Bear with me here.

I often monitor with an old Dell 2405fpw LCD display that had a poor but manageable s-video input. Then it stopped working.

So, I had to x-fer some tapes but no s-video display. Checked our various home TV’s... no svideo input. My brand new Yahama TOTL receiver? Nope. Our various computer monitors? No luck. So I have some S-VHS recorded tapes, a recently refurbished Tom Grant 1980p and I’m stuck with composite.

Then I realized I have an Onkyo TX-NR3007 AV receiver in the closet. This was a rather capable (paid ~$2k for it) AV receiver near the dawn of HDMI with then top notch video processing and up scaling targeted at poor video sources. I figured I could power it up and if it still worked, use it as a very power hungry s-video to HDMI converter to visualize against a modern display.

After a couple of hours trying to figure out the various inputs I got it working. And, I was stunned when the on board video processing (HQV Reon) turned noisy ugly VHS into something truly fabulous. I truly have never seen VHS or S-VHS look this good. I played a couple of pre-recorded S-VHS tapes and the quality was not far off DVD.

Meanwhile when I capture I’m always dealing with poor old ATI Theater devices that barely work on modern hardware because svideo capture is so archaic now.

So this got me thinking and my question: is there something to a workflow of S-VHS svideo —> 2010s high end video proc that still had s-video —> HDMI —> HDMI capture —> downscale perhaps 2x?

I do not have an HDMI capture device so I’ll have to go find a simple one to do some ABA. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear if anyone has had thoughts or experiences along these lines.