from a VCR sitting on my computer, but you guys are telling me to compress that to fit on a tiny DVD when I could just burn the file with no compression to a 50GB Blu Ray disc (as a data disc) that I have plenty of. How can compressing something be better than no compression?
    I don't think people mean to frame the issue in that manner, compression vs no compression. Certainly an uncompressed video is going to look more like the original source than a video that is compressed (in a lossy manner). Well, it is true at least on a theoretical level, perhaps not in practice though with an actual set of eyeballs and a moving video. Personally I don't think there is anything "wrong" with what you are doing, I think people are just trying to make you aware if you aren't already that VHS is a low resolution format and thus you'll quickly reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of resolution and bitrate that you can throw at it and improve the quality of the capture.

    In my experience, capturing a VHS tape to MPEG2 at 720 x 480 for DVD at the max supported DVD spec bitrate for video and audio is not going to look appreciably different than a VHS tape captured in an uncompressed format at 720 x 480, 1920 x 1080, or 4096 × 3112 and beyond. You'll end up with a much larger file, but no gains in the ability to produce an equivalent picture to the original (the one exception perhaps being very shaky handheld footage that produces artifacts at even the max MPEG2 DVD-Video bitrate).

    So it may be overkill in terms of the space you'll end up using for a video that won't look any better -- but as you said, if your intention is to archive the footage, uncompressed video is the safest option, although I'd venture that MPEG2 or some of the lossless "uncompressed" formats would be just as safe in the long-run. Still if that is what makes you feel most comfortable and you have the space to fill, there is nothing wrong with it.

    I like the idea of using the BR discs as backups but I'd also maintain another copy on a hard drive or two (perhaps one of them off site) and perhaps store a DVD version as well for convenience of viewing. A lot of people who maintain uncompressed backups of footage will routinely encode a copy to the optical/digital media dujour for convenience purposes. Uncompressed video is really only fully supported in professional workflows and in the "computer world". Standalones typically require video in a very strict file format, with restrictions as to bitrate and resolution, etc -- so it is not such a bad idea to have a redundant copy that follows those conventions, in case you want to distribute it to others or view it easily.
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  8. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    It seems crazy that I can have a 50GB uncompressed file I captured from a VCR sitting on my computer, but you guys are telling me to compress that to fit on a tiny DVD when I could just burn the file with no compression to a 50GB Blu Ray disc (as a data disc) that I have plenty of. How can compressing something be better than no compression?
    why? just because it's "uncompressed" doesn't make it any good. garbage in garbage out. if you have a big screen tv, play the vhs tape to it and see how it looks at 1080. that's as good as it will get. once you do an analog to digital conversion it can only look worse, or the same if you are lucky, have the best equipment in the world and have hundreds of conversions under your belt.
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    This is a lot of fuss about nothing. As long as you're not using some kind of crazy, super proprietary codec like Real Media, there's no reason to expect that MPEG-2 or H.264 would not still be playable in 20 years. Good old MPEG-1 is STILL playable on every computer platform out there. Crap, on my previous job I even had a 1990s era Sparc workstation that I could get to play MPEG-1 video.

    I'm not really seeing the point in worrying about saving uncompressed tapes. Geez. It's not like these are such great quality any way. This reminds me of a guy I worked with who was just adamant that 256 Kbps MP3 files were the LOWEST bit rate that didn't produce "horrible artifacts" he claimed to hear. Maybe the original poster is some kind of unusually sensitive person to video compression, but I suspect that 99% of the people out there would be quite happy with a properly made MPEG-2 backup of the VHS tape to DVD.
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    If you don't want to encode to any specific disc formats then I'd suggest capturing in whatever uncompressed format you like and then compress it to a H.264/MPEG-4 AVC file of whatever size you prefer. If you can see any major differences between the two I'd be very surprised, especially if the VHS source isn't that great.

    Fact of the matter is any VHS capture stored and played back in uncompressed format is just a waste of space. The quality isn't there.

    But the only way to find out is to try it. Make your uncompressed capture then try encoding it to compressed formats and see what the output is like. I'm sure you'll be surprised.
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    Video isn't RGB, it's YUV. Capture + save raw uncompressed YUV, if you must, but almost nothing is going to play it for you. This is the source for a restoration project, not a format that you watch.

    If you're only "doing this once", making good interlaced DVD standard MPEG-2 (and/or bob-deinterlaced square pixel x264) viewing copies is very important.

    Cheers,
    David.
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  12. Fact of the matter is any VHS capture stored and played back in uncompressed format is just a waste of space
    Why is it a waste of space? All the video I want to capture raw will fit nicely within 1TB of hard drive space. I will then place the hard drive in a fireproof box and store for safe keeping. If I choose to compress, it would not change anything (apart from reducing quality if a lossless codec was not used) as my project would still be sitting on a disc in a fireproof box. How am I wasting anything?

    Video isn't RGB, it's YUV
    I thought these were 2 separate things? Some people choose RGB others YUV as when I did a Google search I found discussions of people talking about this


    Yes, that is the case. There may be some standalone media players out there (not sure, but doubt it) that can play a 24bit uncompressed RGB file. Very few consumers would be interested in it as a feature, but perhaps there are professional units out there capable.
    Ok if there are no standalone Blu Ray players that will play uncompressed RGB, do you know any that support lossless codec's such as lagarith or huffyuv? If I have to use a codec I am only interested in ones that are lossless. Any uncompressed files I burn to Blu Ray will be under 50GB so there is no need for me to compress footage, especially when I have stacks of 50GB Blu Ray discs to spare.
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  13. Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    Why is it a waste of space? All the video I want to capture raw will fit nicely within 1TB of hard drive space. I will then place the hard drive in a fireproof box and store for safe keeping. If I choose to compress, it would not change anything (apart from reducing quality if a lossless codec was not used) as my project would still be sitting on a disc in a fireproof box. How am I wasting anything?
    I agree with you: If you have the space and you're anal about quality, archiving lossless is the way to go. It lets you return to the originally captured source whenever you want to make compressed copies for actual viewing on hardware players, and you can always redo bad encodes using better settings or newer formats. I've learned that trying to fit even 45 minutes of MPEG-2 onto a DVD is just WAY too lossy for me, even using the best settings I can in HCEnc. I'm not even entirely happy with those results as distribution copies, let alone permanent archives.

    Word of warning: I sense from your insistence on lossless that you're on a quest for perfection. You should know that PC capture - the only way to capture losslessly - can become MUCH more time-consuming, stressful, and expensive than you may expect:
    • Different capture cards have their own issues: They have different capture windows and different quality. Some will leave you in driver hell. Some will have audio sync issues, and some will have audio sync issues if you don't use the right settings. Others have nasty AGC pump, and others can be tricked out and go haywire from input levels/voltages they aren't expecting...so you may need an external proc amp to reduce the gain or another external passthrough device that flat-out clips the signal at a level acceptable to your capture card (TBC's and DVD recorder passthroughs will generally do this).
    • If you try to use an external time-base correctors, some are better than others, and every single one involves certain tradeoffs. Full-frame TBC's will give "continuous sync" at the expense of an occasional duplicated/skipped frame when they're overwhelmed by errors and "something has to give" to output a clockwork signal (this doesn't hurt audio sync though). However, they will only partially correct geometric distortions, and they can introduce image artifacts of their own. The best device I've used is a Philips DVDR3475, which corrects geometric distortions perfectly and gives continuous sync (also at the expense of occasional dupes/drops)...but its AGC reacts badly to high levels, so you need to reduce gain with a proc amp first. In turn, my Studio 1 Productions/Signvideo PA-200 proc amp - known to be the most transparent around - has a black level control that doesn't affect the bottom 14 or so lines of the frame. (It strangely used to process those lines about two weeks ago before my power went out, but the current shortcoming is referenced in the user manual, so it's not broken either.) This is a game where you're always trying a new quirky device to fix the flaws of another one.
    • You also have to deal with issues common to all VHS capture: Different VCR's capture significantly different amounts of detail. They artificially sharpen by different amounts. They denoise and blur by different amounts. They add noise in different amounts. They have different colors. They output different levels. They internally clip white levels at different voltages (causing irrecoverable blowouts). They have different tracking stability, and some cause vertical jitter/jumpiness. Some have built-in time base correctors to fix geometric distortions like wavy vertical line...and others don't. The ones that do, generally have DNR that can smear the image temporally and cause weird distortions (most), randomly add sharp chroma noise (AG1980), suck out color in moving areas (AG1980), or conspicuously leave far more noise in moving areas (JVC S-VHS units). Different VCR's also capture audio with different amounts of noise, buzz, hiss, clicks, and Hi-Fi/linear switches.
    Moral of the story: If you're on a quest for quality, this can get VERY complicated and stressful, and it can become a money pit.

    Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    Video isn't RGB, it's YUV
    I thought these were 2 separate things? Some people choose RGB others YUV as when I did a Google search I found discussions of people talking about this
    Are you sure you aren't referring to HDMI playback bitstreams? Virtually all video is captured and encoded in some form of YUV, and VHS in particular is separated on the tape on the basis of luma and chroma. If you use S-Video, your VCR will send out separate luma/chroma signals (but the two chroma channels will still be sent together). Even if your capture card captures analog video to an RGB format - which few if any do - it must perform a slightly lossy colorspace conversion from a YUV format to do so...and the conversion can be more than "slightly" lossy if it isn't done just right. If you actually want lossless, I'd steer clear of RGB.

    Unless you have some rare capture card (maybe one of the HD ones) that can capture YUV without chroma subsampling (so it would capture 4:4:4 YUV), the best capture format you can pick is probably 720x480 YUY2 (4:2:2 subsampled YUV). This is perfect for VHS: The chroma samples from different lines are kept separate (unlike YV12...yucky when mixed with interlacing), and 360 chroma samples per line still greatly exceeds the VHS chroma resolution of roughly 40 columns per line.

    You can save your YUY2 stream uncompressed, but IMO raw uncompressed video is a pointless waste of space, even if you have terabytes to spare: Huffyuv is 100% lossless (as long as you encode in the same colorspace as your capture, e.g. YUY2), fast to encode and decode, and less than half the size...and it's the most stable, future-proof lossless format available. It uses a very simple, well-known intra-frame algorithm called Huffman encoding, which is one of the first and most famous lossless compression algorithms ever invented for data. At least the ffdshow implementation is open source too, so you never have to worry about the archives becoming unreadable.

    Lagarith has slightly better compression, but it's slower and more complex, and I think there's only one known implementation, which makes it less reliable from a "readable in 50 years" standpoint. If it were ever lost to time, it would be a heck of a lot harder to reverse-engineer. Steer clear of other popular codecs like UTVideo: UTVideo is great as an intermediate format, but it's not mature enough to archive videos for decades with.

    Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    Yes, that is the case. There may be some standalone media players out there (not sure, but doubt it) that can play a 24bit uncompressed RGB file. Very few consumers would be interested in it as a feature, but perhaps there are professional units out there capable.
    Ok if there are no standalone Blu Ray players that will play uncompressed RGB, do you know any that support lossless codec's such as lagarith or huffyuv? If I have to use a codec I am only interested in ones that are lossless. Any uncompressed files I burn to Blu Ray will be under 50GB so there is no need for me to compress footage, especially when I have stacks of 50GB Blu Ray discs to spare.
    No matter what lossless format you choose, Bluray will likely only be able to serve as a PC data storage medium for you, like a hard drive. There may be some exceptions in the domain of professional video equipment, but I don't know of ANY hardware Bluray players that come even close to reading uncompressed video or lossless formats, because their capabilities are generally strictly limited to playing H.264 and MPEG-2 format video. For that matter, Bluray and AVCHD formats also restrict you to bitrates that hardware players can keep up with, sometimes with other strings attached as well...so they can't even play the full gamut of H.264 and MPEG-2 video. Considering those limitations, I think you can see how video with an entirely different encoding is totally outside the domain of ordinary players (especially raw uncompressed video, given its insane bitrate).

    If you're hellbent on video that's directly viewable on a Bluray player, you likely have only one choice: Encode to AVCHD-SD format, and adhere strictly to the restricted bitrates the format allows. Odds are, those encodes will be lossier than you want for permanent archives, and I think (but I'm not sure) that it requires conversion to YV12 as well...which, as I mentioned, can get ugly for interlaced video if it isn't done just right.

    My suggestion: Encode lossless YUY2 with Huffyuv, archive your videos on huge hard drives and/or Bluray data discs, and make viewable encodes from those at your leisure. You can always go back and redo any encodes you don't like, or use Avisynth (or other) filtering to denoise or deinterlace before encoding, or whatever...because your original lossless captures will always remain available to you from your PC.

    Personally, I don't quite have the space for lessless, but I do have something close enough: My goal is to save my entire collection (a couple hundred hours of video) to a single 2TB hard drive and keep a couple backups on other drives. I would need 6 drives just to hold lossless copies and a single backup, and that can get messy from a data preservation perspective, since I don't have a fancy NAS/SAN setup yet...so I'm picking "multiple transparent copies" over "one or two 100% lossless copies."

    My own solution is to temporarily save my YUY2 capture as lossless Huffyuv and combine multiple captures in Avisynth to overcome playback issues from individual captures. Then, I encode extremely high bitrate YUY2 H.264 archives with x264 (--qp 11 --preset slower --no-psy --ipratio 1.0 --pbratio 1.0 --tff --input-csp i422 --output-csp i422...you'd never want to use those settings for a distribution copy, but qp modes work great for predictable high-bitrate archiving...I might try to squeeze in some qp 10 too). The encodes are generally around 37% or so of the Huffyuv bitrate, which itself is less than half the bitrate of an uncompressed file. If I interleave the lossless captures with my H.264 archives, they are totally indistinguishable unless I zoom in and notice very subtle shifting of grain. The difference is far, far smaller than the difference between two different lossless captures of the same material (with the same equipment/settings), so I just pretend it's a totally lossless copy of a remarkably similar capture.

    H.264 is complex, but it's a ubiquitous international standard, so it should never become unreadable. Still, 4:2:2 colorspace is a bit rare, so I'm including copies of the encoder and decoder on my hard drives along with the video archives, "just in case." You may not have to make these concessions, and keeping totally lossless archives may work out well for you...but I wanted to detail an alternative just in case.
    Last edited by Mini-Me; 21st Mar 2012 at 11:54.
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  14. Member 2Bdecided's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by david151 View Post
    Ok if there are no standalone Blu Ray players that will play uncompressed RGB, do you know any that support lossless codec's such as lagarith or huffyuv? If I have to use a codec I am only interested in ones that are lossless.
    If you actually want to play the discs on a standard player, you'll have to use lossy, like everyone else.

    You can always keep a lossless backup elsewhere.

    btw, a HDD left in a fireproof safe for a decade will probably die by itself. You need a slightly more active backup strategy than that.

    Cheers,
    David.
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  15. Member bendixG15's Avatar
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    [/QUOTE]btw, a HDD left in a fireproof safe for a decade will probably die by itself. You need a slightly more active backup strategy than that.

    Cheers,
    David.[/QUOTE]

    I sure agree with that, from some personal experiences. There is no guarantees with storage.
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