VHS recording, advices would be appreciated!

[FLP437]

I do agree the vhs player will be the single most important piece of equipment, however the workflow will be as good as the weak piece in the workflow and in this context the capture card is also important.

The important is not the magewell " arsenal" of features although these are welcome and useful.
The differentiating point in the magewell is it ability to do solid captures without a tbc and the fact that you buy a new device in top condition.
With the "recommended" cards you will need an external tbc or at least a dvd recorder in between, or you will have to trade quality versus stability of output signal in vhs player, final quality is not going to improve and price will rocket to the skies if you buy a tbc, assuming you find one in good conditions and will be marginally more expensive if you go the dvd recorder route and can additional increase if you do have to setup a XP PC .
In this moment I would never pay the prices that are being asked for tbc like the green avt8710 or the tbc 1000 , in this case I will choose the route of brighteye devices , it will be less expensive after all , they are new and you will get great results.

Another solution providing also great results in the same range of prices ( 200-250€) is using a panasonics dvd recorder as digitizer( input svideo output hdmi).

This type of workflow usually do also provide good and solid captures.I have tested and used it in the past with a panasonics dmr-eh65 and the results were quite good

There seems to be a reasonable stock of devices of this type in good condition and at a reasonable price.

The german gleitz forum (german Doom9) as tested several brands of of DVD recorder combos and concluded that that the Panasonic devices had the best ADC of them all
You can see a lot of details for instance in the German forum gleitz.info

https://gleitz.info/forum/index.php?thread/47572-tutorial-hochwertiges-digitalisieren-...en-und-andere/

You can put the chrome browser in automatic translation from german to english and access all the info and a large tutorial about this workflow

[lollo]

With the "recommended" cards you will need an external tbc

That's another story I think.

I have understood that Magewell has a strong lineTBC correction thanks to the ADV7842 ability; not that it can replace a frameTBC, that sometimes is requidered with ugly tapes.

If a frameTBC is not required in the "Magewell" flow when it would be required with the same tape with the "classic flow", that's a big surprize, as I have understood that the frameTBC capabilities of the ADV7842 were not enabled in it.
In any case I trust your experiments, because I don't have a Magewell, and I am lucky enough to do not absolutely need a frameTBC with my tapes.

Concerning the HDMI approach (meaning that the A/D conversion is beeing performed by the circuitry of a Panasonic, not "real" useless HDMI capture), it is for sure a good alternative to the standard flow, but I am not a big fan of it.

To be honest I only tried once, using hardware from a friend, but his VCR had no lineTBC and the tape(s) showed jitter, so we had to insert a Panasonic ES-15 before the other Panasonic doing the capture (do not remember the model of the second). The same tape(s) captured with my "classic flow" had better digitalization. I will never know if the difference was because the worst VCR (high chances) or because the insertion in the chain of another A/D conversion and signal "disturbance" caused by the ES-15 (lower chances) or the HDMI flow itself, but I did not stick to this capture methodology.

Thanks again for having shared your (many) experiments!

[FLP437]

Some thoughts about question asked by the OP

Composite/svideo to Hdmi converters/scalers/ video processors

Most of these devices are low cost devices (15-40€) and so are the their specifications and the final results

The major problems are related to design and quality of the electronic components involved ,namely low quality ADC , bad deinterlacer and upscale algorithms lack of output specs control, original DAR change ,resulting in bad final quality.

Most don’t assure control over interlacing, upscaling, DAR and post-processing settings providing only progressive output and 720p or 10080p .It is essential that a pass-through feature exist enabling native resolution and interlaced output for capturing lossless in best conditions . Deinterlacing and upscaling if needed can be done better in post production with software . If these type of devices do use quality grade components, a more refined design and also give control of output settings, the price goes up and there will be no much difference in terms of price compared with a fair/good capture card.

That said there are always some exceptions to this general rule for instance the Gefen TV Composite/Svideo to HDMI Scaler is said to have very good quality and can output interlaced and does have selectable output resolution so can output native input resolution , do have post processing controls and other additional features as for instance analog or digital( toslink) that can be hdmi embedded however the price is almost 250 usd .
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/610273-REG/Gefen_GTV_COMPSVID_2_HDMIS_TV_Compos...e_to_HDMI.html

In these moment there are some devices which might be interesting to follow in the coming times :

Pixel FX Morph https://www.pixelfx.co/content/morph_roadmap.html

OSSC Pro https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=65892

Retrotink 5x Pro https://www.retrotink.com/product-page/5x-pro

The Pixel FX Morph does have a Film Mode for (VCR/LD/DVD) with Full frame Time-Base Correction and a 3D Comb Filter.

The OSSC Pro is expected to include in the in next iteration in a few months additionally support for composite and svideo , does have 512MB of RAM and a cyclone V FPGA for all kind of things as a full frame video buffer .

Retrotink 5x pro will be probably the less interesting of the 3 and it does not seem to have a 480i/576i output mode. The actual retrotink 2x pro works fine but the results are not good for video capture

SING MAI video processor device https://www.singmai.com/Modules/sm03.html
this one works with composite but a svideo version is expected .Some of these devices are already on sale but they are in short supply, due to limited production related with difficulties with components and are insufficient for demand. Probably only in 2022 they can be easily purchased.
However all of these devices cost around 300 usd or more and the sing mai 600 usd or more so they are not a panacea.

[oln]

I have understood that Magewell has a strong lineTBC correction thanks to the ADV7842 ability; not that it can replace a frameTBC, that sometimes is requidered with ugly tapes.

If a frameTBC is not required in the "Magewell" flow when it would be required with the same tape with the "classic flow", that's a big surprize, as I have understood that the frameTBC capabilities of the ADV7842 were not enabled in it.

Wheter the device has a "frame TBC" part is mainly about how the output of the video decoder chip is handled, there needs to be some buffering of data and logic to determine how to deal with it. For SD video, a video chip will typically output a data stream in the format specified in the ITU-R_BT.656 standard. Typically the "invisible" parts of the image are blanked, but it's often possible to make the chip output data for the full frame and get the sync information from separate outputs on the chips. The frame tbc feature of the ADV7842 and related integrates this into the video decoder chip itself, but from the description it seems magewell implemented something it externally instead similar to what you would find in somewhat modern standalone TBCs. If you look at these, they usually have an off-the-shelf video decoder chip, some memory buffer and a programmable logic chip like a CPLD or FPGA (or even running a full embedded operating system on a CPU). An older one would probably have things split up more into different ICs.

The actual performance will depend a combination of how good of a job the video decoder IC does at detecting and handling corrupted/non-standard video input and the logic for ensuring a stable output of fields from the data.

The OSSC Pro is expected to include in the in next iteration in a few months additionally support for composite and svideo

Hm, from the link you posted it just says it has GPIO ports which would allow for designing add-on modules that could for instance be used for that. The Video decoder they chose (ISL51002) doesn't seem to support composite or s-video (according to a reply the choice was between that and the ADV7842 instead, which would have supported that natively). Granted some add-on-board with a video decoder and outputting raw stuff via a GPIO interface could maybe just as well be designed to work with some cheaper device/board with enough GPIO read speed to convert it to HDMI, USB or similar so maybe that's an approach compared to a full device.

EDIT: Looking through the thread the dev is talking about using the A/V chip as an ADC and doing composite/S-video work in the FPGA instead which is interesting. Maybe we could find some overlap with vhs-decode there as we've been looking for some device for doing software decoding of composite video.

The retrotink 5x and morph do as noted, though they don't have open firmware so you will be more at the mercy of the priorities of the makers with those but it seems vcr stuff is at least something they've thought about with the new versions. Afaik the retrotink 2x doesn't have buffering so with video tapes it tends to lose sync. It seems buffering/frame tbc-like functions have some use for some game systems too which probaly helped it's inclusion.

[FLP437]

The OSSC Pro will launch initially without support for composite/s-video, however this will be added on later by a firmware update (s-video will also require a breakout cable to attach to the component video inputs). This is because the decoder will be done entirely on the FPGA, allowing for maximum flexibility with regards filtering, signal processing etc.

https://videogameperfection.com/forums/topic/ossc-pro-some-questions/

[lordsmurf]

The differentiating thing in the __ is it ability to do solid captures without a tbc

In the past 25 years, can you guess how many times I've heard this claim? Lots, and for lots of devices.

Can you also guess how accurate that claim is? Not at all.

I can capture some tapes right now, various sources, various capture cards, no TBCs, and some may work with no drops, while most will drop. Some drops are smaller, some are so large and violent that it wipes out seconds worth of footage. It's very source dependent, and most claims of "I don't need no TBC!" are from a combination of dumb luck: capture card, VCR, and source tapes all play nice. Not typical.

Adding line only can improve the pass/fail count, but even line alone isn't enough.

Video doesn't automatically start dropping frames. The TBC is there so you don't have to worry, monitor, guess, etc. It just prevents these issues from happening. Not just any random TBC, but TBCs designed for consumer analog sources.

The ADV7842 was not made for consumer analog sources. The frame often fails, while the line is weak by default. The line function may, or may not, have promise. What is known now is the default settings suck, can easily make the image worse rather than better.

There are some great tests for TBCs, and I have zero doubt I can make a Magewell card crap itself (as I already known I can make the ADV7842 crap itself). I know the fail points for most TBCs, because I've run them hard. Some fail points are acceptable, in the fringes. Others are too close to natural errors on a wider scale, and should be avoided. Many TBCs even make the video net/overall worse when issues are encountered, worse than the issue itself. The ADV7xxx chip falls into that last category, but it may be due to default settings.

Note that sometimes claims are ignorant, the person uses software that doesn't even count frame drops.
Or daft, the person essentially disabled the frame drop counter -- and the is especially a problem on Youtube, lots of goobers not understanding what they're doing in the settings, by changing default values to inert.
So "I don't drop frames!" isn't even accurate, they just closed their eyes to the problem.

German forum gleitz.info

I sometimes observe, when that forum is mentioned, it may have an echo chamber of worshipping price over quality, when it comes to TBCs. "DVD recorders, yay! External TBCs, boo!" And possibly even some confusion over TBCs, mixing up line TBC and frame TBCs. Or at least some posts, from some members (and I don't have any specific posts/people in mind). I've not had the time to read it much, as I don't really want to read it all via Google Translate (I'd rather re-learn German first). Chrome's translate always barfs if the pages get too long. So I'm somewhat apprehensive and wary of the information there.

I have understood that Magewell has a strong lineTBC correction thanks to the ADV7842 ability;
not that it can replace a frameTBC, that sometimes is requidered with ugly tapes.

No.

The ADV7842 is a weak line correction, at least in every implementation I've seen to date. Again, it may be default values at play, and lack of any useful documentation. It's not as accurate, or as strong, as the JVC S-VHS line TBC. The JVC is weaker than Panasonic (actually field, not mere line), which is weaker than ES10/15 (noting ES10/15 also worse, too aggressive, in many cases; only use when net result better).

Frame TBC isn't about "ugly". It's about signal continuity. An SP tape that looks fine can have a mush signal that drops frames. A fugly homemade VCR tape can equally sometimes not drop frames. Frame TBC is not about visuals. The (very) poor man's frame TBC (actually frame sync TBC) is the non-TBC frame sync attached to line TBC, which is the minimalist ES10/15 as TBC. Adding even a weak frame TBC makes it 99% as effective as something like the TBC-1000, though you have to deal with the quality-hit side effects of those cheaper devices.

it seems magewell implemented something it externally instead

Yep.

EDIT: Looking through the thread the dev is talking about using the A/V chip as an ADC and doing composite/S-video work in the FPGA instead which is interesting. Maybe we could find some overlap with vhs-decode there as we've been looking for some device for doing software decoding of composite video.

I've long believed that vhs-decode will eventually require dedicated hardware. A list of specific VCRs, and an encapsulated box that corrects and captures the signal. The software portion will simply be finishing touches and preview. Sort of like capturing is now.

That's if it actually works beyond alpha testing. There's just so many variables. As usual, I wish you luck with it!

buffering/frame tbc-like functions

I don't understand why several non-TBCs suddenly claim (weak) TBC-like functionality simply because a wad of RAM exists. Buffering and RAM is good and all, but even something like the ADI chips have min/max values. It's not infinite, and RAM itself doesn't magically make the image/signal better. At some point, it becomes nothing more than marketing hype, and not an actual feature.

[lollo]

Thanks oln for your reply!

but from the description it seems magewell implemented something it externally instead similar to what you would find in somewhat modern standalone TBCs.

So, if I understand correctly, that card has a "sort of" frameTBC without using ADV7842 capabilities, but rather using somehow a set of other ICs.

I am waiting vhs decode maturity to improve my capture flow (the only real candidate I am considering so far), but maybe a try of such cards could be interesting then.

[ElegantRain]

Pixel FX Morph https://www.pixelfx.co/content/morph_roadmap.html

It looks like there's no release date announced yet. I'm really dubious too about the performance of the said full frame TBC and the 3D comb filter. Well if this can compete with the Datavideo or FA-125 TBC's id be glad we finally have a not overpriced 2021 product for VHS rippers!

As for the Magewell capture card it have value as it also does HD which is great because my ripping computer doesn't have one yet. Also it seems like it's the only Windows 10 compatible SD capture card available for sale brand new. Magewell have been good to me through the years for maintaining compatibility with Windows update. This is VALUE to me. Requiring another computer running Windows 7 only for the purpose of VHS ripping is the definition of less value to me. If there are SD capture cards compatible with Windows 10 that cost less I would definitely consider looking into it.

I work in video and have many contacts and could possibly find some cheap VCRs and TBCs. But yeah I've read the warnings of Lordsmurf saying that the prosumer products tend to not work well with consumer tapes which makes sense.

I'm heading toward installing the VHS recording setup (VCR + TBC) in my rackmount. I'm seeking the For.A FA-125 or DataVideo TBC-3000,4000,7000 rack version if anyone would like to sell one at a deal price.

Id like to thank everyone for the share of knowledge and participating to this discussion in respect even though we all have our vision on the subject.

REPLY FROM MAGEWELL SUPPORT:

Hi. Magewell has asked me to provide you with answer to your request. Your idea is sound, but our current pro capture card (with ADV7842 chip set) cannot support TBC, because we did not add a memory chip for ADV784. There is not enough space to add TBC function for ADV7842. Magewell does not plan to add this function, because the memory chip is very expensive, and right now hard to come by. Sorry we can’t help.

[ElegantRain]

I've added the Snell & Willcox to the list in my latest thread, although it is new acquisition I'm impressed so far, It is based on the Analog Devices ADV7802. 3D comb filter for composite, 3D DNR, line and frame TBC, Its line TBC is better and more sophisticated than the built in JVC VCR.

Are you talking about this unit? It looks like it still can be ordered at a really low cost.

Have you done further testing, is it any good?

[dellsam34]

No not that one, that looks like a regular analog TBC, See my thread for the exact model.