best hardware + s'ware for bulk vhs to file capture & archiving

[miamicanes]

I have about 300 old VHS tapes that I want to capture, slice & dice (throwing away stuff I don't care about), and somehow organize & catalog for future retrieval.

The basic capture workflow I'd like is to stick a tape in my vcr (s-vhs w/TBC), rewind the tape, start capturing, hit play, and have it stop capturing 6 hours later (I'd start one tape before going to bed, and one tape before going to work).

Once in a while, I'd tackle a new batch of capture files to bulk-truncate the noise tails at the end from each. I'm capturing 6 hours per tape, but most tapes will be 2 hours or less. It's easier to just capture the longest possible run and chop it down later than to try and figure out before capturing how long it will be.

The hardware itself needs to be USB-2, Firewire, or PCI-Express (I have no free PCI slots, and no AGP slot).

If encoding takes place on the hardware itself, I want it to support constant-quality variable bitrate, with aggressive bidirectional encoding. If it wants to semi-losslessly capture first, then do the hardcore analysis and compression later, that's cool... as long as it can be automated and doesn't require that I stand over it to interactively launch each file's (re-)encoding one at a time.

A card/device I can buy locally at CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, or Tiger Direct would be nice... but I could live with waiting a few days if there's one that would make me ecstatically happy compared to what I could buy locally.

Opensource Linux drivers would be a nice bonus, but I could live with XP-only as long as there's a decent chance it will someday work under at least 32-bit Vista. But if there's a solution that LITERALLY supports ONLY XP, but is just insanely great compared to everything else, I'd probably go with it since my ultimate purpose is to free up the space all the tapes are taking up in my house once and for all.

One VERY big feature I'd like is for it to either ignore Macrovision if it finds it (yeah, I know... I'm dreaming...), or at least warn me clearly after a capture is done if it intentionally ignored any part of the video because it believes it encountered Macrovision. Say, a big warning dialog shown upon completion of the capture, and a modified filename that will stand out in a directory listing. That way, I'd know that I had to go back and scrutinize the capture a bit and couldn't just feel confident it was captured & chuck the tape without further investigation. However, it must NOT simply abort the entire capture if it believes it encountered Macrovision. It can record a blue or green blank screen if it must, but it MUST keep plugging along and recording what it can. Why? I'm sure I have a few tapes that were protected, but ended up getting something important recorded from live TV in the middle because it was the only tape I had handy at the time (of course, we all remember what life used to be like, pre-DVR...)

[classfour]

Hauppauge PVR series.

Read the reviews from actual users to determine what fits your needs.

I'm running a Panasonic VCR thru an Elite Video BVP-4 into a PVR150 without seeing MV.

It does require a bit of tweaking to get the capture like you want it, though.

[miamicanes]

Hmmm.... ok, I now have a couple of possible ideas:

* Buy a DataVideo DAC-100 to capture s-video to DV (1 gigabyte per 4 minutes) and capture it to the hard drive via firewire, then use some as-yet-unknown app (preferably free) to do non-realtime multipass VBR encoding to MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 with the maximum possible size-reduction from B-frame abuse, while compromising the video quality as little as possible.

* Buy a "normal" USB-2 capture device that does hardware realtime MPEG-2 compression. Capture at whatever bitrate is necessary to preserve the original video's (minimal) quality without making matters worse. In the future, re-encode content destined for HD-DVD or DVD into compliant MPEG-2 using multipass VBR at constant quality.

As a practical matter, if I captured to MPEG-2 w/mp3 or ac3 at something like 8-12mbit/sec using a typical $50-100 usb2 capture device, then later re-encoded it to ~5000 kbit/sec using multipass VBR if necessary to make something fit on a 5-gig DVD, how much worse would it REALLY look compared to the DV->MPEG2 workflow? Would the recompressed video look obviously worse, or would it be something that you probably wouldn't even notice unless you saw the two variants side by side?

[gadgetguy]

Another comparable option to the DAC-100 would be a digital camcorder with passthrough capabilities. In my experience it ignores Macrovision.
As for encoding to MPEG2, I recommend HCEnc. Good and free.