New Old Guy Needs Guidance VHS AV to Digital Transfer for Upload To Web

[VWestlife]

If you could return all the equipment you bought and get a good USB capture device, connect it to a computer and setup vdub, AmarecTV or CaptureFlux and capture in lossless AVI using your S-VHS machine, Copy the lossless files on a removable media and send them to someone who knows how to process videos and pay them to process the files for you

If the OP has found a method that works for them and produces good-quality results, then doing all that is the "giant waste of time", not what is already getting the job done.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Let's not be like the "vhs_decode is God's gift to video capture and everything else is the Devil" folks.

[dellsam34]

I disagree, a DVD recorder is not adequate for YT uploading, it maybe good for playing back the discs. But then he has to rip the discs to computer and upload to YT and YT converts it and compresses it further, or he has to convert the rips to h.264 himself for easy sharing as manageable media files, none of which results in good looking videos, I'm far from being perfectionist, I've just being realistic and thinking ahead of what will happens to that footage later.

DVD was a great playback format in its time, But by modern standards it is not considered an archival medium by any stretch of imagination, especially when it comes to high quality tapes like S-VHS with sentimental value, I believe he was given the wrong advise based on his final goal and I shared my opinion.

[lollo]

I disagree, a DVD recorder is not adequate for YT uploading, it maybe good for playing back the discs. But then he has to rip the discs to computer and upload to YT and YT converts it and compresses it further, or he has to convert the rips to h.264 himself for easy sharing as manageable media files, none of which results in good looking videos, I'm far from being perfectionist, I've just being realistic and thinking ahead of what will happens to that footage later.

DVD was a great playback format in its time, But by modern standards it is not considered an archival medium by any stretch of imagination, especially when it comes to high quality tapes like S-VHS with sentimental value, I believe he was given the wrong advise based on his final goal and I shared my opinion.

+1 on all

[Sharc]

The problem is the sub-par quality of the on-the-fly mpeg2 encoding of the DVD recorders with the DVD constraints (e.g. max. bitrate). The additional damage of the subsequent re-encoding of mpeg2 to AVC (H.264) is comparatively insignificant.

For some people lossless interlaced capture and subsequent post processing presents an almost insurmountable obstacle, and/or they are not prepared to go through the learning curve - or they are happy with what they consider as "good enough" for their purpose.

[VWestlife]

Tell me which of the VHS, Video8, Hi8, or DV footage captured using the DVDirect has the awful MPEG nasties you accuse it of having.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF1-1hwYdKg

If you answer is "you'd need to compare it to a lossless capture of the same material to spot the difference, otherwise without a direct comparison it looks fine"... that's the whole point of compression! Congratulations on learning how it works!

[Sharc]

Here we go. It didn't take me a second to spot it. And all are generally oversmoothed with poor details even for VHS, IMO. But to each his own. The capture process is simple, I agree, and the result is accordingly.

[dellsam34]

These are personal S-VHS recordings. We gave him the options and explained the resulting quality for each one. Now he knows what to do if he wants to properly archive them later on. I just wanted to share the facts, not argue.

[The 14th Doctor]

I might not have dealt with analog tape to DVD copies outside of one wedding, but I've dealt with a lot of anime DVDs and MPEG2 compression sucks.

This is why LaserDiscs of certain anime are better than their DVD release especially if they come from the same source, one is loseless, the other is mpeg2 compressed.

Don't get me started on English releases that are even more compressed than the Japanese release. It starts to become Hank Hill's "Do I look like I know what a jpeg is?" meme.

[VWestlife]

Here we go. It didn't take me a second to spot it.

That's a poor-quality EP recording of analog cable TV with a weak signal causing noise/"snow" in the image.

And all are generally oversmoothed with poor details even for VHS, IMO.

This is hard to judge over YouTube, whose own compression heavily smoothens noisy/snowy video, as I have already provided examples demonstrating.

And one thing you fail to consider is that if the OP drops everything and follows your suggestion, they'd lose the DVDirect's excellent built-in TBC, and I think we can agree that VHS captured without a TBC is far inferior to VHS captured with a TBC regardless of what kind of compression you use on the result.

That's really the DVDirect's "killer app" -- if you can live with burning DVDs, it's the absolute cheapest way ($15 - $20 on eBay) to get a capture device with a rock-solid TBC built-in.