Digitizing VHS tapes?

[Saturn0660]

Be aware that prerecorded tapes of movies and TV series might "feature" Macrovision copy protection, an early version of rights management. The recording circuitry of VCRs is a little more particular than the circuitry that syncs a TV to the input signal. Thus a playback suitable for a TV will be unsuitable for copying on another VCR, with poor video quality on the copy as a result. DVD recording equipment is supposed to be designed with similar limitations.

Retail DVDs often feature Macrovision in addition to digital encryption of the files on the disk.

And while i'm down with what you're doing. Doing that WOULD in fact be a Copyright Violation. As crappy as that is.

 

[Jptrekker]

I'm using this one. You can set the software that you're recording with to VHS so it has the proper settings. My frame loss has been very minimal, mostly due to tracking issues on the VCR which can be resolved with a good head cleaner. I've been getting very good results transferring home movies to DVD. May try it with some old laserdiscs next.

 

[farmkid]

I've tried using tv capture cards to do this with home movies on vhs, but it didn't work out for a variety of reasons.

Fristly, the videos are not perfect quality, and the capture card drops frames even now and then. This causes the audio to drift out of sync. Even with applications designed to account for that, it still happens. Trying to stretch the audio and resync it manually is just not practical.

Secondly, the frame rate isn't perfectly snapped to 50/60hz from vcr playback. It can average out at 48.7Hz or something like that, so the numbers here don't line up perfectly with digital frame rates. This causes it's own de-syncing errors.

I've never had much success converting imperfect quality vhs to avi. It's actually easier in the long run to record directly into a DVD recorder, and then rip the DVD. They seem more forgiving of imperfect quality.

That's usually a problem with video capture cards that use the sound card to capture the audio. The reason is the video and audio are captured separately and then combined by the software. In addition, the video compression is done by the CPU, so if the computer is doing anything else, it is likely to drop frames, thereby shortening the video portion but not the audio. Also, when the two streams are not captured together, they may be captured with slightly differing frame rates, which will cause them to gradually go out of sync.

For the last few years, I've been using a Sapphire Theatrix card with the ATI Theater 550Pro chip. It captures the audio and video both and compresses the stream to MPEG2 on the card. There are several other cards out there that do this, most notably the Hauppauge PVR and HVR lines. The advantage of an on-board MPEG-2 encoder is that the conversion is done on the card, not the CPU, CPU load does not cause dropped frames. Also, the audio and video are captured by the same device, so they stay in sync much better. If the goal is to simply transfer to a DVD, the output is a DVD-compliant file, so no transcoding is necessary. It's not so good if you'll be doing any video editing other than cutting and joining.

Based on a later post, it sounds like the final goal is not necessarily a regular DVD, but just something to play on the computer. In that case, another simple solution would be to use the passthrough feature of a camcorder to produce a regular DV .avi file and then compress it with Divx or Xvid or something.

There's more information about exactly these kinds of questions than you could ever want to know at www.videohelp.com.