Capturing VHS/Cable - What to buy?

[rbxbots]

I have a stack of old VHS tapes that I'd like to capure to my PC and store on DVD. I also have recordings on my Virgin Media V+ cable box that I'd like to copy to the computer/backup to DVD. So I'm in the market for a capture device which can handle both of these types of input. Looking through the forums and reading up online the Blackmagic Intensity Pro seems to be well thought of. Would that be a good choice? Is it worth the cost, or is there anything else worth considering? I'm more interested in the VHS tapes just now, but both would be good.

I plan to edit some of these files down - using VirtualDub/Sony Vegas for the editing. Quality isn't vital - the tapes are old - but It'd be good to maintain a decent level.

My computer specs are

Windows 7 Home
Intel Q6600
Ati 5770 Hawk Gfx Card
4GB Memory
Gigabyte P35-DS3R Mobo

Thanks in advance

[lordsmurf]

Where are you?

[rbxbots]

I'm in the UK.

[yoda313]

Is your cable hd? If so consider the hauppauge hd pvr. I don't know if there is a European model of it or not. It does component input and has analog inputs as well.

If you only have standard def cable just about any capture card will do. The old but trusty hauppauge 250 and 350 capture cards are well respected here.

[jman98]

yoda313's recommendations are good. Please note that that PVR-250 and PVR-350 by Hauppauge are older. Sometimes people looking for them find the PVR-150, which is cheaper. I do NOT recommend the PVR-150. It uses a completely different chipset from the 250/350. The 150 was quite problematic. It worked fine for some people, but a good number of buyers never got it working. The 250 and 350 models just work.

[rbxbots]

Is your cable hd? If so consider the hauppauge hd pvr. I don't know if there is a European model of it or not. It does component input and has analog inputs as well.

If you only have standard def cable just about any capture card will do. The old but trusty hauppauge 250 and 350 capture cards are well respected here.

The cable is both SD/HD, depending on the channel. From searching around, it seems there are problems getting the 250/350 working with Windows 7. Has this been fixed? I'm not sure how often I'd be recording HD content. But I don't suppose it can hurt to have that capability, since more HD channels are being added all the time.

Would the HD PVR be a good choice for my needs, given that I plan on editing the captured VHS and Cable footage in soemthing like VirtualDub, or would the PVR's compression just complicate matters?

[yoda313]

Well the hd pvr does h264 so it CAN be finicky. It would help to have a fast computer for editing h264 natively.

If all you want to do is simple cutting of commercials than you can use the supplied arcsoft software and it works nicely. But for nle editing you'll need a pretty peppy computer to do it (or convert to high bitrate mpeg2 - something in the 25mbps range and then reconvert to h264 for avchd or bluray creation).

If you have a ps3 or bluray player you can make avchd on dvdr without a problem. That is what I do with mine.

It is a bit of overkill and requires conversion if you are just making a standard dvd to play in a regular dvd player. The hd pvr does not record in mpeg2 only h264 so conversion will be required. Again if you simply want to cut out commercials the supplied arcsoft software works well and can create a regular dvd on its own if you don't want to do an avchd (for sd material).

I do not know about the windows 7 compatibility with the 250/350 cards. You can check out hauppauges website for updated info.

[edDV]

The new capture cards are targeted mainly to SD/HD digital tuner time shift recording. This is just a RF decode to digital stream capture with no encoding going on so CPU load during capture is tiny. Editing and display are separate issues. Many of these cards toss in composite/S-Video SD capture as a legacy afterthought. These inputs usually come with dedicated MPeg2 hardware encoders, some record to MPeg4 variations.

Uncompressed capture is difficult to impossible with these cards. There have been discussions of hacking ATI 650 cards with GraphEdit that can be searched in the forums.

The old trusty Connexant/Brooktree 8xx series cards are well documented for uncompressed SD capture to Virtualdub. For higher quality look to AJA/BlackMagic/Ensemble pro cards, many of which include TBC but you are paying >$700. These companies also have solutions for baseband HD recording.

[rbxbots]

I'd be doing more than just cutting commercials. At some point I'll reuse the clips from the footage in my own compilation videos (it's mostly sports footage I'll be working with). And although I would like to make playable DVD's from some of the recordings, alot will just be archived to disk as data files for later re-use. With this in mind, would the HD PVR be suitable or is there another option that covers all these bases?

BTW, my computer specs...

Windows 7 Home
Intel Q6600 - Quad Core
Ati 5770 Hawk Gfx Card
4GB Memory
Gigabyte P35-DS3R Mobo

Thanks for all the help so far.

[edDV]

The HD-PVR is one of the only choices for recording off cable/sat boxes but the format is h.264 which can be difficult to edit and suffers generation loss.

An old tuner card can capture SD uncompressed (RAID required) or real time lossless compressed with huffyuv so one drive can be used. This is best if you want to edit/filter later with minimal generation loss.

An alternate classic SD approach is capture to DV format with a Canopus ADVC or ADS Pyro. This gives a more manageable file size of 13 GB/hr vs huffyuv ~20-40 GB/hr.

Most of the rest hardware encode to MPeg2 unless you want to experiment with Graph Edit on the ATI's.


PS: Another classic capture approach is the ATI All-In-Wonder. Problem is the drivers haven't been maintained for these cards so an older computer with Win98se or XP SP2 needs to be used.

[rbxbots]

Thanks for all the help. I went for the Hauppauge HD PVR and I've had a chance to play with it over the weekend. I'm pleased with what I'm getting out of it so far, but I do have a couple of questions

1. The only downside I've found is that the supplied software is awful. When I'm working on my VHS tapes the program is constantly freezing or saying the device is already in use, and I'm forever having to turn the PVR off and on to reset it. Is there anything other than TME that I can use to capture the footage from the PVR?

2. Is is possible to edit/trim the files down without re-encoding? I've tried a few of the suggestions mentioned elsewhere, such as TS Sniper and VideoRedo, but the quality after editing always seems much worse.

Thanks again.

[edDV]

Thanks for all the help. I went for the Hauppauge HD PVR and I've had a chance to play with it over the weekend. I'm pleased with what I'm getting out of it so far, but I do have a couple of questions

1. The only downside I've found is that the supplied software is awful. When I'm working on my VHS tapes the program is constantly freezing or saying the device is already in use, and I'm forever having to turn the PVR off and on to reset it. Is there anything other than TME that I can use to capture the footage from the PVR?

The HD-PVR was mainly designed for cable/sat box captures under control from PVR software (MCE, BeyondTV, GBPVR, SageTV, etc.).

I've never even considered it for VHS analog composite capture but I suppose it works.

[edDV]

2. Is is possible to edit/trim the files down without re-encoding? I've tried a few of the suggestions mentioned elsewhere, such as TS Sniper and VideoRedo, but the quality after editing always seems much worse.

H.264 files can be cut on I frames (half second accuracy) without recode.

A theorectical h.264 "smart render" capable editor would only recode GOPS at the edit point. Several are in design stage.

If filter processing is the goal, best to decode h.264 to a digital intermediate format.

[lordsmurf]

1. The only downside I've found is that the supplied software is awful.

The word "awful" is almost a compliment. To call it "shit" would be an insult to feces.
I don't understand why Hauppauge totally borked over WinTV so badly in the latter versions now used.

Best of luck to you!

[usually_quiet]

Thanks for all the help. I went for the Hauppauge HD PVR and I've had a chance to play with it over the weekend. I'm pleased with what I'm getting out of it so far, but I do have a couple of questions

1. The only downside I've found is that the supplied software is awful. When I'm working on my VHS tapes the program is constantly freezing or saying the device is already in use, and I'm forever having to turn the PVR off and on to reset it. Is there anything other than TME that I can use to capture the footage from the PVR?

2. Is is possible to edit/trim the files down without re-encoding? I've tried a few of the suggestions mentioned elsewhere, such as TS Sniper and VideoRedo, but the quality after editing always seems much worse.

Thanks again.

There are only a few PC capture devices for recording HD programming from a satellite/cable tuner or DVR, and you probably made the best choice possible in that respect.

While Hauppauge does promote it for capturing VHS (I saw that in the Overview tab at http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html), when I looked around for software that just captures, I could not find references to any that works with it other than Arcsoft Total Media Extreme. Maybe you could experiment with using Windows 7's Media Center for VHS captures, since the HD PVR comes with an IR blaster. ...although then you would have h.264 .wtv files to contend with.

If you just can't get the HD PVR working for VHS captures using TME, you might need to find an SD capture card (perhaps an inexpensive one with no tuner) to have other options available for capture software.