VHS cassette - when capturing to PC shows blue screens.

[1gnition]

Hello,

I am capturing a 19 years old VHS cassette to my PC. When watching cassette on PC through the TV card the first two minutes of playback seems to suffer from frequent appearances of blue screens.

But when I play it on my TV instead of the blue screens - the picture shows slightly up in the screen, while the bottom is black.

Now, I understand that my card interpret these interferences as blue screens. I really don't want it to happen because I want to convert this tape to DVD and the blue screens are a loss of data which practically exists but for some reason the card doesn't want to show it.

What can I do? This is very important.

My specs are all written in that thingy if you want.

[Bjs]

Get a video stabilizer ... blue screen is macrovsion detected by winfast unit .

Old tape ... black area ... unit capable of correcting tbc needed .

[jlietz]

Are you using the same VCR with the TV and PC? If not, you need to turn off the "blue screen" or "blue background" option on the PC-connected VCR, if possible.

[Video Head]

Sounds like the time code and/or blanking area at the begining of the tape is damaged. This usually happens to the begining of tapes that are left fully rewound for an extended period of time. Nothing can really be done to completely fix this as the VCR cannot track the tape properly. If your VCR has auto tracking you may want to try turning it off and play with the manual tracking to see if you can improve that portion of the tape's watchability. Other than that you are looking at a TBC and ProcAmp to stabalize the image.

Now, if I understand your question, you want to leave the garbled image and not have the screen turn blue when the VCR cannot produce a proper image. Back in the glory days of the VCR they included a little feature called video muting. If the image became too unstable, rather than showing garbled video on the screen, it would produce a nice blue screen for you to enjoy. Check to see if your VCR has video muting - could be a button, could be in a menu - and turn it off. Also check your capture card settings and your capture software settings to see if either or both have video muting. If they do disable it there as well.

You may want to check in the restoration forum as well. There you will find some very talented people doing incredible restoration of really old tape.

VH

[1gnition]

Thanks for the help.

I don't have an option such as "muting" in my VCR nor in the capture software (which is VirtualDub). As for the drivers of the capture card - I don't know how to access them. I tried device manager but there is nothing no configure there. Since the problem shows only on the computer, as I mentioned in the first post, my guess is it is originated in the capture card. I have a Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Global. So if anyone knows the problem with this specific model, and how to solve it (patch maybe, new drivers etc.) please tell me how to do it.

Thanks.

[thecoalman]

If it's as Bjs suggested:

blue screen is macrovsion detected by winfast unit .

A TBC or a stabiliser might help but if it's only two minutes I wouldn't even bother.

One thing you could try but certainly not ideal is copy the portion of the tape that's giving you problems with another VCR then capture the new tape.

[1gnition]

I certainly don't want to buy any more hardware. And I don't have another VCR. My VCR is a new one by LG with six heads. What's the point?

What I'm actually asking is if there is a software fix for this. After all it is something with the drivers, with the algorithm or whatever. The card just decides not to show it because it is a bit distorted so what? The TV can show but the capture card cannot? it's a bit absurd. A PC is far more sophisticated than a TV. I'm sure it is a lot more simple then it looks. So this is the reason why I asked if there is a fix or drivers that can treat this problem.

[thecoalman]

If it's as Bjs suggested there is most likely not a solution, if in fact that's the case count yourself lucky that it's not happening during other parts of the tapes as well. People such as myself have gone through this with tapes that showed no noticeable problems at all when played back from a VCR to TV.

There's more info here: www.nepadigital.com/mv/index.php

Try capturing a commercial tape and see if you get a blue screen. They don't all do the same thing when you attempt to capture a video protected by macrovision (or if it thinks it's protected). If you get a blue screen then Bjs is probably right, he most likely has experienced this himself.

[1gnition]

Maybe I should have mentioned that this tape is a home made video. It hasn't been recorded from a TV broadcast so it does not fit what you describe.

I read that this effect can be caused also on home made videos because of deteriorating of the tape which can be confused by the capture card with a macrovision. I guess that this is my case.

[thecoalman]

I'm aware it's home made video, I only mentioned trying a commercial tape to test the card to see what it does when it enocunters the real thing. If you get a blue screen with real thing then most likely that is what your problem is with the home made tape.