VHS Capture Card - Updated Recommendations?

[Hessian]

I've had a look through the 'Capture Cards List' but most of the high voted cards are quite old now and was wondering if there's any recent recommendations? I only need it for capturing from a VCR, not interested in digital tuners, HD capture, etc. I'd ideally like to not spend much, but if it's going to make a big difference to the capture options and quality, then I can swallow the cost.

[hech54]

I still use an old Hauppauge PVR-350....and a cheap Hauppauge USB-Live 2 capture "stick". That's all you need.....it's only VCR you are capturing.

[jman98]

I'm pretty happy with the Hauppauge Colossus for this purpose. Here's a few things you should know.

1) It has a TBC that you can turn on with a registry modification. This has worked extremely well for my needs as I have some old tapes from TV recordings back in the 1980s that have tracking problems and my VCR cannot fix them. The TBC of the Colossus fixes the image problems. Also, I've done some recordings of videotapes that I think have Macrovision on them and they recorded without problems, but I have no way to verify that they actually do have Macrovision.
2) The Colossus only records video in H.264. Audio will be AAC unless you can feed it audio via an optical cable that is in AC3 format, in which case it will record the audio as is in AC3. So if I record for DVD then I have to convert the video AND audio after the fact but if I record for BluRay then I only need to convert the audio.
3) The default version of ArcSoft ShowBiz that comes with the Colossus allows you to set the bit rate of your capture. If you upgrade this version of ShowBiz to a more recent one when the program itself asks you if you want to upgrade, the upgraded version does NOT allow you to set the bit rate of you captures any more, although it will allow you to set some other options like recording level and those other options may or may not be of interest to you. They aren't to me, so I won't upgrade as I want to do captures at specific bit rates.
4) Some have reported on our forums that extremely high bit rate recordings (ie. 20000 Mbps and above) may not work with the card. I have never tried this and have no reason to do so, so I don't care about it but you may.
5) The Colossus records at 3 different resolutions:
720x480
1280x720
1920x1080
If you feed it a VHS tape signal, it will record at 720x480. You CANNOT force the card to record standard definition video at a higher resolution. It will only record at 1280x720 and 1920x1080 if it receives video at those resolutions (or close to them). It uses whatever resolution matches or is closest to the source and you can't change it. Do note that if you live in a PAL country that it may record VHS at 720x576 for you, but I live in the USA so my recordings are from NTSC VHS sources which are at 720x.480. Laserdisc captures (I do some of this too) are at 720x480.

[dfisher052]

I use a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1250 to convert VHS with excellent result. Even though I come out of the VHS in composite I use an adapter & go into the WinTV S-VHS input for better results. And the card is very reasonably priced. This by the way was an upgrade from a PVR-150.