The Best VHS Capture System Using Free Software?

mrcgran asks: "I have been trying to find the best solution to transfer VHS tapes to a digital format using Free Software only. I would like to lose as little as possible in the conversion, sampling optimally, minimizing noise and being in control of every step of the process. Storage is not a problem. I'm expecting to use around 5GB+ for each hour of raw captured footage." If you were going to build a VHS capture system using Free Software, how would you do it?

The software part seems promising: VLC and mencoder for conversion of raw footage, Cinelerra and many others for video editing.

However, the hardware is being tricky. Most try to bloat the device adding functions like TV/compression/edition instead of focusing on the raw A/D conversion. Chipsets are hidden, and parameters like signal-to-noise, sampling rate etc are unavailable for comparison. Information is scattered and very difficult to find.

Which chipsets/products should I look for, specially for use with Linux and BSD? Which ones allow oversampling of pixel resolution and number of frames (in order to average the values and reduce the noise)? Which setup should I use: S-Video/Composite, sampling rate/oversampling, suggestions on high-quality VHS players/heads/tape cleaning processes, etc? Has anyone tried to use scaling algorithms such as hq/scalenx to upscale video and sound resolution? Pitfalls?"

Comments

Using a DVD recorder

[Rastignac]

Plug the VHS reader with the DVD recorder. Play the tape and record it on a DVDRW (using highest available quality). Voilà. That's the easiest way to do it, and the quality is good. Now put the DVDRW in your PC, and get the files (MPEG2 VOB), and use any software for editing them.

Re:Hardware

[fyngyrz]

Why is an external time base corrector required when you are going to sample and process the signal anyway?

TBC's do a lot - you should read this short page, it is very concise and to the point.

The other two questions are not relevant because you were fed misinformation. You do want an SVHS deck, and you do want to use S-Video as the source if humanly possible. Composite video is more of a compromise than S-Video is. Keeping the chroma and luma separate resolve interference issues you have seen many times such as ties with stripes turning colors.

Re:DV capture bridge

[rasper99]

Since you want to use free software it might be to save money along with your principles of avoiding M$. Quality may suffer a bit but you can use a DV camcorder (which you could probably borrow) that has analog to digital conversion for the DV bridge mentioned earlier. Hook the VCR analog video to the camcorder. Hopefully you can use S-Video instead of composite. Then firewire from the camcorder to the PC firewire.

This makes it just like a DV camcorder capture which is rather straight forward. No TV capture cards, etc. Let the camcorder do the analog to digital conversion like it is designed to do. Once captured compress using your favorite codec.

Trying to start a business...

[Thumper_SVX]

... or trying to capture your home movies to digital format for archival? This makes a big difference.

If you're looking to start a business to do this, then the software should be the least of your worries and you should be looking at broadcast quality hardware to do the conversion. An OTS VHS recorder strapped to a PC with a raw capture card (they do exist for Linux and they're pretty good with minimal features... check the MythTV Wiki for info on those) is going to give you something that's going to look/sound worse than VHS no matter what you do. But again, if you want to do this commercially, then there's no replacement for quality hardware and software.

An Apple Mac Pro with capture cards connected to broadcast-quality SVHS playback hardware is going to be your best bet... and the software's readily available (though not cheap) and extremely nice to use. No, I'm not an Apple fanboy (though I do use a Mac laptop), but this kind of media manipulation is precisely what Macs are good at and the software/hardware available on that platform is still better than the equivalents on Windows in my opinion. At the very least, it's a more mature media platform than Windows or Linux.

The point I'm getting at here is that if you're going to do it right, you're going to spend $10,000 on hardware... why run free software when it'll only cost an extra grand?

(NOTE: For the pedants out there, I know the numbers are not precise... I'm just making a point, here!)

Now, if you're looking to just convert your VHS collection to digital... screw it. You're never going to get the economies of scale on the hardware you'd need to make the expense worth it. There are plenty of companies out there already who do this commercially, and have the commercial grade equipment to do the conversion. They can do this because they resell the service over and over... most of them recoup the cost of hardware pretty quickly... and they have professional, experienced people who will do the cleanup on the captured video before it's dumped to a digital medium.

I've watched some of these guys work, and they amaze me. You'll end up with something digital and indistinguishable from your VHS tapes... in fact with decent image processing by an experienced editor and some sound processing thrown in the results may appear BETTER than the source material played back on your average consumer-grade VHS player. They won't really be significantly better... but with corrected color balance and resampling and cleanup of the soundtrack you'd be amazed the difference it can make. Total cost might only be around 10% of the cost of the hardware that you're talking about needing to do the job right.

Besides, after spending all that money on the hardware (see above) and doing your captures, what then? eBay it? Good luck... you might get 30% of your money back at the end of the day, and that's presuming it sells!

Re:Hardware

[evilviper]

Then use whatever capture card you can find that works well with whichever distro you're using.

Congratulations on spending $2,000 on equipment, only to end up recording noisy crap...

Most popular TV capture cards are low S/N, and very noisy. That applies to any BTTV cards.

I would, at the very least, suggest getting an SAA71xx card, because the quality will be much better, and it's one of really the only 2 non-BTTV card well supported under Linux. (The other being Zoran)

Mencoder is really all you need on the software side.