VHS Digitization in 2019

[Eric-jan]

VHS capturing is not an exact science.... and depends heavily on the hardware and software setup, (each element of that) sofar i only see only very negative response towards users who are trying their best, never seen an exact system and software guide, or existing use case in any forum, (for current available hardware) only nagging.... VHS recordings where done in a age, where video was just starting, analog, VHS recordings will not be perfect in the first place.
Dropped frames are also caused by slow media, a capture codec (ProRes) dat compresses/or is digital, (DV) will help in that case, to compensate for slow (mechanical) media, Video quality from that will be still enough for VHS resolution material, the ProRes codec is designed for post edit work, and for hardware recording.
VHS capture means that everyone tries his best with the means available, which is not the same for everyone

[Barrythecrab]

A list of usb capture dongles that work in W10 and not meet damning ridicule would be a welcome treat.

[lordsmurf]

VHS capturing is not an exact science.... and depends heavily on the hardware and software setup,

Well, no, it can be an exact science. However, the science dictates you use specific hardware and software, not just whatever you want. It's when people stray to random devices, especially known-flawed/bed devices, that all the problems arise.

sofar i only see only very negative response towards users who are trying their best,

The only time I see a negative response is when the person is stubborn, and insists on using known-flawed/bad or low-quality hardware/software/methods. The world is full of science deniers, and brand loyalists, and both are idiots.

never seen an exact system and software guide

Those exist. You're not looking hard enough. I know that I've written several, as have some others.

(for current available hardware)

This is a weasel term/phrase. What is your narrow idea of "current available hardware"?
I have plenty of hardware available for sale, at least for now.

VHS recordings where done in a age, where video was just starting, analog, VHS recordings will not be perfect in the first place.

False. Video started 75+ years earlier, and VHS was not the 1st magnetic medium. It was most prolific, and long-lasting, but that's really it. No format is perfect. Analog tapes, optical (both digital and analog), and streaming have issues. The skill is learning how to deal with them.

Dropped frames are also caused by slow media, a capture codec (ProRes) dat compresses/or is digital,

That makes no sense. Codec compression is in CPU, maybe RAM, not storage. Yes, slow storage can cause drops, but even then storage-related drops are almost always from secondary causes like drivers, I/O bridge (motherboard chips), or a bad/flakey drive.

(DV) will help in that case,

Myth. DV won't do anything for dropped frames.

to compensate for slow (mechanical) media, Video quality from that will be still enough for VHS resolution material,

That makes no sense. "Slow media" has (almost) nothing to do with resolution. True, 352x470/576 could cut down on data rate, but realistically both it and 720x isn't that much different for likely storage problems. So just theory, not practice -- FYI, conversations I generally detest, waste of time. However, you refer to DV, which is fixed resolution at 720x480/576, so no idea what you're referring to. It's just technobabble.

the ProRes codec is designed for post edit work, and for hardware recording.

False. ProRes (specifically ProRes422) is an intermediary, and proprietary to Mac (which is itself a capture-unfriendly OS, and ProRes was introduced at a time when Mac-based capturing support was more and more being ditched by Apple).

VHS capture means that everyone tries his best with the means available, which is not the same for everyone

This is just an excuse for low-quality methods that ignores video wisdom, and rejects the known recipe for quality VHS conversion. "Means available" is just double-speak for being a cheapskate, and trying to justify said cheapness. Most of the quality capture cards are in the $75-150 range, far cheaper than overrated Magewell/Blackmagic crap, and not exactly a bank-breaking amount of money.

[jwillis84]

This is a start.

(uncompressed, full bandwidth)
-------------
[PC]
ATI TV Wonder (AIW) USB2.0N
ATI TV Wonder 600 USB2.0
Elgato ATI 750 hybrid
Pinnacle USB-700
Pinnacle USB-500
Magewell XI100

[Mac]
ATI TV Wonder (AIW) USB2.0N
Grass Valley ADVCmini
Elgato ATI 750 hybrid
Magewell XI100

(compressed, partial bandwidth)
-------------
[PC]
plextor 402
creative labs video editor (vers I/II)
Elgato ATI 750 hybrid

[Mac]
Grass Valley ADVCmini
Elgato ATI 750 hybrid
Elgato EyeTV 250
Elgato HDTV

[strong warning] These are not a 'walk in the park' to use. Each has its specific requirements and demand careful attention to detail to make work. These are the 'best' at capture (using USB).. but poor signal, or poor playback equipment will (not) be compensated for by any one capture device well. It takes a lot of patience and tenacity to get these to work, even on old computers or modern computers running an old operating system. Picking one with drivers for W10 or OSX15 does not guarantee success.

note: There are (other) usb capture things.. ATI DCT 750, Turtle Beach Video Advantage USB aka.. Crescent (Empia), AMD/ATI 650, Diamond ATI 750, VC500, SVID2USB, using a DVR with HDD as a Capture and MPEG/h.264 USB offload system.. BlackMagic USB Capture, Black Magic Intensity Shuttle.. Hauppauge Live2USB, PVRxyz, AverMedia HDMIxyz .. but they all come with extra ' baggage' i would rather not discuss in this list. The above came out before or shortly after the 'golden' year of 2010. Take away.. avoid HDMI capture dongles, or dongles that can capture HDMI.. its a bad sign for SD capture.

There are a Huge number of obscure, or re-branded USB capture boxes, Honest tech, ION, EzCapture, EzGrabber, Grabster ect.. you can get lost quickly chasing the perfect dongle.. but unless you (scope it out) with an actual instrument.. its difficult to really compare.. in which case its best to stick with the mainstream dongles. Picking one based on the Windows or MacOS version that you have is disastrous. Current (patched) Windows and MacOS no longer care or test USB video hardware.. they are network streaming oriented at best.. and that is being generous. USB 3.0 ports are generally (unreliable).. if you have a genuine USB 2.0 port things will be more stable. Capturing in (short) sessions of 1-2 hours is better than trying to capture 8 hours straight.. there are many reasons for this, but generally dongles were meant for transferring camcorder clips.. not VHS tapes... regardless of the branding. They 'meant' 2 hour movies.. 2 hour VHS recordings.. not 8 hour XLP tapes.

note: Terratec made a large number of very interesting 'hockey puck' solid metal dongles which seem well insulated from external interference. I'm still carefully looking into these.. but Grass Valley originally sourced much of the same construction for their ADVCmini and they are quite thorough in evaluating anything they allow to carry their name. These are becoming harder to find and may already no longer be in production.. that is they maybe on warehouse stock availability only.. but they are 10-bit and that's not ATI AIW quality.. but far better than 8 or 9 bit.

External Capture "technologies" that have/had capture dongles each had at least (one) that supported both Uncompressed and Compressed capture:

USB2.0
USB3.0
Firewire 400
Firewire 800
Thunderbolt
PCIe

in other news:

Hodgey from Norway pointed out an eclectic little known card to me to 'play' with and I'm waiting on its arrival from here in Texas.

It has the ATI Theater 200 chip from the AIW.. and may have slipped under the radar.

It's quite exciting !

To me it appears a "dream" card.. just waiting to try and confirm it. It really seems too good to be true at the moment.

[Eric-jan]

I see the Plextor 402 listed, wasn't there also a Firewire version of ? and did it also work with non Plextor software ? i was beta tester for the european branch of plextor in those days,
for Plextools that was..
The Intensity Shuttle is even more sensitive for a good video signal, but is a good one, (Thunderbolt2 version)
Lots of people have problems with the USB version, Thunderbolt2 with a MacbookPro works fine, the strange thing is, The VHS/DVD recorder combo i use for VHS playback is a good combination, why i don't know.... the combo has no "so called" TBC "feature", or Super VHS, all video output connections can be used for capture with the Itensity Shuttle.
USB capture devices have never been upgraded, while USB got faster over the years, and the M$ OS "stability" isn't helping also.

btw. Terratec i know only of soundcards, and i thought it was a rebranded "name of other hardware...

[jwillis84]

You may know more about the Plextor Firewire history than me.. I do believe they use the Wisbond(?) chip which was also used in the EyeTV200 and (that) was Firewire.. I've one at home right now.

I've no doubt at all Thunderbolt was more stable than USB.. the problem with HD or SD capture over USB 2.0 is bandwidth limitations.. drivers have very little room for being delayed before they fault or have to drop frames. On the other hand using XHCI ports with USB 3.0 is "well.. may you live in interesting times?" event. Instability is part of the bargain with USB 3.0 so many vendors, so many different "interpretations" of a weak and watered down standard. Even USB 2.0 is a better standard, but slower.

Combo devices are plus and minus, plus that the signal path is self contained and leaves less room for external interference and potentially better matched impedance. But minus because if the tape signal is degraded.. you can't insert anything into the signal path to help recover it.. your basically stuck.. the capture device determines what is accessible.. it either works.. or does not work. A lot of combo boxes also don't offer VHS output external to the box, they only offer DVD output.. which is very irritating.. you can't work around its limitations.. not all combo boxes are like that.. but many.. only a few exceptions.

TBC is only important.. "when you need it".. then its your only hope.. PAL is less likely to need it.. here in the states.. its nearly mandatory.

Terratec seems to be a Gmbh design firm that outsources manufacturing to China and then imports and resells the results.. at least that's my remote.. totally uninformed point of view of the situtation. We have a lot of those in the US.. like Apple. Terratec might be drifting in the direction of Hauppauge or Avermedia.. but I can't be certain, most of their stuff I have touched has details that remind me of German engineering practices.

[Trytoki55me]

Hey wahts up guys !VHS 4ever ))

[Sharc]

A list of usb capture dongles that work in W10 and not meet damning ridicule would be a welcome treat.

For basic, simple VHS capturing I have been using Hauppauge USB-Live2. Avoid their real-time mpeg2 converter. Capture lossless instead with Huffyuv, Lagarith or UT video codec and VirtualDub2, for example and convert to mpeg2, AVC or whatever offline afterwards

[jwillis84]

Aw gosh.. I have collected like three Hauppauge USB-Live2.

They are okay.. but they got redesigned several times. The easiest way to tell is by the shape of the box they come in. The larger boxes were generally version 1 the smaller ones that came later were version 2 and 3. I've heard they've had more versions.. but basically they aren't the same hardware, but the plastic case between versions is the same.

So your mileage may vary.. from one hardware design to another.

I wish hardware vendors or resellers would "own up" to their changes and use that as a selling point, with a sticker or something.. rather than claiming its the same device.

It makes troubleshooting harder.

Its not as bad as the VC500 though, where you actually have different incompatible device drivers per design, but all the designs have the same plastic shell. Took me forever to figure out that the cdrom that comes in the package with device is the "only" device driver that will work with that device.. very uncommon situation.

[Barrythecrab]

Do the Pinnacle 500 and 700 USB have working proc amp controls in W10? My VC-500 only functions in brightness and contrast, I'd like the other sliders to work also.

[jwillis84]

I can only say for W7 at the moment they do, but with a stipulation.

VirtualDub does not support 500 or 700 in hardware Overlay mode, but only Preview mode.. so when you open the Proc Amp control panel the video window goes blank.

But if you use GraphEdit, this does not happen, all of the property pages are exposed and work properly. And when you open the Proc Amp control panel the video windows continue to play.. so adjustments on the Proc Amp control panel are immediately visible in the video window.

GraphEdit is okay, but can be frustrating to use when you build new graphs because any filter errors in the registry can cause it to crash.. this is only important when creating new graphs.

GraphEdit Next doesn't crash, but its user interface is even harder to use than basic GraphEdit.

update:

Just for fun I got out my W10 laptop and connected the Pinnacle 700 and ran the same tests.

It looks like its supported.. I did nothing more than trigger a hardware driver search through Windows Updates.. it found a driver and loaded it.

Then I installed GraphEdit.. video sound and proc amp worked fine.

Then I installed VLC.. appears to work as before.

This doesn't change anything I've said regarding the suitability of those programs for capture work.. but it is what it is.

I would prefer to use VirtualDub Capture all of the time.. but its very hardware specific.. as flexible as it "seems" there are a lot of capture cards it doesn't support.. and its not just hardware compression cards.. it doesn't support some pretty basic frame grabbers. The worst part is it doesn't support "selecting" the Capture device output pins.. it tries to do it automatically.. and that is its greatest failure.

VLC is better.. and actually supports many more hardware capture cards.. but its not well documented and really suited towards "streaming" not "capture" .. its rather hard to get to capture plain AVI files.. it wants to compress everything.

update (to the update):

One last thing.. I also installed Open Broadcast Studio.. again not optimized for recording, but rather for streaming.. but it can be configured easier than VLC in modern versions of Windows with USB capture devices. It works fine with the Pinnacle 700 usb.

The universal problems with VLC and OBS are they don't deal with the audio output pin "well".. you can get VLC to "deal with it" by using some specific options in specific versions of VLC.. but then it goes and compresses the output... "streamer.. duh" OBS also has problems with capturing the audio output.. it seems to want to use windows default mixer and while it enumerates the audio pin.. it identifies "nothing".. I think its a bug in the driver or OBS.. I don't know which. It think it could be made to work.. but its not a natural fit.

"Universally" a GraphEdit (just 'works') audio and video play and can be captured straight to an uncompressed .avi file with minimal delay.. its simply not what I would call an "optimal" program. So the driver is "capable" of being used.. its all the capture programs that fall down at some level using the pins provided by the device driver.

[Barrythecrab]

Thank you for the detailed reply. I have never approached Graph Edit out of ignorant fear.

[jwillis84]

We are kind of a victim of the move towards compressed streaming formats as the new 'normal'.

VirtualDub came about at a time when everything favored Uncompressed, AVI format.. that was easiest to edit and then compress to DVD and burn to a DVD or store on a HDD.

WinDVD and other programs like it, aka Windows Media Center moved on to compressed video capture only, eliminating the Uncompressed option.

VLC continued the idea of favoring compressed video only, adding the option to stream the video rather than storing it locally.

OBS studio followed up VLC and we arrived at the current era, compressed video with streaming by default.


There are other things like AmarecTV, and GraphEdit that try to go low school and give you more options. But they require more knowledge about what the programming and hardware devices are actually doing.. so most people avoid them.

I'm learning more about the lower layers of video capture.. and trying to add back in the Uncompressed, local storage options.. but its very hard.. and I question my sanity some days.

Earlier this year it became possible to re-tool a DVD recorder with HDD, to simply capture video to a hard drive. DVD recorders were designed with poor signal quality in mind and VCRs specifically.. so its kind of like getting the best of all worlds, a TBC, Proc-amp and a near infinite HDD storage device in one simple to use box.. not like using a PC for capture at all. The only caveat being you have to buy a relatively low cost piece of software (IsoBuster) to eventually offload all of that recorded video to a PC HDD so that you can access from a PC or your local network. It works very well for more than 52 brands and models of DVD recorder.. but I'm still looking into the PC capture options. I'm not ready to turn my back on them.. Uncompressed capture produces very nice video.. as good as it will ever get.

[Brad]

VirtualDub display with real-time proc amp changes:

One trick is to load a minimal graph with no output in GraphEdit, just to have access to the Proc Amp while VirtualDub does everything else. That way, VirtualDub's display doesn't disappear when you open the Proc Amp control.

[oln]

If you wanna go down the manual route there is always ffmpeg, which can capture from pretty much any source on any OS.

DVD recorders were designed with poor signal quality in mind and VCRs specifically.. so its kind of like getting the best of all worlds, a TBC, Proc-amp and a near infinite HDD storage device in one simple to use box.. not like using a PC for capture at all.

You can get the best of both worlds to an extent by capturing the HDMI output from DVD-Recorders that have it.

[jdmack]

Sorry to respond to a fairly old thread (is there a 2020 version of it?). I had been using AG-1980s and black AVT-8710s to capture analog video. As others have noted, the 8710 changes the quality of the video more than one would like. I was pleased to read that passing the signal through a Philips 3576 DVD recorder as a TBC instead of the 8710 could work as well, and sure enough, this set up works like a charm for me. As an experiment, I also tried passing the signal through a Toshiba DR420 DVD recorder, and it works great as well! No dropped frames. No sync issues with the audio. I thought I'd pass this info along to anyone who might find it useful.

[dellsam34]

Black AVT-871 are garbage, I have one, they do more damage than fix anything.

[oln]

DVD-recorders (or at least all the ones I've seen) digitize whatever are passed into them so they can work a bit like TBCs. How well depends on what's in them.

Many of the Philips DVD-recorders have Philips/NXP video decoder chips that are related to the ones used in the AVT and Datavideo TBCs, so it makes sense that they would work similarly (at least the LG ones I have with similar chips do). I don't know if they like macrovision too much though, and as far as I know they don't correct horizontal wiggling like the Panasonic DVRs do, and you don't get any control over brightness and automatic gain control.

I think the Toshiba one is one of the funai-made DVRs that use a panasonic video chip. These do correct horizontal wiggling to a degree (though maybe not as much as the ones in older panasonic DVRs) from what I've read on these forums but the automatic gain control is known to cause flickering.

[lordsmurf]

Black AVT-871 are garbage, I have one, they do more damage than fix anything.

To expand on this, the black AVT-8710 has flawed chipsets.
As do other Cypress from the "black" era (mostly 2010s) though EOL.

Far more details at: Is my new black AVT-8710 DOA? (screenshots/clips of error)

Many of the Philips DVD-recorders have Philips/NXP video decoder chips that are related to the ones used in the AVT and Datavideo TBCs, so it makes sense that they would work similarly

Chipset alone doesn't make the difference. Philips have almost no TBC(ish) abilities in their recorders.

[Dinho]

The universal problems with VLC and OBS are they don't deal with the audio output pin "well".. you can get VLC to "deal with it" by using some specific options in specific versions of VLC.. but then it goes and compresses the output... "streamer.. duh" OBS also has problems with capturing the audio output.. it seems to want to use windows default mixer and while it enumerates the audio pin.. it identifies "nothing".. I think its a bug in the driver or OBS.. I don't know which. It think it could be made to work.. but its not a natural fit.

Hello!
I get no audio on Pinnacle 700 using VLC.
Which VLC version and specific options did you use?
Thanks!

[lordsmurf]

I get no audio on Pinnacle 700 using VLC.

So?

You probably don't get audio by using MS Word, either.

You're using the wrong software for capture. Stop it.

Use VirtualDub.