Slashdot Mirror

There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.

Like anything else, people thought they could make a quick buck doing what seems to be an easy process. Most of these places just hooked up a cheapo VCR to a run of the mill DVD recorder and hit record. The results were awful, over compressed, and filled with video dropouts. To do it right requires time and money, something that isn't going to happen at $10 a tape. Doing it yourself properly requires significant investment in hardware and time to get the capture setup "just right". Even the DIYers (like myself) will tell you that its cheaper to send them out to a qualified transfer service. In my case, I didn't have much of a choice since a few of my tapes were in Betamax format, something many transfer places don't handle.

In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be.

This question came up on Ask Slashdot a few months ago. I'll repeat the list here

Recommended VCRs for transfer: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $200-300
Note: They are a a transfer service, they have first hand experience with these decks. You'll see that everyone else recommends the same decks too.
Recommended capture cards: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $25-50
AGP ATI All-in-Wonder cards can be had for about $30-40 with the required dongles and breakout boxes on ebay. Look for a decent Prescott P4 with an AGP slot at the thrift store or scrapper for your capture box. The cards require Windows XP as there is no official support in Vista/7. If you want to capture on your Windows 7 rig, try and find the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB. It has working drivers, and captures clean video with no AGC issues.
External TBC: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... $150-200
Used to keep capture cards happy. Many capture devices are sensitive to unstable video signals found on VHS tapes and either completely drop frames, or falsely flag the video as having Macrovision.

You can optionally pick up things like a proc-amp ($150-200 for a decent one) for correcting video levels. For software, capture with VirtualDub. For compressing video to MPEG-2, one of the better commercial codecs is MainConcept, although most go with TMPGEnc or open source codecs (HC-Enc, etc.). For DVD mastering, the old ULead DVD Workshop 2.0 does a great job.

There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.

Like anything else, people thought they could make a quick buck doing what seems to be an easy process. Most of these places just hooked up a cheapo VCR to a run of the mill DVD recorder and hit record. The results were awful, over compressed, and filled with video dropouts. To do it right requires time and money, something that isn't going to happen at $10 a tape. Doing it yourself properly requires significant investment in hardware and time to get the capture setup "just right". Even the DIYers (like myself) will tell you that its cheaper to send them out to a qualified transfer service. In my case, I didn't have much of a choice since a few of my tapes were in Betamax format, something many transfer places don't handle.

In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be.

This question came up on Ask Slashdot a few months ago. I'll repeat the list here

Recommended VCRs for transfer: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $200-300
Note: They are a a transfer service, they have first hand experience with these decks. You'll see that everyone else recommends the same decks too.
Recommended capture cards: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $25-50
AGP ATI All-in-Wonder cards can be had for about $30-40 with the required dongles and breakout boxes on ebay. Look for a decent Prescott P4 with an AGP slot at the thrift store or scrapper for your capture box. The cards require Windows XP as there is no official support in Vista/7. If you want to capture on your Windows 7 rig, try and find the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB. It has working drivers, and captures clean video with no AGC issues.
External TBC: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... $150-200
Used to keep capture cards happy. Many capture devices are sensitive to unstable video signals found on VHS tapes and either completely drop frames, or falsely flag the video as having Macrovision.

You can optionally pick up things like a proc-amp ($150-200 for a decent one) for correcting video levels. For software, capture with VirtualDub. For compressing video to MPEG-2, one of the better commercial codecs is MainConcept, although most go with TMPGEnc or open source codecs (HC-Enc, etc.). For DVD mastering, the old ULead DVD Workshop 2.0 does a great job.

There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.

Like anything else, people thought they could make a quick buck doing what seems to be an easy process. Most of these places just hooked up a cheapo VCR to a run of the mill DVD recorder and hit record. The results were awful, over compressed, and filled with video dropouts. To do it right requires time and money, something that isn't going to happen at $10 a tape. Doing it yourself properly requires significant investment in hardware and time to get the capture setup "just right". Even the DIYers (like myself) will tell you that its cheaper to send them out to a qualified transfer service. In my case, I didn't have much of a choice since a few of my tapes were in Betamax format, something many transfer places don't handle.

In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be.

This question came up on Ask Slashdot a few months ago. I'll repeat the list here

Recommended VCRs for transfer: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $200-300
Note: They are a a transfer service, they have first hand experience with these decks. You'll see that everyone else recommends the same decks too.
Recommended capture cards: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $25-50
AGP ATI All-in-Wonder cards can be had for about $30-40 with the required dongles and breakout boxes on ebay. Look for a decent Prescott P4 with an AGP slot at the thrift store or scrapper for your capture box. The cards require Windows XP as there is no official support in Vista/7. If you want to capture on your Windows 7 rig, try and find the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB. It has working drivers, and captures clean video with no AGC issues.
External TBC: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... $150-200
Used to keep capture cards happy. Many capture devices are sensitive to unstable video signals found on VHS tapes and either completely drop frames, or falsely flag the video as having Macrovision.

You can optionally pick up things like a proc-amp ($150-200 for a decent one) for correcting video levels. For software, capture with VirtualDub. For compressing video to MPEG-2, one of the better commercial codecs is MainConcept, although most go with TMPGEnc or open source codecs (HC-Enc, etc.). For DVD mastering, the old ULead DVD Workshop 2.0 does a great job.

Along with Lagarith and to a lesser extent, UT Video. All of them are open source (so you can implement them on the platform of your choice in the future), lossless, and support 4:2:2 chroma subsampling.

If your source tapes do not require special handling (water damage, mold, etc), these guys can handle it and the prices are reasonable: http://www.digitalfaq.com/serv...

They'll output to whatever format you specify, including the above codecs. Any decent place should. If the places you looked at are limited to DV, that is a sure sign they are using analog to firewire bridges. With HuffYUV, you can fit one hour of video in roughly 25GB. In the age of TB sized hard drives, that is nothing. So space shouldn't be an excuse, particularly if the customer sends in a blank external HD for the final product.

Not one VCR is best for all tapes. For SP speed tapes like home movies, the JVC SVHS and DVHS decks equipped with JVC's "Digipure" TBC/noise reduction from the late 90s-early 00s have some of the best picture quality out there. The Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U DVHS deck is another recommended model. Expect to pay upwards of $200 for a working deck on ebay. The list of model numbers can be found here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...

The Panasonic AG-1980P is best for EP/SLP tapes and is also better behaved with VHS-C tapes in the motorized adapter. The JVCs tend to have problems with the VHS-C adapters. The downside of the AG-1980 is that it is VERY prone to electrical problems. Almost all of them need to have full capacitor replacement, otherwise they have problems with herringbone noise, loss of color output, and "barber pole" patterns on the video output. Sometimes the deck even stops accepting tapes. Repair involves replacing close to 100 surface mount capacitors.

For capture, find an old Pentium 4 with an AGP slot running Windows XP and an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder with the Rage Theater 100/200chip. They have excellent analog capture quality and the ADC doesn't do any sharpening or muck up the video with AGC. Both of which are common problems on modern capture cards, including ATI's own PCI "TV Wonder" cards.

To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync. They also tend to strip Macrovision off of tapes *wink* *wink*. More info here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...

Not one VCR is best for all tapes. For SP speed tapes like home movies, the JVC SVHS and DVHS decks equipped with JVC's "Digipure" TBC/noise reduction from the late 90s-early 00s have some of the best picture quality out there. The Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U DVHS deck is another recommended model. Expect to pay upwards of $200 for a working deck on ebay. The list of model numbers can be found here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...

The Panasonic AG-1980P is best for EP/SLP tapes and is also better behaved with VHS-C tapes in the motorized adapter. The JVCs tend to have problems with the VHS-C adapters. The downside of the AG-1980 is that it is VERY prone to electrical problems. Almost all of them need to have full capacitor replacement, otherwise they have problems with herringbone noise, loss of color output, and "barber pole" patterns on the video output. Sometimes the deck even stops accepting tapes. Repair involves replacing close to 100 surface mount capacitors.

For capture, find an old Pentium 4 with an AGP slot running Windows XP and an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder with the Rage Theater 100/200chip. They have excellent analog capture quality and the ADC doesn't do any sharpening or muck up the video with AGC. Both of which are common problems on modern capture cards, including ATI's own PCI "TV Wonder" cards.

To avoid frame dropping, you need an external TBC (different from the TBC in the VCR) acting as a frame sync. They also tend to strip Macrovision off of tapes *wink* *wink*. More info here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru...

FWIW, http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

If by best you mean mediocre.

Memorex make some of the better DVDRs I've used in the UK.

Memorex makes fuck-all. They sell CMC Magnetics and Ritek media. The Office Depot brand is just as good.

There is a relatively small number of manufacturers of DVDR media. Memorex, Imation, Maxell, etc. are just stamping their names on them.

There a nice chart at the bottom of this page
.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

51 Gbs is better, but still far short of my 320Gb HDDs for backup (and I've got 1Tb of disks). A losing battle. Maybe Blockbuster will just give up and fill the ailes with Seagates to rent by the evening?

I posted the following on the article's comments section:

I'm curious what you (the author) think of this link:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
I was always of the mind that TYs are the best, with no competition. The article above also cites Pioneer, Hitachi Maxell, and Mitsubishi Chemicals in their top 5 archival quality media. I got the link from Lifehacker and was surprised to see anything but TYs as da bomb.
Lifehacker link:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/dvds/choose-the -best-blank-dvds-220373.php

Anyone here care to comment on the digitalFAQ.com article? I'm curious if anyone even halfway qualified agrees with them. Should I only stick with TYs or can I trust these other brands that they claim are as good?

I have found this dvd media quality guide to be extremely informative. Yes, Taiyo Yuden is always ranked at the top (and is what I use), but they are not readily available at local retailers. It really helps to have a detailed comparison of various media instead of just saying "brand X is best".

RiData sucks. Seriously, I'm not trolling, I've been backed up on this. Not to mention I've personaly had RiData discs fail on me within a month of burning, their double layer DVDs are good for nothing but coasters, and I have an entire spindle of RiData CDs with visible defects on them. How the hell did that get past quality control?

For me, it's Verbatim all the way.

Maybe it's the quality of media that you buy.
look up your media here to see how it rates.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm