Cost to have VHS tapes transferred to Blu-Ray? Recommendations?

[guy24s]

In the United States, how much does it typically cost to have the contents of a 90 minute VHS tape converted into a Blu-Ray disc?
I guess it needs to be digitized and then upscaled somehow? Any recommendations of companies (or private individuals) who does these type of conversions good? Maybe there's even someone here on the forum that can help me, for a charge? If so, let me know.
I am not interested in MKV / MP4 files, I would prefer to get the contents on a Blu-Ray playable in a Blu-Ray player.
I understand that a VHS tape is of lower resolution than a DVD and some will argue that it's pointless to record VHS footage to anything beyond Mpeg2, but I have seen some Blu-Rays where the footage came from VHS tapes and it looks much better (to me) than on a DVD.

[Alwyn]

some will argue that it's pointless to record VHS footage to anything beyond Mpeg2

Yes, hogwash. VHS can look very good on a big screen, doesn't matter if it's in plain MP4 or Bluray format.

[cholla]

I do not have a recommendation for a business that does this.
I know from reading in this forum here that certain models of VCRs & capture cards are used to get copies of the VHS to a computer.
I recommend reading some of those topics.
Then you can ask the business doing the conversion if they have this kind of equipment.
I'm not going to buy this type of equipment & you are probably not either.

I expect the DVDs you watched with VHS footage were compressed to fit on a single layer DVD.
I understand the captures can be very large.
Written to a bluray those could probably be full size.
I will let someone more knowledgeable verify that.

[themaster1]

You can do mpeg2 480i high bitrate on bluray no need to upscale

[dellsam34]

I could do it but for one tape the cost will be higher VS if doing it for multiple tapes, But it is easy to do and have done it before and have all the necessary equipment for it from tape to disc. The disc will be playable on any regular Blu-ray player but with no menu, authoring with menu and thumbnails is time consuming and I personally don't offer it.

[guy24s]

I could do it but for one tape the cost will be higher VS if doing it for multiple tapes, But it is easy to do and have done it before and have all the necessary equipment for it from tape to disc. The disc will be playable on any regular Blu-ray player but with no menu, authoring with menu and thumbnails is time consuming and I personally don't offer it.

Hi. It's actually a few tapes. I'm guessing maybe 4 or 5. What is the price, and do you have some sample of a conversion you made? I've seen many VHS to MP4 conversions available on sites like Archive.org, and they always look terrible, worse than DVDs (blocky / pixely, bleeded-together colors), but I've also seen some commercially released Blu-Rays that were mastered from VHS tapes, and they look good.

[guy24s]

You can do mpeg2 480i high bitrate on bluray no need to upscale

That's what I've been doing for many years, recording VHS tapes to DVD through a DVD recorder in XP mode (1 hour per disc), but the resulting quality is always worse than on the original VHS tape (more pixely). Some movies that have unofficial Blu-Ray releases, and even some commercially released movies, were actually mastered from VHS tapes and they look very good with no visible pixel artifacts.

[dellsam34]

Quality is directly related to the quality and condition of your tapes, I do have a lot of captures in my YT channel of various tape formats in various qualities down below the orange hyperlink, Check them out and PM me.

[guy24s]

some will argue that it's pointless to record VHS footage to anything beyond Mpeg2

Yes, hogwash. VHS can look very good on a big screen, doesn't matter if it's in plain MP4 or Bluray format.

Do you know why all 1080p MP4 files available online which were captured from VHS look so terrible?

Here's a still from a VHS to DVD conversion I made:

[Attachment 87075 - Click to enlarge]

Here's a still from a 1080p MP4 file (by someone else) of the same scene:

[Attachment 87076 - Click to enlarge]

I understand the source for the MP4 rip is of better quality, but to my personally the encoding looks better in my DVD encoding look better than the HD file. You can see the MP4 file look horrible, blurry and colors all bleed together. You can barely make out their facial features. This is just one example of many, almost everything available online that was taken from VHS to MP4 looks this way. Why?

Here's a still (from a different movie), which is a commercially released Blu-Ray where the master was a VHS tape:

[Attachment 87077 - Click to enlarge]
There are much better examples, but I purposely picked one where the master tape is of similar condition to those in the first two stills. To me, this is a much better Mpeg4 rip of VHS footage, so obviously it is possible to achieve good results if you know what you're doing. So why do 99% of everything look like the still in example no.2?

[dellsam34]

Several reasons: Mediocre de-interlacing, bad upscaling, heavy compression, mainly because people needed to make the files smaller so they can easily upload them but also because some of them they don't know what they're doing. Having said all that, VHS is still VHS, you can't make it any better than what's on the tape, you can get it close enough, this is the nature of analog signal with low resolution.

[Alwyn]

I'm struggling to believe that the first two pics are the same source. The colours are totally different; in this case, unlikely to be caused by deinterlacing or compression.

so obviously it is possible to achieve good results if you know what you're doing. So why do 99% of everything look like the still in example no.2?

Because people don't? Even the most basic setup and low-end digitiser would not produce a result like pic 2 if a DVD recorder produced pic 1, so it would have to have been a major balls-up to produce that video... or a different source.

The critical issue is the quality of the tape. If the tape's good, a half-decent hardware setup will produce a good copy. Going through a few "VHS Rips" on Youtube, one can see errors: no stabilisation, over-exposure, too-saturated colours. But I wouldn't say 99% are awful.

[DB83]

Read this with interest. Maybe delisam34 has already given a quote for the work but, in my eyes, some Q.'s should have been raised.

1. Are these tapes commercial ?. I, obviously, do not know our friend's stance on this but, I guess, no major transfer company would accept these - and if this same Q. was raised in a UK source I would not even contemplate it..


2. And if they are commercial it is my understanding that the majority of US-sourced VHS have some form of Copy Protection (Disney being the hardest to crack). Of course our friend might have the tools and what he does is of no concern of mine. But I would not want to see any good member on here get into serious trouble.

[Brad]

I do have a lot of captures in my YT channel of various tape formats in various qualities down below the orange hyperlink

I think the colour is based on the forum profile in use. It's blue for me.

(Apologies for the mosquitoey JPEG instead of PNG.)


@guy24s: dellsam34 does excellent transfers and posts here often. If I had some Betamax tapes to transfer, I wouldn't hesitate to mail them over and pay whatever fee -- if dellsam34 accepts those. The equipment used would cost $$$$ to acquire now.

[dellsam34]

Thanks Brad, I did not think about the color even though I know it can be different for other members, my bad.

@DB83, No I do not do copyrighted materials, Even though here in the US the law allows anyone to have one backup copy of their copyrighted material, But I'm not sure about the legality of the paid service to do it, So no.

[guy24s]

I'm struggling to believe that the first two pics are the same source.

Because they aren't, and I mentioned that in my original post. While I haven't seen the source for the rip in example 2, I suspect the original material for that example was of higher quality than the VHS tape that I recorded to DVD in example 1.
From what I've observed, most Mpeg4 rips sourced from VHS tend to exhibit similar visual characteristics, albeit to varying degrees, resembling the image in the second example, although we know it's possible to avoid this.

[guy24s]

No I do not do copyrighted materials, Even though here in the US the law allows anyone to have one backup copy of their copyrighted material, But I'm not sure about the legality of the paid service to do it, So no.

OK.
The tapes I wanted transferred are indeed commercial films, but they all belong to the public domain library, so there wouldn't be any legal issues. However, if you feel unable to proceed, I completely understand.

[themaster1]

You can do mpeg2 480i high bitrate on bluray no need to upscale

That's what I've been doing for many years, recording VHS tapes to DVD through a DVD recorder in XP mode (1 hour per disc), but the resulting quality is always worse than on the original VHS tape (more pixely). Some movies that have unofficial Blu-Ray releases, and even some commercially released movies, were actually mastered from VHS tapes and they look very good with no visible pixel artifacts.

You're using a bad dvd recorder i guess

Sony dvd recorder (mpeg2 HQ Plus quality (15 Mbps) link Here

[cholla]

I'm not more than minimally knowledgeable in transferring VHS to DVD.
So I hope the experts here will correct anything incorrect in this post.

There are VCRs that are not what the average consumer buys.
SVHS & ones the have TBC & other features.
Even of those some have more settings.
I assume that dellsam34 has this type of hardware.

I have done this conversion & the results looked OK but not great.
What I have for doing this is a filter called GREX
(There may have been improvements in the GREX. Mine is several years old.)
I have not used it in a long time.
It is supposed to remove the Macrovision copy protection from a commercial VHS tape.
I'm certain my results would have been better if I had one of the really good VHS units for doing this.

[Santiago]

I have used iMemories for many years. I have never been disappointed in the results.

[dellsam34]

The tapes I wanted transferred are indeed commercial films, but they all belong to the public domain library, so there wouldn't be any legal issues. However, if you feel unable to proceed, I completely understand.

I don't have any issue in this case, I'm all for saving the forgotten contents, but are you sure these titles do not exist on better formats? You can share the titles here for the members to search, In any case, if you want to proceed you can always PM me.

[dellsam34]

You're using a bad dvd recorder i guess

Sony dvd recorder (mpeg2 HQ Plus quality (15 Mbps) link Here

Depends on the source, If the source is clean like in your sample, MPEG-2 can still look good despite the obvious compression and chroma artifacts, but still nothing beats capturing lossless 4:2:2, doing non real time de-interlacing and upscaling and encoding to a much more efficient codec. If you look at this capture from a very old and soft VHS tape you can hardly see any compression artifacts (provided played in 4K with good internet connection), you only see some de-interlacing artifacts which is expected due to the nature of interlaced contents.