Capturing VHS via HDMI

[sebus]

So, you're suggesting to buy this software for $30 (since you keep linking to the page for the software, not the device)

Because this is the only logical page I could find which states ALL the numbers correctly for various devices that Hauppague produced with same confusing names...

And these old devices do go for peanuts on fleebay...

As to splitter, another few quid. So all in all less than two rounds of beer with couple of mates...

And NO VHS is worth all the fuss. It is bad quality no matter what. There is no magic that the end result will be any better (no matter what one thinks or believes)

[awgie]

And NO VHS is worth all the fuss. It is bad quality no matter what. There is no magic that the end result will be any better (no matter what one thinks or believes)

No argument there. No matter what equipment you use to capture it, you're ultimately limited by the quality of the original recording and the age of the tape. There comes a point beyond which you're just not going to improve the capture. (There is some post-processing you can do to improve the video after it's captured, however. Even so, that's just repainting an old barn.) Nevertheless, you have to decide how much money you are willing to throw at it, and you do the best you can with what you can get for the money.

As for my own VHS collection, I have maybe 100 or so tapes that I recorded off cable back in the 1990s. With the tapes being that old, I'm already expecting some signal degradation. And I'd have to buy a new VCR to do anything. My old one blew up (quite literally – the house reeked of smoke and melted plastic for a week) when my Mom was trying to watch a movie on new year's eve about 5 years ago, and I've never gotten around to replacing it. With the exception of a few old movies that aren't available on DVD, I doubt I have any tapes that are worth the time to convert to digital. All the commercial tapes I had I have already replaced with commercial DVDs.

[Skiller]

The VCR can output 480i/576i, so in theory it shouldn't de-interlace and then re-interlace the video, and at that resolution it's not being upscaled. So in theory, that should give you the same stream as what the composite video output would.

Maybe just terminology but how can Composite video be "a stream"? It's analog video, it's not a stream of 0's and 1's, unlike HDMI.
I disagree with your statement – the HDMI output would allow you to capture without having another conversion from digital to analog and back, while if you used the Composite output the video would run through those two conversions which is never lossless. And although there shouldn't be major differences because of that, the two are not the same. Now you could say for VHS such small losses don't matter, but I'm not going to decide what is good enough.

My point is, if the VCR runs the VHS signal through it's digital processing no matter what (and I bet it does) then there is no point at all in not using the HDMI output (at 480i/576i). Anything the unit outputs via Composite would be just a conversion to analog of the very same stream that you could copy losslessly via HDMI to your HDD. Unless the Composite output is linked directly to the VHS part of the unit without first running through any digital processing (so basically like any plain VCR without TBC and digital NR) there is simply no way a capture over Composite can be any better than over HDMI.

The up-side to using the VCR's 480p/576p output is that the VCR should be de-interlacing the stream in the proper order, and in proper sync with the fields, so you should get a better picture than if you recorded composite video output without a TBC.

Why would capturing 480p/576p be any better over 480i/576i? All the VCR does is it takes the digitizted VHS video and runs it through it's real time deinterlacer. I would avoid that like the plague.

You could also try recording 480i/576i at 59.94fps to try and capture each field in its own frame, but without a TBC, you will likely still end up with parts of two fields being recorded in a single frame.

Maybe I don't get it but that doesn't make sense to me.

[awgie]

The VCR can output 480i/576i, so in theory it shouldn't de-interlace and then re-interlace the video, and at that resolution it's not being upscaled. So in theory, that should give you the same stream as what the composite video output would.

Maybe just terminology but how can Composite video be "a stream"? It's analog video, it's not a stream of 0's and 1's, unlike HDMI.
I disagree with your statement – the HDMI output would allow you to capture without having another conversion from digital to analog and back, while if you used the Composite output the video would run through those two conversions which is never lossless. And although there shouldn't be major differences because of that, the two are not the same. Now you could say for VHS such small losses don't matter, but I'm not going to decide what is good enough.

My point is, if the VCR runs the VHS signal through it's digital processing no matter what (and I bet it does) then there is no point at all in not using the HDMI output (at 480i/576i). Anything the unit outputs via Composite would be just a conversion to analog of the very same stream that you could copy losslessly via HDMI to you HDD. Unless the Composite output is linked directly to the VHS part of the unit without first running through any digital processing (so basically like any plain VCR without TBC and digital NR) there is simply no way a capture over Composite can be any better than over HDMI.

Maybe I should have said "the HDMI would give you the same image as the composite signal" (since they're both interlaced). But you're not disagreeing with me, as I also think it's better to just use the HDMI output since it's already there. I was making the comparison because someone else had said it would be better to use the composite output.

The up-side to using the VCR's 480p/576p output is that the VCR should be de-interlacing the stream in the proper order, and in proper sync with the fields, so you should get a better picture than if you recorded composite video output without a TBC.

Why would capturing 480p/576p be any better over 480i/576i? All the VCR does is it takes the digitizted VHS video and runs it through it's real time deinterlacer. I would avoid that like the plague.

Why would you avoid that? The VCR should have an internal TBC, so it should be de-interlaced properly for the 480p/576p output. Interlacing is a corruption of the image in the first place – separating the image into two fields – so assuming the VCR is recombining the two fields correctly for the progressive output, you'd be capturing a single image, which should give you a better picture. (And what I actually said was that 480p/576p would be better than recording the composite output without a TBC.)

You could also try recording 480i/576i at 59.94fps to try and capture each field in its own frame, but without a TBC, you will likely still end up with parts of two fields being recorded in a single frame.

Maybe I don't get it but that doesn't make sense to me.

Now that I go back and think about it, the 480i/576i HDMI stream shouldn't have that problem, since it's already gone through the internal TBC. It's recording the composite video without a TBC that would have that problem.


Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that the VCR actually does have an internal Time-Base Corrector, and that the digital output is therefore correctly synchronized to the analog fields/frames.

[dellsam34]

No one can be sure how that HDMI VCR handles the capturing and processing of the video VS a stand alone S-VHS TBC/DNR deck connected to a capture device from the late 90's and early 2000's, The only way for the OP to tell the difference is to experiment himself if there is few tapes that are worth the adventure.

[Skiller]

Sorry I was confusing statements.

Why would you avoid that?

Because I want to capture what's on the tape in it's rawest form, with as few processing as possible before it gets on my HDD (apart from jitter correction, nothing should be done to it imo). And, later, I can have better deinterlacing in software than the real timer deinterlacer of the HDMI output can provide.

The VCR should have an internal TBC, so it should be de-interlaced properly for the 480p/576p output.

But TBC and deinterlacer are not tied together. Any kind of TBC functionality is due to the (more intelligent) way the sampling process in the conversion from analog to digital is done (yes, that's all the magic). On the tape there is 480i/576i stored, more precisely there are 59.94 or 50 fields per second, each video head reads either the odd or the even fields.

A deinterlacer just takes those fields after the conversion to digital (so after the TBC) and interpolates the missing lines of each field in some more or less smart way to turn the fields into full height frames.

In other words, you do not gain anything by having the hardware do this for you, except maybe time. I'm not saying you should not deinterlace, I just would not do it during the capture, but afterwards in software.

Interlacing is a corruption of the image in the first place – separating the image into two fields – so assuming the VCR is recombining the two fields correctly for the progressive output, you'd be capturing a single image, which should give you a better picture.

All of that is however relying on the quality of the hardware deinterlacer because there are and always will be only mentioned fields to capture from VHS.

It's recording the composite video without a TBC that would have that problem.

But only if the analog VCR part is linked to the Composite out without running through it's digital processing first. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't do that because otherwise the engineers would have had to implement an additional circuit to route the original analog video to the Composite out – and for what purpose?!
This means you are getting the same processing on all outputs of the unit, for the the analog outputs the stream is converted to analog again after all the processing.

Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that the VCR actually does have an internal Time-Base Corrector, and that the digital output is therefore correctly synchronized to the analog fields/frames.

And if it didn't have TBC-like functionality, the only difference would be that the analog defects would be baked in forever into the video, but the output signals would still be continuous and stable – it cannot be any different since the video had to be converted to digital for the unit to do it's processing and signal instabilities and discontinuities get lost at that point – it just doesn't imply they also get corrected visibly(!).