Please review my home movie VHS capture workflow.

[PuzZLeR]

VHS doesn't have any Y/luma above 3MHz so in theory doesn't need S-video. In practice it's safer to use S-video in case other devices don't do the filtering of composite properly (even though the filtering for a VHS source is trivial due to the lack of overlap).

Yes, composite is sufficient for VHS signal, but other components in the chain have something else to interpret, including the capture device, which is why we should always use s-video if possible.

For all the theory, I'm a great believer in "whatever works" - with the warning that sometimes things look like they're working, but are causing other problems which you notice later.

Profound indeed. And I'm sure I'm not the only one experiencing this rollercoaster in this hobby.

Even in this case it happened. Couldn't figure out an acceptable way to remove the crosstalk/dot crawl from my composite captures, so settled with a restoration solution instead. It was a simple - just downsize and then upsize. Problem solved. It "worked". (Elation!) Then, one day I noticed the artifacts from upsizing. (Horror!)

Then I found a better way to increase the resolution. (Super Resolution as a VDub filter works best for me). It took a while before I became comfortable saying that now "this works".

[Brad]

Catching up on threads since I haven't been on for the past two months...

Some DVRs have an effective passthrough, but weaken quality. I believe, for those that "work", they recompress/reencode the video along the way, which create other obvious artifacts.

This claim has been tossed around a lot over the years but I've yet to see evidence.

On the contrary, here is a sample of the garbage at the end of a VHS tape. It starts with pure noise (obviously difficult to encode). Sharpen it, blow it up. There's no appearance of DCT artifacts. Also, the chroma resolution exceeds 4:2:0.

[jagabo]

Some DVRs have an effective passthrough, but weaken quality. I believe, for those that "work", they recompress/reencode the video along the way, which create other obvious artifacts.

This claim has been tossed around a lot over the years but I've yet to see evidence.

Yes, this has been thoroughly debunked. I can't say there are none that compress/decompress but the the Pansonic ES15 I have shows no evidence of compression/decompression. No macroblocking, no DCT ringing artiacts, no significant loss of small low contrast detail, etc.

[PuzZLeR]

Catching up on threads since I haven't been on for the past two months...

Some DVRs have an effective passthrough, but weaken quality. I believe, for those that "work", they recompress/reencode the video along the way, which create other obvious artifacts.

This claim has been tossed around a lot over the years but I've yet to see evidence.

Yes, it's been a couple of months and have been enlightened on this recently - thanks to all, including Jagabo, Orsetto and others.

As for debunking - yes and no. And here's my take on this confusion from what I've read.

There IS filtration that does take place, and some compromise, however such "degradations" or "artifacts" these passthrough units create become ever more frivolous since VHS video is so bad to begin with (noisy, lo-rez, soft, low color info, unstable and changing signal throughout, etc, etc).

Those that notice these deltas in P/Q may not be wrong, but can be counter argued with the fact that due to the low-band quality of VHS it's all moot.

I don't use one of these units, so only summarizing my take on what I've read on them.

It may seem interesting to know how these passthroughs perform on higher quality sources, such as high quality SD TV, but again, this may be moot as well since you shouldn't need such a unit in the chain as a TBC to clean a signal that shouldn't need it to begin with anyway.

[Brad]

For general degradation rather than compress/decompress, I checked out a few devices here (apologies if you've seen it).