Video capturing old VHS tapes with lossless format

[JVRaines]

Very interesting. I'll have to check that out. Is there any other tools besides VirtualDub or Amarectv for video capture? I believe those only put video in avi containers and no mkv files. Will I just have to dump it to a lossless avi with either of those and then encode again into mkv?

My workflow is to capture to Lagarith/AVI with AmaRecTV (VirtualDub capture is too flaky on my system), then re-encode to the desired codec and do trimming and audio sync correction (if I used an external TBC) at the same time. Usually that's all through FFmpeg, though if I have a difficult capture in multiple files, I will concatenate in VirtualDub and then use the external encoder function.

[pippas]

I have also had a LOT better luck with all of the codecs working in Amarectv. All of the ones that Virtualdub crashed with that I spoke about earlier seems to work just fine. So it definitely isn't my system but Virtualdub.

I'm glad I have been able to make at least one suggestion that worked for you.....

[TimA-C]

I'm pretty much with JVRaines in capturing with AmarecTV (v3.1 the later ones require you to purchase their codec) to Lagarith (YUY2) audio PCM, edit in Vdub and then usually use Avisynth and HC BatchGUI (HC Enc) to encode to Mpeg2, or use Vidcoder, Xmedia Recode or MeGUI to encode to x264.

Lagarith still gives me slightly smaller .avi files than any of the other lossless codecs mentioned here, and a 2.6GHz Intel C2D with 4Gb DDR2 RAM is more than capable of capturing without ANY dropped frames in 64-bit Windows 10 (or 64-bit Windows 7). UT Video might be a better option for long-term storage as it is at least still being developed . . . ? Have Fun!