Question about captured VHS Tapes

[lucgallant]

Hello everyone,

I've been browsing this forum - seems like the place to discuss everything related to VHS to DVD projects.

I have a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1850 and am trying to capture tapes from small VHS cassettes (VHS-C).

This capture card has a hardware MPEG2 encoder. I am using the Hauppauge WinTV software to capture the video.

I have captured about 30 hours worth so far, and everything has gone pretty good except for a few tapes.

I have attached a sample file.

The issue are the black bars you see that come in the picture. Some background information which may help:

1. When I play the tapes directly to my TV, they play perfectly (the black bars are nowhere to be found).
2. I have tried 2 different VCRs as well as playing the tapes using a VHS-C Camera. When played into the TV, perfect but into my computer, the same issues.
3. Only parts of the video have this problem. It might play perfectly for 10 minutes, and then this type of thing starts happening.

I'm at a loss here, I'm hoping this is something that has been seen by someone. I don't really want to put all these affected video files onto DVD knowing that the video itself is of better quality. These black bars are showing up somewhere in my capturing process I just don't know how to fix it. I've read a bit about these TBC but I'm not sure if that's my issue or not.

Anyway, thank you for your time and looking forward to hearing from you.

[jagabo]

Those are time base errors. Apparently they are not bad enough to mess up the display on a TV but your capture card is more sensitive to them. You need a line time base corrector to clean up the horizontal sync pulses.

You can get that in one of several ways. A good SVHS deck will have a line TBC built in. You can get a standalone full frame TBC which may help. But both of those options will probably run you ~US$300, used. The cheapest method is to get a used DVD recorder with a line TBC and use it in passthrough mode (composite into the DVD recorder, composite out, without recording). The Panasonic ES10 or ES15 may be worth looking at.

Search for TBC and flagging.

[lucgallant]

Hi jagabo,

thanks for your reply. I guess if the TBC is worth so much used I should be able to resell it afterwards for about the same amount.

I'll take a look at the Panasonic units you mentioned. Thanks,

Luc

[lordsmurf]

The better VCR is the best option.

[jagabo]

Yes, I've heard of people buying the equipment via ebay then reselling it for about the same price when they were done. There are other DVD recorders with TBCs but I only know those Panasonics off the top of my head.

[lucgallant]

Thanks,

so this might seem like a stupid question but, what are the odds of the better VCR fixing the problem? As you can imagine I don't really want to spend the 300$ without some sort of a guarantee. Can anyone comment?