Up-to-date VHS Capture Guide?

[Hessian]

I'm wanting to capture some home movies from VHS, possibly deinterlace, crop, sort out the colour and then author a DVD.

But I'm struggling to decide the best format and software for capturing the video files to being with though. I have a Panasonic NV-HS820 and a Hauppauge USB-Live2. I also have an AVT-8710 Time Base Corrector , but I think the tapes are too far gone for the TBC to help with because I get a lot of ghosting when using it.

Which is the current up-to-date software and file format that is recommended? Before asking here, I have capture some video using WinTV as MPEG2 in .TS format and then edited with TSDoctor, but then I don't know where to go from there!

[hech54]

IMO, your only "next step up" is to capture to lossless AVI or something like HuffyUV. The Hauppauge can do that. Not sure exactly how it will improve anything though. Unless you are capturing at an incredibly high bitrate to mpeg2 via WinTV, what you see is what you get. Improving video quality is best done when starting with uncompressed.

[usually_quiet]

Nothing much has changed with respect to the basic process of VHS capture in ten years. VHS is a dead format, and nobody today is interested in making improvements in software and hardware to facilitate conversion from VHS to digital. You should be capturing to a lossless format like HuffYUV or similar if you plan to correct defects. All the software for lossless capture is pretty old. Virtualdub is still recommended. DScaler and AmarecTV could also work. These won't let you capture directly to MPEG-2. Avisynth is used to process lossless video after capturing, but it uses scripting and it takes some effort to learn it. If you want MPEG-2, you would encode to MPEG-2 after processing and editing. AVStoDVD, a simple DVD authoring program, can also encode for DVD compatibility with HCEnc.

If you don't want to be bothered with all the tedious work involved in correcting defects, then capture to MPEG-2 as you are doing now. MPEG-VCR is an inexpensive, simple, frame-accurate, smart-encoding editor for MPEG-2 video. There are many free and paid DVD authoring programs. DVDAuthorGui, DVDStyler, and AVStoDVD are free and relatively easy to use.

If you have a DVD recorder, try passing the signal through it (you don't use the DVD recorder to record) without using the TBC to see if that improves the picture at all.