cleanup on old vhs tapes

okay, the easy part, is i'm using right now my R7200 to capture VHS tapes, i'm using VLC player to open the stream, camstudio to crop the stream, unless a work alike for free that wasn't abandoned in beta in 2007 exists..., and i'm using [s:b04db48749]huffyuv[/s:b04db48749]lagarith because i'd like to clean the VHS artifacts, before ultimately compressing to Xvid format, so i can recycle the old VHS tapes... (some are 10+ years old already, if ATI's software let me crop the video better, i would have done this 5 years ago, sigh)

all of the tapes are free of any copyright protection, and are for my personal archive, so i am aiming for a slow but steady process of making same quality vids, that can last a lifetime instead of a an uncertain future... (the tapes were only recorded once, most watched at most 3 times, and well preserved, in good indoors with AC and all that good stuff, the VCRs are old, but were used lightly and i regularly clean the heads.

i don't have money for high end equipment, but i technically have 4 ATI based cards, a R7200 VIVO, a AIW 8500, as well as an aiw rage 128 and aiw pro, the last two, are old, and i kept buying ati hoping that technology would get better, and then i always hit a wall with killing the black bars, etc... software that was slow, hard to use, and didn't get the kind of results i wanted... i was very discouraged by my results with the AIW 8500, mainly that one i did TV straight to MPG, it was easy, and the quality okay, and i had an early DVD burner so the files sizes weren't too bad.

i know i'm not going to get an optimal recovery of this data with a 4-head VCR that was mid-range consumer when i bought it, but i would like to try to get an image that doesn't look Worse than the vhs source, even compressed. I'm aiming on keeping the same quality image. now, since i'm using VLC, i can run filters on the video, before it's captured, if my CPUs are fast enough, and since i'm using cam studio, i can use huffyuv or the like, so there is no loss, in further processing, before the final compression, which for the quality of video I'm dealing with, I'd rather use mpeg-4 technology, like xvid, or h.264, or whatever... the best thing, is so far, all of the tools i'm using are Free, mostly open source so far. i'll get a capture of a sample frame later, so you can see how bad the quality is, that's why i hadn't converted so far, i wanted small files cuz the quality was so low, using a full dvd for 2 hours of video was ridiculous, at the quality of video i had.[s:b04db48749]

someone mentioned a 4GB bug in camstudio, on a different fourm, perhaps virtual memory settings? [/s:b04db48749]