The future, vhs to hd dvd ?

[victoriabears]

What are the opinions on anyone waiting to do their vhs conversions to when HD DVD or blu ray(Whatever), is affordable, will the resulting material be a big leap up from SD DVD or is the source so limiting that just do your sd-dvd conversions now and use upconverting players?

[lumis]

DVD does have its limitations when transferring VHS material to it. I've noticed even at 2 hours you can see quite a bit of macroblocks in high motion material (old football games). I believe the next generation of video recording (either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) will prove to be a "transparent", basically indistiguishable from the source. Hell, maybe with all of the filters and cleaners and whatnont that the recorder, it may well produce a cleaner copy.

I think this next generation of recording and playback technology should be good enough for quite sometime, hopefully more than the roughly 10 years that DVD has given us.

Don't throw away those tapes yet.

[edDV]

What are the opinions on anyone waiting to do their vhs conversions to when HD DVD or blu ray(Whatever), is affordable, will the resulting material be a big leap up from SD DVD or is the source so limiting that just do your sd-dvd conversions now and use upconverting players?

The only relevance for HD/BD DVD to VHS encoding is more recording space and maybe more playback flexibility for MPeg4 on specific players keeping in mind that only h.264 and VC-1 are required to be supported.

Multi-layer HD/BD also gives more recording space to those wanting to store a lossless compressed archive (e.g. Huffyuv) or DV dub from VHS.

As for upconvesion, if you keep the VHS transfer interlaced, the HDTV will usually upscale (aka line double) to the HDTV native resolution better than any software process.

[edDV]

DVD does have its limitations when transferring VHS material to it. I've noticed even at 2 hours you can see quite a bit of macroblocks in high motion material (old football games). I believe the next generation of video recording (either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) will prove to be a "transparent", basically indistiguishable from the source. Hell, maybe with all of the filters and cleaners and whatnont that the recorder, it may well produce a cleaner copy.

I think this next generation of recording and playback technology should be good enough for quite sometime, hopefully more than the roughly 10 years that DVD has given us.

Don't throw away those tapes yet.

The standalone HD/BD DVD recorder is another take yes. Increased DVD capacity will allow higher bitrate recordings but the real step up in quality will come with hardware capture filters and hardware VC-1 and H.264 encoders that are optimized for VHS (if they do it). First VHS needs to be captured properly with TBC, bandwidth filtering and noise reduction. That will allow more effective encoding to Mpeg4.

All this will be possible for standard DVDR recorders as well since the resulting VC-1 or h.264 files will be small even at highest quality record settings (e.g. 2-8 Mb/s for 1-4hr or more per DVD-5 side)

[Wile_E]

I'm capturing VHS to DV-AVI and keeping these files for later use. But for now, I'm converting them "slowly" to MPEG2 for DVD. I was hoping that official HD/BD players would support DV-AVI or other lesser compressed formats(Huffy). Perhaps future hybrid players or Holographic Versatile Disc(HVD) will support these formats? That way, we won't have to compress to MPEG2/4.

[edDV]

I'm capturing VHS to DV-AVI and keeping these files for later use. But for now, I'm converting them "slowly" to MPEG2 for DVD. I was hoping that official HD/BD players would support DV-AVI or other lesser compressed formats(Huffy). Perhaps future hybrid players or Holographic Versatile Disc(HVD) will support these formats? That way, we won't have to compress to MPEG2/4.

Player support is the main issue but MPeg2, VC-1 and h.264 at sufficient bitrate are good enough for broadcast TV and HD/BD DVD distribution. SD and HD resolutions are supported in HD/BD DVD players.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
http://www.blu-raydisc.com/Section-13470/Section-13627/Index.html
http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Universal_24.pdf
http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=11629

[yasth]

I'm capturing VHS to DV-AVI and keeping these files for later use. But for now, I'm converting them "slowly" to MPEG2 for DVD. I was hoping that official HD/BD players would support DV-AVI or other lesser compressed formats(Huffy). Perhaps future hybrid players or Holographic Versatile Disc(HVD) will support these formats? That way, we won't have to compress to MPEG2/4.

It is rather a niche market though. I mean what percent of the video buying public even understands digital compression and colorspace sampling on their pretty DVDs?

Someone probably will fill it though, I mean it would be free to implement something like it, since lzh compresion is out of patent. It would leave you about an hour a dual layer BD though? So until those get cheap I doubt it will show up uncompressed.

At some level in the not so distnt future the whole video conversion thing will become a very niche industry. I mean how many times will people buy machines to digitze their videotapes?