Some VHS Quality Questions on Old Tapes:

[HeadRusch]

I'm hoping someone here can shed some light/provide some advice:

I've begun to take old VHS tapes and go through them, capturing what I need to before they completely degenerate. Mostly we're talking about old commercials, clips I recorded off Television and so forth.

I am capturing using the HUFFY codec at 640x480 through my AverMedia stereo card via Composite connection. I have turned a bunch of captures into VCD's and the quality is acceptable (all things considered, ancient VHS tapes recorded on cheap tapes at slow speeds in mono). I am not expecting much considering the source.

However I did have a few questions:

1) On some tapes, the quality is perfectly fine. On others, I get a constant line of "Distortion" along the TOP edge. This is only one one tape I have found so far....is this a known problem? Is this tape "breaking down"? Note I'm not talking about that distortion that occurs at the bottom of the frame in almost every case, but along the top of the screen. its like a "tracking" problem, but adjusting the tracking of the VCR doesn't help.

2) Is it normal for one VCR (my Hi Fi VCR) to play a tape horribly, but another one (my old mono VCR) to play it much better? Would upgrading to an SVHS player produce better output from these tapes?

I understand that with an SVHS player I could use SVIDEO OUT to SVIDEO IN on my capture card....but honestly, would the difference considering the source tape quality be any different?

3) I currently use the demo version of TMPGENC to convert to VCD quality, I apply a few of the filters and the results when they get to my TV are "as good as the VHS copy" usually is. (I upped the bitrate from the VCD standard to something slightly higher which seemed to solve any fast-motion problems). However, ideally I'd rather burn these to DVD and not CD. Is the way to go to PURCHASE Tmpgenc Plus and then encode at Half DVD resolution? At full resolution I'm afrfaid all my captures would just show all the noticible grain and noise.

A softened VCD image isn't always a bad thing.....

Thanks for reading.

[ahhaa]

Are you fastforwarding/rewinding tapes before transfer? Have you stop/started the tapes a lot for cuing?
You'll never get a better result than the output of the tape allows... borrow a neighbor's Svideo deck to see if it makes a dif. There are also old inline processor boxes for tape-tape dubbing, you can find'em on eBay purty cheep!:]

[lordsmurf]

VCD is deinterlacing. That's a huge quality loss.
VHS is far better than VCD.

[mikel]

On quite a few "older" tapes, I found that playback on the
same deck (if possible) that recorded the tape can actually
produce a better picture than my newer S-VHS JVCs.

I'm glad I didn't toss the old Sony mono machine.