Another"Help me, VHS to DVD" question

[Venner]

Since I am currently unemployed and have pleanty of time on my hands, I'm hoping to start the task of transferring 40 or 50 old family movies on VHS. Some of them have degraded substantially - lots of frame jitter, a bit of distortion, loss of detail, etc - and I'm wondering how to best go about this. As I don't currently have a source of income, I've got to limit myself to about $200 worth of equipment (if I want to eat, at least!)

What I have to work with currently:

Nforce2-based system. AMD 2600+ CPU, 1 Gb ram, 400Gb storage.
STB TV Tuner (BT848 based, c.1995-1996. Has Svideo in)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card.
Low end JVC SVHS VCR w/ svideo out.
Running WindowsXP Pro on NTFS.

I initially tried capturing at full NTSC DVD resolution with Huffy, applying some filters in virtualdub, re-encoding to Mpeg-1 and possibly outputing at 320x240. 1) VERY time consuming. 2) I had issues with 'lines in the picture' that disappeared if I captured at a lower resolution.

When I captured at the lower initial resolution, the end result was substantially worse (much less detail)...and the results weren't very good to begin with. The frame jitter was the worst offender, in one instance making much of the test video virtually unwatchable.

I've also had some 'issues' off and on with the open-source BT8xx drivers on my system that don't make the process any more fun.

So... what should I do? A TBC - which I think I need - seems to be out of my price range. Are there any PCI, USB, or Firewire capture cards out there in or near my pricerange that have one integrated? Is it worth buying a more modern capture device even if it doesn't have a TBC, or is my nearly 10 year old TV Tuner card still sufficient? (I do have A/V sync issues at times) Are there any other options?

BTW, what's a reasonable target runtime for a single layer DVD at 720x480? An hour? And 2-4 hours at 320x240?

Thanks all. I appreciate your input to my longwinded question.

[canadateck]

Maybe a Set-top DVD recorder?

[Venner]

Will a stand-alone unit correct for the jitter though, or just give a verbatum copy of the VHS tape? My first goal is obviously to preserve this stuff before it degrades away, but I would like to restore watchability wherever I can.

[thecoalman]

320x240. 1) VERY time consuming. 2) I had issues with 'lines in the picture' that disappeared if I captured at a lower resolution.
.

Are the lines you refer too the same as the ones on the singer to the left in this pic? https://www.videohelp.com/forum/images/guides/p1094170/40.jpg

If so that's interlacing and is how it's supposed to look. Once burned to DVD it will look normal, even using software designed for playing "made for TV" video on your computer will make it look normal.

You should be able to remove the jitter with a TBC but that's about $250.

[edDV]

I agree, finish the project to DVD and evaluate the result on a TV monitor not the computer monitor. I assume you want to maximize quality with the hardware you have.

I'd capture from the SVHS recorder with S-Video connector (composite is also OK for VHS) at 640x480 (Brooktree BT848 native resolution).

[Venner]

>>Are the lines you refer too the same as the ones on the singer to the left in this pic?

Nope. Wasn't interlacing problems. The best I could eventually determine was that the lines appeared when I tried to capture at high resolution to my SATA hard drive, and only to that drive. They spanned a horizontal fingers-bredth of the video, always the same area.

I did a sample capture to my (much smaller) IDE boot drive, and it worked fine. I don't know if the SATA controller shared bandwidth with the PCI bus or what, but that's what it seemed to come down to. That's another reason I'd been thinking of trying a Firewire device or something.

I contacted tech support for the motherboard maker (Asus) and got a canned response that had nothing to do with my questions.

The biggest problem (for some tapes) is the jitter. Is there any realistic way to deal with it in post processing? I found an anti-jitter filter of some type for virtualdub a while back, and it didn't seem to do much.

[SatStorm]

First, buy a better capture device card... A second hand bt878 is not a bad choice, about 10$ nowdays. Use them with btwincap drivers (try btwincap drivers with your card also, but it might not work...).

Then you can filter / resize your source and encode it to mpeg 2 using the freeware version of TMPGenc 2.5 . This is the classic root and has the top results the cheap way.


The alternative, is direct to mpeg 2 capture.
With your PC, it is possible to use mainconcept 1.4.2 to capture realtime to mpeg 2 (352 x 480 with 2000min / 3000 average / 6000 maximum) and mp2 audio (which later you can re-encode to AC3 if neccessary). But you need to dig the encoder for this...
Another choice is power VCR (cheaper), needs some hacks to make it work 100% as it should.

On all cases you need an authoring application to burn your DVDs... IMO, the best low cost newbie friendly choice, is TMPGenc Author. Another alternative is DVD Lab. Some basic freeware tools exist, but they are still not so newbie friendly...