In search for an uncompressed video capture card

[sanlyn]

Gosh, sorry to see so many people here are ruining their dirty crappy ugly damaged discolored noisy VHS by capturing to lossy compressed formats and claiming they look "great" (blind as bats, IMO). VHS is horrible dreadful low-rent when captured direct to compressed format, even to DV-AVI. Capture to 720x480 or 640x480 YUY2 with lossless Lagarith or huffyuv, clean the garbage out of it, use a good encoder like HCenc. and make a decent looking DVD from it. If you're not willing to do that, you have 2 choices: continue capturing to MPEG or use a DVD recorder (the results will be exactly the same)...Or send it out to be worked, remembering that the cheap guys look worse than cheap when the video comes back.

Otherwise, anybody who wants to capture VHS noise and blow it up to HD noise is taking small ugly tape and making it big ugly HD. If anyone thinks running filters on a 720x480 capture takes time, wait until you try it with 1920x1080.


We keep seeing the same posts. Hi, I have these precious hallowed invaluable home-made family tapes. I want to transfer them to digital video, and I want the highest quality possible.....well, not really the highest quality possible, I wanna resize and change formats and do something really quick and easy. What I mean is, I don't really want the best quality, I just want to inflict as little damage as possible. Well, not really as little damage as possible, but maybe not too much damage...

Sorry. This is same debate is getting tiresome.

[Brad]

sanlyn, it may be getting tiresome because this was a bumped thread.

The last post in here talking about what you're talking about was 4 years ago.

[sanlyn]

sanlyn, it may be getting tiresome because this was a bumped thread.

The last post in here talking about what you're talking about was 4 years ago.

MM, no, I don't think so. Read posts #28, 29, 30. In fact, the last post just before mine (#30) was dated 23-Mar-2013. And in fact #30 was posted by....vaporeon800 ? ? Yesterday was 4 years ago?

OMG, vaporeon800. Time sure moves fast on your planet.

[sanlyn]

In case no one noticed, this was a cross-post from xyzxyz who got so much "help" from the group that xyzxyz hasn't returned since. Can't say I blame 'em.

[Brad]

Read what I actually wrote instead of what you think I wrote. The recent posts in this thread have not been discussing lossy VHS transfers.

The last post in here talking about what you're talking about was 4 years ago.

[Videogamer555]

Oh boy. Anytime someone starts quoting RGB numbers for capture stats, you know they haven't been doing too many captures lately.

1920x1080 29.97 fps YUY2 data rate: 994332672 bits/sec = 124291584 bytes/sec = 121.38 MiB/sec

But who captures uncompressed? My CPU is sitting there idling while my HDD is getting a workout. Throw Ut Video Codec at that data rate and you cut it down by 3:1 on typical content.

Why use YUV codecs? YUV is a form of compression. Because of rounding errors converting to and from YUV, it is LOSSY! You put R=123 G=89 B=230 (or any other RGBtriple) into a YUV codec, and you'll most likely get DIFFERENT numbers back when converting it back to RGB for display (since your graphics card sends RGB values to your monitor on the 15pin connector, not YUV values).

Also YUV not only has rounding errors, most also don't store the color (U and V) data for every pixel. This is CERTAINLY a lossy method!

Now there are some truly LOSSLESS codecs. For example DV is lossless, as is HUFFYUV. Windows Movie Maker (not Windows Live Movie Maker) directly supports DV codec! So if you are writing DV video stream from a Sony DV camcorder to a DV AVI file with Windows Movie Maker, the result is compressed prior to writing (meaning no need for a fast writing HDD), and since DV is lossless, it's as good as raw/uncompressed video. DV from my camcorder is so good, that I usually use the analog/digital passthrough on my Sony DV camcorder in place of a dedicated "frame grabber" or "video input card" or "video grabber" when digitizing my VHS tapes (as most of these dedicated cards use a lossy format like MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, .h264, or DIVX). Just plug the Firewire (IEEE-1394) cable into the PC's Firewire port and the Camcorder's DV digital output port, and then the plug the composite-video and audio cable into my camcorder and into the VCR, set the passthrough to on, and then start Windows Movie Maker recording and hit the play button on the VCR with my tape, and VALLA! When the tape's done playing, I've got my digitized tape on the computer! It's VERY high quality (almost DVD quality) 720x480 video (displays as 640x480 in Windows Media Player due to the correct pixel aspect ratio conversion factor being properly stored in DV AVI file). It takes up well over 100GB for a complete VHS tape, but it is SO WORTH IT!

[Videogamer555]

As for if you want true uncompressed/raw video capture. You can get uncompressed 720x480 video capture with this USB 2.0 capture card.
http://www.sears.com/linxcel-vc-211v-usb-2.0-video-grabber/p-SPM5748378503P
In addition to NTSC (720x480), it also supports PAL and SECAM (which are 720x576 video sources).
At just $35 it's a VERY good price, as uncompressed video is usually only used by professionals (think video editing room file format for big-name Hollywood producers), and professional video capture solutions are usually WAY MORE EXPENSIVE than this! This gives true professional video capture quality to the amateur video maker! I've never personally tried it, but it sounds like WAY AWESOME! So I'm considering getting it. If I get it, I'll report back here and tell you how good (or not) it actually was.

[Brad]

Why use YUV codecs? YUV is a form of compression.

Not true; in practice, simplified values are used for the conversion equations for speed reasons but mathematically, YUV is just a transformation that can be reversed. The rounding errors don't make the video any larger or smaller than if they were converted with perfect values, so your claim of compression is baseless. Later you bring up chroma subsampling which IS compression. But there is such a thing as YUV 4:4:4.

As for why, because they are better suited to the human visual system than RGB colorspace.

Because of rounding errors converting to and from YUV, it is LOSSY!

The error is small and happens once per capture-display chain. It's FAR below the noise level of VHS, or for that matter an S-Video or composite cable.

Do this: screen capture a computer game in RGB. Make a copy in YUV 4:4:4. Try to find the difference. Even with several generations of conversions back and forth, I've never been able to see it. One is impossible for a human.

For example DV is lossless

It isn't lossless. The transfer from miniDV cassette tape to DV-AVI container is a stream/file copy, which is what you mean.

VALLA!

Not trying to be a dick, honestly, but it's "voila".

It takes up well over 100GB for a complete VHS tape, but it is SO WORTH IT!

8-hour EP tapes? Yikes.

This gives true professional video capture quality to the amateur video maker! I've never personally tried it

Now I think you're just trolling. Being uncompressed doesn't make something high quality. It's the simplest application to code for, and it says nothing of the ADC actually involved inside the unit.

[sanlyn]

Read what I actually wrote instead of what you think I wrote. The recent posts in this thread have not been discussing lossy VHS transfers.

The last post in here talking about what you're talking about was 4 years ago.

No, my post was to bring attention to the fact that 4 years ago and this very current month and all the months in between see the same debate occurring again and again. Surely there should be a sticky around here or maybe a standard signpost linking to something like digitalfaq's capture guide or doom9's ancient tutorials. It's obvious that newcomers don't even search for these hundreds of identical threads (and why would they, when most newcomers don't know enough to format a proper search query to begin with).

[jagabo]

More importantly: composite, s-video, and component video are all transmitted as YUV, not RGB. The signal stored on the VHS tape is YUV, not RGB. So they are all captured by the hardware as YUV. If you specify RGB for the saved video file you are converting that YUV capture to RGB and thereby losing precision, not the other way around.