Ask Slashdot: Best Service To Digitize VHS Home Movies?

An anonymous reader writes Could someone recommend a service to convert old VHS home movies to a lossless archival format such as FFV1? The file format needs to be lossless so I can edit and convert the files with less generation loss, it needs 4:1:1 or better chroma subsampling in order to get the full color resolution from the source tapes, and preferably it should have more than 8 bits per channel of color in order to avoid banding while correcting things like color, brightness, and contrast.

So far, the best VHS archival services I've found use either the DV codec or QuickTime Pro-Res, both of which are lossy.

Comments

Ask them

[ArcadeMan]

If one of the service offers QuickTime Pro-Res, they can probably also offer QuickTime Animation instead. Just ask them.

Re:Ask them

[Anonymous Coward]

Or uncompressed, or pr4:4:4:4 which is barely compressed and 12 bit per channel.
Also ProRes 4:2:2 HQ (it can also do 10bit per channel) which would certainly be more than fine for editing. It's used in the media industry all the time. I'm sure his needs for quality and generational loss provision aren't higher than most pro shops. Unless he really needs all the data foursome other kind of analysis. Which I doubt since he specified 4:1:1 chroma subsample res.

If pr444 isn't good enough then I'm at a loss as to what would be good enough besides raw ADC output.
You can easily put pr444 through 5 generations have no visible generational quality loss. why is he even worried about generational loss in the day of the Non-Linear-EditoR. Put all that shit in a database and always link to the originial footage.

All the pros have an acquisition format. Even RedCode is a lossy-raw format. I don't think that worried Peter Jackson. He just looked at the results.

Sounds like he's worried and doesn't understand the point of diminishing returns and thinks compression at all =bad.

- a neck-beard from the Video production world.

Re:Ask them

[im_thatoneguy]

Or, just use the ProRes or DNxHD.

VHS is 4:1:1 and incredibly soft. ProRes and DNxHD are both so lightly compressed and 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 that you'll never notice the difference.

It doesn't need to be Uncompressed. You might want it to be 10bit but even that would be pushing it.

The only time you really need uncompressed footage is when you're dealing with noisy footage which is difficult to compress. VHS footage is so soft that there is very little entropy to compress so the 4:1 or 6:1 compression of DNxHD for instance would be effectively lossless.

Quick Pro Res for analog input

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguing that Quick Pro Res compression is lossy for VHS input is really stretching your obsessive disorder about maintaining quality, especially since you mention you are going to be *correcting* the input anyway, so it is not *exactly* the same any more as the source. So what's next, after storing GiB of pixel perfect replicas you will lose them to disk corruption because you don't implement reed solomon codes on your storage?

Do it yourself?

[kheldan]

If the overall quality is a high priority to you then why not get a decent video capture device and do it yourself? By the way, if it's all on analog video tape like VHS, isn't it going to have degraded somewhat all by itself over time anyway? I've still got some VHS tapes I recorded myself that are at least 10 years old, and a high-end Sony VCR I kept (used to have two) and even though they were brand-new 'broadcast quality' tapes recorded at 2-hour speed, they really don't look all that great now. Honestly if it were I, and it was that important, I'd get a good video capture device, capture it all to the most uncompressed format I could, and do the editing myself.

Re:Do it yourself?

[TWX]

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.

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. Depending on the inputs on the tuner card you can experiment with coaxial, composite, and S-video inputs to see which combination turns out the best quality (ie, if the comb filter on an S-VHS deck isn't as good as it should be, maybe composite makes the most sense, or maybe a very high quality RG-6 or RG-11 cable and RF transmission will be best) so it's worth some experimentation.

Bear in mind, that VHS resolution is about 330x480 when thought of in modern digital formats, and nothing is going to overcome that. Even S-VHS is only about 570x480, so you're still looking at poor quality even with some of the higher end S-VHS and S-VHS-C camcorders compared to anything modern. Don't expect miracles, you will be let-down.

Re:Do it yourself?

[whereiswaldo]

I've been using a DVD Player/Recorder machine to digitize old home movies from VHS-C (using a converter tape in a VHS player) to DVD. Then I rip the DVD into a VIDEO_TS folder using RipIt for Mac and also have it create a .m4v file. I save both formats for posterity, as well as the physical DVD I burned and (for now) the original tape.

Re:Do it yourself?

[QuietLagoon]

...even though they were brand-new 'broadcast quality' tapes recorded at 2-hour speed, they really don't look all that great now....

VHS was never even close to "broadcast quality" (even at the "2 hour" speed). I had S-VHS, which was markedly better than VHS, and even that was still a significant step below "broadcast quality". And I used the "2-hour" speed for S-VHS. VHS just sucked, plain and simple.

.
Methinks the quality of your tapes has not deteriorated anywhere near as much as you think, but your frame of reference has moved as you've bceome accustomed to newer technology.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Mr D from 63]

Along these lines, but a bit OT, I have found it surprisingly hard to find a decent DV capture software. The one's I've tried have had problems with audio sync or even finding the device. I have wasted hours getting my DV tapes to digital, and have been putting off trying again.

Re:Do it yourself?

[NJRoadfan]

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.

Re:Do it yourself?

[NJRoadfan]

For Windows, try WinDV. It dumps the DV stream direct to an AVI file. Most DV capture problems in Windows can be tied to Firewire drivers, particularly in Windows 7. Some machines require the "legacy" IEEE-1394 drivers installed.

Re:Do it yourself?

[mrmeval]

I used a video capture card with Svideo input. I found after many trials that VLC worked well in capture mode with a tape that had issues. I had to manually clean the video and audio heads in the thrift store VCR and used another tape to verify the VCR worked wel mechanically. It still took two attempts. I then transfered it from the Windows 7 box to a Linux box and had FFmpeg transcode it after bleeding the docs for a couple hours and fumbling with several attempts.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Pentium100]

Still, when compared to analog broadcast, (or very compressed digital) SD, a good VCR and a good tape produce quite a good image, it's not full broadcast quality, but good enough for me. Especially since digital (and especially HD capable) VCRs are so expensive (tapes for them too) and not very common. So, no way to record HD and the best I can do is to record to a good VHS tape, since SVHS tapes are expensive too. DVDs don't last and don't allow overwrites, so a DVD recorder would not be useful to me.

Re:Do it yourself?

[QuietLagoon]

Still, when compared to analog broadcast, (or very compressed digital) SD, a good VCR and a good tape produce quite a good image, it's not full broadcast quality, but good enough for me....

In the second hlaf of the 80's, I went with a S-VHS VCR that had Hi-Fi capability (20-20,000 Hz, with an excellent s/n ratio). You're correct, the picture can be "good enough". But regular VHS or even S-VHS is no where near the ability of analog broadcast. Not Even Close.

For starters, luminance resolution for analog broadcasts (when a comb filter is used) can extend to 5MHz or even higher. Luminance resolution with a VHS recorder tops out with a resolution around 1.5MHz, on a good day. Then add in all the shortcuts used to reduce the quality of the color to fit on the VHS tape format, and you have a very limited color spectrum.

It's a shame analog TV broadcasts have been phased out, if they weren't I'd suggest you view one on a high quality TV. I suspect you'd be surprised at what was capable with that system.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Pentium100]

Well, I get analog broadcasts from my cable company. Whether it's the multiple splitters or the long cables (after the amp), but the video quality is not that great. Sure, it's better than VHS, but I cannot really see a difference between it and SVHS.

I also get IPTV from another company. The SD channels are higher quality than the analog channels that i get.

And yet, with digital VCRs (and tapes for them) being so expensive, i have to continue to use VHS...

Re: Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe you said VHS and broadcast quality in the same sentence. Ouch, I did too.

Re:Do it yourself?

[QuietLagoon]

Well, I get analog broadcasts from my cable company....

Well, there's your problem. Most of the analog on cable nowadays originated as digital, and it was converted to analog at the cable company's head end. Then it travels through the cable system, being degraded at each active device along the way. By the time it reaches your house, the signal has been processed so much, anything resembling high frequency video information has been smeared out of existence.

When I spoke of analog broadcasts, I meant exactly that, i.e., a broadcast received over the air from the television station transmitting it. I have also been fortunate enough to live in the reception area of New York City, one of the two network origination points for network shows (the other is L.A.). So there is little, if any, signal degradation from the network's network.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Pentium100]

I have used cable for so long, I do not remember the terrestrial broadcasts. Well, other than the very noisy picture I got when using a portable TV outside or using a piece of wire as an antenna during cable outages.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

LMAO, VHS = Broadcast Quality ... In Soviet Russia, maybe.

D1 is broadcast quality, NTSC. BETACam is broadcast quality, NTSC. A VHS tape was, even at highest possible settings, barely above absolute crap as far as video quality goes. You're not going to change the quality by digitizing it, as a matter of fact if it travels through a wire it degrades before it even gets to the DAC for conversion. If it's family stuff, buy an inexpensive bridge device for converting the signal to something your computer can read. There are many options these days under $150. Look at some reviews and pick the best one. If your VCR has S-Video or component out you may be able to get better-than-shite quality that you would get through a composite video out, but the best you're going to do is preserve the content at an as-is condition. Going forward you still have to deal with bit rot and backing up of the files. Ideally, that would mean archiving it back to tape as a digital file. Funny how that works.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear in mind, that VHS resolution is about 330x480 when thought of in modern digital formats, and nothing is going to overcome that.

Good luck with that. Once you exclude the vertical blanking and data regions, VHS decks usually only recorded about 290 scanlines for PAL and 240 for NTSC. That's frame total, not per-field.

Re:Do it yourself?

[kheldan]

You're reading WAY too much into two words here ('broadcast quality'). They were 'broadcast quality' because they were 1-hour tapes, not the typical garden-variety 2-hour tapes, the tape itself was thicker and overall higher quality than consumer-grade VHS tapes, and they weren't cheap when I bought them; the 'broadcast quality', if you're not getting it still, referred to the material quality of the tapes (better quality tape itself, better quality shell, better quality tape-path components within the shell, etc), not in any way, shape, or form referring to improvement of recording quality (which is impossible, VHS is VHS.

Re: Do it yourself?

[kheldan]

MATERIAL quality of the 1-hour tapes, not RECORDING quality, goddamnit..

Re:Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have VHS tapes, they you already should have a VCR.

Go to eBay and get a Sony Handycam DCR-TRV480.. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR2.TRC1.A0.H0.Xsony+dcr-trv480&_nkw=sony+dcr-trv480&_sacat=0 There may be other Sony handycams that do the same thing but mine is this model.

Several for around $100. It has a video in for capture and goes out via Firewire. Microsoft Movie Maker already supports Sony Handycams. Capture out of this DCR-TRV480 is 640 x 480. It has a function to get 720 x 480 but if your input is from VHS, it will look stretched.

I bought my handycam new in the late 1990's and didn't find out that it had a capture feature until a few years ago about 5 minutes before I was going to throw the handycam away. It makes for a great capture device and I've probably captured 30 to 40 video tapes with it.

The handycam still works great and I now wouldn't get rid of it for anything.

Nathan

Re:Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember Panasonic sold both VHS and S-VHS tapes actually labeled as "BQ - Broadcast Quality" on the case. The VHS BQ tapes came in a blue cardboard sleeve, and the S-VHS BQ ones came in a gray plastic hard shell case.

Having said that, you are correct that VHS and S-VHS were not used for broadcasting (except on some local-access cable alongside U-Matic). Betacam was the standard for broadcasting. VHS and S-VHS didn't have enough horizontal resolution. The BQ label was pure marketing fluff on the part of Panasonic.

By the way, that "2-hour speed" (the fastest tape speed for best quality) was called SP (Slow Play). The other speeds were LP (Long Play, 4 hours), and SLP (Super Long Play, 6 hours)..

Re:Do it yourself?

[storkus]

LOL, I worked at 2 TV stations back in the 90's and one of them used JVC S-VHS decks for non-prime-time programming (daytime and late night syndicated crap). To the trained eye, the difference with even 3/4-inch tape was obvious, but it apparently was still FCC-legal "broadcast quality".

Still, IMHO, it looked a hell of a lot better than MPEG-2 with all its compression artifacts: noisier, but none of the "blockiness".

Anyway, just to add my opinion to the original poster, ordinary 1/2-inch VHS is so noisy and has lost so much visual and aural information already that I think you'd be hard-pressed to lose any more by using a lossy compression format unless you intend to do serious editing (with effects and such where you'll have to alter the actual video rather than just cutting and pasting) after transfer. To REALLY blow your mind, consider that MPEG-1 (same as Video-CD and lots of OLD interweb videos) was originally intended to be roughly equivalent to VHS or even Super-VHS! (Yeah, I never bought that either.)

Re:Do it yourself?

[soundguy]

It's also just the luminance signal. NTSC VHS only has about 80 lines of chrominance resolution. Requiring loss-less archiving is a pointless waste of digital storage space. DV is a perfectly reasonable editing format for VHS source. I recommend the Sony DVMC -DA1 converter. It ignores the Macrovision flag.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

One additional caveat: Many, if not all, PC-based capture devices enforce VHS copy-protection technologies (not just the easily circumvented Macrovision). I've found, back in the days of XP, that several devices I was using refused to capture streams from commercial tapes. Pro (and, I assume, many prosumer) devices might not have such constraints.

Re:Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Beg to differ. A first-generation VHS dupe, viewed on a typical screen of the day -- 12-27 inches -- was reasonably close in quality to an original SD broadcast. VHS certainly didn't "suck" given the state of the art at that time. If it had to make a analogy, I would say the difference was similar to that between a 44/16 uncompressed CD-Audio rip and a 256Kbps MP3; the difference is clear on a good-quality playback system, but difficult to hear through your average iPhone/earbud combo.

Re: Do it yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD recorders can only do about two hours at standard resolution. It's a lot if swapping to do for long tapes.

For my long tapes, I used an AverMedia capture dongle and VirtualDub. I captured in Xvid, not uncompressed/lossless. Note my CPU was an i3-550 and it dropped less than a dozen frames on a 4-6 hour tape (sometimes none). It depends on footage quality/complexity. I'd recommend an i5 or equivalent for capturing. Some GPUs or capture cards have built-in encoder chips, but those are usually h264 (but it should take the load off the CPU).

Re: Do it yourself?

[whereiswaldo]

Did you run into any out-of-sync issues between video and audio? (eg. someone's lips move noticeably before you hear the audio) In the past I had problems, and that was my main reason for not involving a general purpose computer in the initial encoding process this time around.

Could you do it yourself?

[tgeller]

I converted a few tapes with a a $40 gadget (Diamond One Touch Video Capture VC500MAC) and was happy with the results.

By comparison, the one service I checked out charges $12 each tape, plus shipping etc. -- and takes three weeks!

If you have more than a half dozen tapes to convert, you may do well buying a converter. You could let it run at night, then pay somebody $15/hour to do the finishing work (conversion to ProRes or whatever).

(I realize that this doesn't directly answer your question... but is an option worth considering.)

Re:Could you do it yourself?

[Solandri]

If you do it yourself, make sure you use a VCR with S-Video output. The regular composite cables (red, white, yellow) combines the chroma (color) and luminance (brightness) into one signal. That means boundary with a high brightness contrast will bleed into the color (and vice versa) and you'll get marching ants. S-Video encodes these two signals separately and eliminates that particular problem. The biggest quality improvement I saw while encoding VHS and Hi-8 tapes myself came from switching to S-Video cables.

Re:Could you do it yourself?

[TheInternetGuy]

If you do it yourself, make sure you use a VCR with S-Video output. The regular composite cables (red, white, yellow) combines the chroma (color) and luminance (brightness) into one signal. That means boundary with a high brightness contrast will bleed into the color (and vice versa) and you'll get marching ants. S-Video encodes these two signals separately and eliminates that particular problem. The biggest quality improvement I saw while encoding VHS and Hi-8 tapes myself came from switching to S-Video cables.

marching ants I mean I guess I should be happy that you gave a source, but it would be even cooler if it had just remotely shttp://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/09/05/2222235/ask-slashdot-best-service-to-digitize-vhs-home-movies#omething to do with the subject of marching ants

Re:Could you do it yourself?

[TheInternetGuy]

Hey Slashdot, whats going on here? That link to this post wasn't in the preview, and I sure as heck didn't add it.

Raw videos devices are expensive

[ThatsMyNick]

Devices that can do raw videos are quite expensive. If you want a simple/cheap solution, Apple ProRes is a quite good intermediary format. I would recommend just recording to ProRes, using a noise/grain filters/editing it, and finally converting to H.264.

Lossless is overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Prores 422 hq is plenty. You don't need to capture the subtle details of all the VHS artifacts and it's limited color gamut. Generational losses aren't an issue either. Don't worry about greater than 8 bits per channel either--the information you are trying to preserve is non-existent.

Seriously, just get it into a quality format that will stand the test of time. Prores is used widely professionally and will be around a long time.

Re:Lossless is overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish we couldn't capture those extra apostrophes.

uh

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck VHS....my Samsung galaxy s5 does not even understand VHS it wants to auto correct to vs. When a new phone is like wif then you must get rid of.

Wrong forum

[Anonymous Coward]

This question is better suited for Doom9.

HuffYUV is common

[NJRoadfan]

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.

DIY - buy a cheap DVB-T receiver, with...

[carlhaagen]

...s-video/composite/audio input - almost all of them, even the "cheap-o" $20 models, have these inputs. Simply record to MPEG-2 and from there convert to f.e. h.264 in .mp4 using Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr) or similar.

Re:DIY - buy a cheap DVB-T receiver, with...

[fermion]

This is what i was thinking any commercial conversion place would do. I also recall those machines used to convert film to video, projecting the film and then recording onto video tape. I wonder if one of those could be used to playback a video on a good sony triniton TV and record onto a good 3ccd video recorder. The real problem with VHS is that it is pretty low quality analog, and one has to add information and fill in holes to make it work with digital. This may be the way to do it. When people complain about quality and blame it on lossy transition, it is probably more than likely the way that information is interpolated to make it work on digital.

Re:DIY - buy a cheap DVB-T receiver, with...

[Anonymous Coward]

...s-video/composite/audio input - almost all of them, even the "cheap-o" $20 models, have these inputs. Simply record to MPEG-2 and from there convert to f.e. h.264 in .mp4 using Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr) or similar.

Ok, so you want him to step on the quality twice? No. Convert it directly to h.264 (MPEG-4) with a quality encoding device and leave it there. Every time the VHS signal passes through a wire or the data goes through a transcoding you are losing quality. Do it once, best quality out of the box and leave it! Also, remember you are dealing with 720x480 maximum resolution. Don't try to double it up or upscale it. You'll also just step on the quality some more.

Does the original magnetic tape have those propert

[ledow]

Does the original magnetic tape have those properties?

Unlikely unless it's S-VHS and even then, I don't think so if it was recorded on any normal household camera (quote from the Wiki: "In VHS, the chroma carrier is both severely bandlimited and rather noisy, a limitation that S-VHS does not address" - and they mention that S-VHS tapes were used to record 20-bit audio, but only if you were prepared to use several minutes of videotape for one minute of audio, so the chances that it recorded colour with even 8-bit accuracy is unlikely).

You have to think mathematically - significant digits. If the original only have 3 significant digits, there's absolutely NO POINT in worrying about anything with 3 or more significant digits handling it. All you're preserving is error anyway.

You know what? Digitise it yourself if you're that worried. Get a capture card (good luck finding one that captures RAW), plug it into a high-end VHS player, stick it all in 32-bit PNG channels if you want. The end result will be so insignificantly different to your original but will cost ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more.

I'm with you on quality, I get that, and you want to get that stuff off tape sooner rather than later if it holds any kind of emotional significance to you (chances are, your holiday tapes from the 80's will never be played again once you're dead, and only a handful of times until then). But you're really trying to go too far because you've heard some things on audiophile/videophile websites and the like and think you have to do that.

You know what? The extra time spent with your family, and the extra money to follow the kid's hobbies, will more than make up for any theoretical loss in the MPEG encoding of some home movies. And, at the end of the day, so long as you can see who the people in the movie are and what's happening, who cares about the fine detail? You can't Bladerunner it back to 4K, so what you do now will not degrade in the future. And, chances are, what you do now is higher quality than anything on the original tapes anyway (unless you intend to capture the missing parts of the TV interlace somehow?).

Give it up. Buy a GBP20 adaptor from your local store. Buy a slide-and-film scanner while you're there. Have a night in with the family where you're all doing one job - scanning, sorting, cleaning, labelling, filing, archiving - and get everything you have in your archives digitised. Copy it to friends and family (who, honestly, really won't care but will be polite). Then forget about it until little Johnny is 18 and you want to embarrass him in front of his girlfriend.

I had a bunch converted and ....

[OFnow]

I had a bunch of old home movies converted to CD and unfortunately they are still boring.

DIY

[Virtucon]

Just buy a capture card or converter and use FFMPEG to convert it directly. That's what I've done to all my old VHS collection using a Diamond VC500.

Re:DIY

[fnj]

No human being known to science can use ffmpeg directly. Use handbrake. All handbrake does is figure out the gory details of the options for you and run it through ffmpeg for you.

Re: DIY

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy rtfm.

Re:DIY

[Virtucon]

ffmpeg -i device -y -s 720x486 foo.mp4

adjust your size accordingly. It isn't that hard.

Re:DIY

[fnj]

I hear you. Now try to remove the black bars and fix the screwed-up aspect ratio. Everything is easy as long as you're not trying to use any of its non-trivial features.

Re:DIY

[Virtucon]

All this has been baked and there's multiple documents covering it along with any customizations. I realize handbrake is out there and I use it but sometimes ffmpeg direct is always best for me. scaling example:

-vf scale=640:480

for removing black bars example:

-vf "cropdetect=24:16:0" to a dummy file, then once you know the size of the bars (crop detect output)
-vf "crop=640:256:0:36"

Again, there's lots of recipes out there and it's all documented as well. Just search.

Re:DIY

[SuiteSisterMary]

Handbrake runs it through handbrakeCLI. Handbrake is not FFMPEG. For example, Handbrake won't do video passthru. Audio passthru, sure. But not video. So you can't, for example, use handbrake to straight remux MKV into mp4.

AG-1980

[Anonymous Coward]

Search eBay for a Panasonic AG-1980 or AG-5710 (they're the same machine, the 5710 has no TV tuner though.) Then grab an analog to digital converter, like the Canopus/Grass Valley/Belden ADVC110. Plug it all in and you can capture to whatever editing program you would like.

If you want even better quality, you can get a capture card like the ones from Blackmagic or AJA. I don't think the increase in quality of your capture card and codec will be noticeable though. It's likely the VHS tape will be your quality-limiting factor.

Jesus Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have Asperger's? Who's going to watch these, how many times??? Who cares???

Re:Jesus Christ

[amiga3D]

Obviously the original poster cares. Some old home movies are precious more than money many years later. I know the video I have of my children back in the 80's is priceless to me.

Re: Jesus Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the OP does have Aspergers. So what? People with Aspergers are still people, and you don't need to be an ass about it.

Re:Jesus Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but did you anguish over the chrominance sub-carrier resolution and the codec and editing them? Who gives a shit? Just rip them and forget them. You're not George Lucas!

Re:Jesus Christ

[Andrewkov]

If he was George Lucas he would be digitally editing his home movies to add CGI.

Video capture card and ProRes

[Art3x]

I don't know of any services. The only way I know would be to get my own gear:

1. S-VHS VCR. Even if your tapes weren't recorded in this higher-resolution format, S-VHS VCRs make VHS tapes look better.

2. Analog-to-digital capture card, like from Blackmagic Design or Grass Valley. Make sure it has an S-video input jack.

3. S-video cables. This cable keeps the brightness and color portions of the picture separate as it goes from the VCR to your computer. This is the best you can do from VHS. The only thing better would be RGB cables or some kind of digital output from the VCR, but no VCR has such outputs. The best is S-video, and only S-VHS VCRs have that. However, it is noticeably better than the standard composite cable, the single RCA jack, typically yellow, on most VCRs.

4. Time-base corrector (optional). The capture card might do this well enough. If not, this device would stabilize and correct the video signal. So you would connect your VCR to the time-base corrector, and the time-base corrector to your VCR --- all with S-video cables.

For your capture format, I guess you could go completely uncompressed, but ProRes is 10-bit 4:2:2 and already overkill for VHS.

Re:Video capture card and ProRes

[Anonymous Coward]

An ancient neck-beard from the Video production world agrees whole heartedly.

Lost at the start.

[Ol Olsoc]

Your old VHS tapes are not in any shape to make decent digitizations. THen again, a new VHS tape ain't all that. VHS was the bottom of the barrel quality wise. Bandwidth on just the red channel was less than 1 MHz,. ALmost certainly not time coded, and let's not forget print-through, where the magnetic information stars to print through from the bits of tape on either side..

So in the end, at best, you can hope for rather fuzzy looking digitizations.

Video has come so far that these VHS tapes will look like crap compared to what we regularly see now.

Your best bet is to get a digitizer, set it up with a spare computer, and rip them. Then after burning to media, the results are best fondly remembered, and not watched.

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree 100% with parent. Just wanted to add: Lossy encoding means losing high-frequency information. Sometimes that's important. More often than not it's ghosting from over-the-air reception, noisy playback, or tape deterioration. In other words: The lossy MPEG looks a lot nicer than the original perfect copy of crap!

For my money, if you really want to do it, get a decent encoder. Hauppage makes a few. Hook it up to a computer with a really big harddrive. Start a tape running every night before you go to bed. Perhaps another in the morning. Review when time permits.

DVD Recorder

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a Samsung DVD Recorder that also had a hard drive, tapes were recorded at a rate of about 2Gb per hour and when the hard drive was full I just removed it and connected it to my media server. All of the recordings were there in AVI format and all I needed to do was change the file names.

As pointed out above, VHS is a poor quality recording compared with recent technology so there's no point using a high specification method to digitize the tapes.

One in the UK

[coastwalker]

Disclaimer I used to work with Colin a decade or two ago but he is apparently well set up to do this kind of work these days and I suspect he will wring out the best that can be done in a transfer.
http://www.video99.co.uk/l

Re:One in the UK

[coastwalker]

oops http://www.video99.co.uk/

dv camcorder

[BradMajors]

Plug the output of a VHS player into the input of a DV camcorder, press record.

Re:dv camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read his question? He said lossless, and DV is lossy.

Don't even bother arguing whether he needs lossless, that's what he asked for. I get really tired of tech guys answering "why do you need that?"

"Where can I find a good peach pie?"
"Why do you want peach? Here's a place that has great apple pie."

Sheesh.

Re:dv camcorder

[dfsmith]

Every digital format is lossy compared with the analog source material. As long as you only lose the noise part, you can reasonably call it lossless. I think the analogy is more like:

• "Where can I find a good semi-freestone peach pie?"
• "The place over there does a great clingstone peach pie."

Re:dv camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

> Every digital format is lossy compared with the analog source material.

Yes, that's why we don't use the word "lossy" for analog, it's specific to digital compression. Throwing out information to improve compression is "lossy," preserving all input data is "lossless."

It you use "lossy" to mean imperfect fidelity, then in fact all media are lossy and there's no point making the distinction.

Re:dv camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

in fact all media are lossy and there's no point making the distinction.

Er yeah, that's exactly the point.

Re:dv camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is, if "lossy" just means "imperfect fidelity," then there is no such thing as lossless.

Either look up what the term means and why it was coined, or just stop using it, please.

Re:dv camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did you even read his question? He said lossless, and DV is lossy.

Don't even bother arguing whether he needs lossless, that's what he asked for. I get really tired of tech guys answering "why do you need that?""

You know, I don't have to spend my time offering our advice to those who seek it. I'm not getting paid. I've never created a slashdot account, even though I've participated in this website since nearly the beginning, so I'm not gaining karma or whatever the hell you get. But sometimes the people ask questions that don't make sense and, in the spirit of kindness, I sometimes respond with my advice. In this case my advice is based on over a decade of digital video production experience.

Sure I could answer the question that was originally asked, but I (and many others who also responded) believe there is no significant merit in attempting to do a lossless capture of a VHS tape, even a pristine one. Why capture in a format that will occupy 20 - 50 times as much disk space, be less compatible with editing/conversion software and in the end be visually indistinguishable? Not to mention that the fact that the ProRes video decode several times faster than realtime, which will make any video editing effort much less painful, speed up rendering times, etc...

Next you'll be telling me the merits of doing 192 Khz/24 bit uncompressed captures of audiocassettes. We need the modern digital equivalent of the phrase "You can't get blood from a rock"...maybe it's this "You can't get 4K-3D from VHS".

Re:dv camcorder

[sysrammer]

" I've never created a slashdot account, even though I've participated in this website since nearly the beginning..."

What? You wasted a chance to trot out your lossless 4 digit userid every alternate All Fools Day?

Re:dv camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I don't have to spend my time offering our advice to those who seek it. I'm not getting paid.

But for some reason, you feel compelled to answer, just because "he's wrong."

But sometimes the people ask questions that don't make sense and, in the spirit of kindness, I sometimes respond with my advice. In this case my advice is based on over a decade of digital video production experience.

He may have framed his question based on limited information, and we can certainly help him get better informed, but telling him not to do what he wants to do isn't really helping at all.

Presumably he's already done enough research to justify ruling out lossy codecs. Now he's just looking for someone to help achieve his ends but isn't having any luck.

Why capture in a format that will occupy 20 - 50 times as much disk space, be less compatible with editing/conversion software and in the end be visually indistinguishable?

Because lossy codecs are a content delivery format, not a production format?

The most important thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The most important thing is to do it now. I've been doing video work for many years now and I have to tell you that VHS is still going to be VHS. Granted there is theorietical loss when you edit and re-compress it, but it will be far, far, far better than what we used to get with tape duplication. VHS is realistically on a par with 320 x 240 resolution mpeg1; if it was done with the absolute best quality available 10 years ago it may be 640x480 at mpeg2. Maybe.

Do not waste a bunch of time finding the best technical solution. The best technical solution is the one you use This Week to begin the long boring job of digitizing it. Do not wait. That is the best advice you will get here or anywhere else.

mo

Re: The most important thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The second most important thing: don't use RealMedia. God kills a kitten every time someone encodes a video In it.

Re: The most important thing

[sysrammer]

The other 1st most important thing: Clean the heads, then test your VHS recorder with a non-important tape.

Tried this

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried this with a machine you could get off the shelf. It's basically a VCR with output that connects to your computer. The computer can then encode the video as you see fit. Sadly, the quality was terrible. VHS tapes don't have all that great quality compared to modern DVDs and hi-res streaming. Most of the tapes were staticy and I gave up after about a half dozen.

You are probably better off buying your videos in a digital format and replacing your old tapes a few at a time. Unless you are ripping VHS home movies (which cannot be purchased, obviously) then you are probably better off replacing rather than transferring.

Re:Tried this

[sysrammer]

yeah, you don't really want to mess with old off-the-tv movies or whatever. OTOH, 3-stooges are fine :) And, of course, like many have mentioned, an old family movie of the kids when they were actually cute, or grandma when she was actually lucid, can be priceless for the family and its descendents.

Today, of course, people video their lunch, etc., so maybe not so much.

Atomos Ninja and ProRes

[humanaceous]

Get the Atomos Ninja, record it in ProRes. Seriously, this codec is indistinguishable from RAW on an eyeball level. For VHS, it is waaaaay overkill, might as well just use MPEG2 for VHS (just being facetious). And its not like you are going to play the ProRes and re-record it to another ProRes device. That would be dumb. Just copy the file, there will be no loss of bits and bytes and what-not.

What about Video8???

[tcheleao]

Any video8 suggestions???
I have tons of tapes, but camcorder no longer works.
I have tried to rent a video8 VCR, unsuccessfully
Any help is welcome.
Thanks.

Re:What about Video8???

[microcars]

find a used Digital8 camcorder with a Firewire (IEEE 1394) output.
Put tape in, plug into computer, import footage.
Digital8 camcorders will play back video8, HI-8 and Digital8 while converting the video8 to DV on the fly.

For free sometime.

[nospam007]

Where I live we have a public audio-video archive that does conversions for free, but they ask for a copy if something of value for the community is on the footage, like festivals, concerts, parades or views of public places in the past and stuff like that.
Check that first, you can't beat 'free'.

Resolution

[ihtoit]

VHS at source is 576x320 (PAL I specification). Analogue broadcast limit is 768x576 (again, PAL I). MiniDV is 720x480 which is plenty for a VHS rip, in fact you'd be introducing noise as the system interpolates pixels. My experienced advice: use the napkin max for VHS, which is as mentioned 576x320 at 25fps or 480x320/30 (NTSC) through component, or 352x288 (either system) through composite. As you're digital from that point on, the only thing that's going to degrade image quality is transitioning and complex CGFX.

Short of it is, you are not going to get HDDVD quality (720p) output from a domestic VHS rip even if you use the most expensive gear you can get your hands on linked with solid gold and oxygen free cables. In fact, the best quality VHS rip you're going to get is doable with a Pentium III laptop and a KWorld composite dongle.

Re:Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really bad advice.

VHS recordings are analog, so they don't have pixels. That the stored video might only have 300-500 or so lines of resolution horizontally does not mean you should sample at that resolution -- you should sample higher to reduce loss at the high end. Even if it did have discrete pixels, you wouldn't want to sample at the same rate unless you could guarantee pixel rate and phase lock.

Second, you absolutely do NOT want to use a lower vertical resolution, and definitely not x240 or x288. Depending on the way the capture card implements scaling, this will either drop one of the fields or mix the two together, destroying quality of motion in the video. VHS records interlaced fields on separate heads and retains full vertical resolution, so the vertical resolution needs to be set high enough that the capture card will not attempt to resample -- typically 480 for NTSC or 576 for PAL. Even a tape that has been through three generations and looks pretty ratty will have full 50/60 fps motion in it that can be captured. Component vs. composite also doesn't matter here as both will carry full vertical resolution.

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you assuming that he's transferring crappy home videos? I read it as he has something really important (Kennedy assassination, first moon landing, Star Wars Holiday Special raw footage, lost Dr. Who episodes, proof of life on Mars) and wants to make absolutely sure that he captures even the noise floor as someone might well spend lots of time trying to recover from 1E-4 SNR.

lossy is not an issue

[dryo]

I'm a professional video editor, and I can tell you flat out that lossy codecs are not necessarily bad. DV is a very solid option, it's supported by all software. ProRes is fantastic, but it's OS X only, unless you want to shell out several hundred dollars for a Windows codec plugin. In most software, if you edit with the DV or ProRes codecs, frames will only be recompressed if you actually change the image data. If all you're doing is straight cuts editing, then your exported, edited frames will be bit-for-bit identical to the originals. If you do need to adjust the video, add transitions, etc., then frames will be recompressed. But you will be very hard pressed to visually detect any generation loss. You'll need to repeat that process through ten iterations before you see any image degradation. And remember, your original footage is VHS, which is hardly broadcast quality to begin with.

Re:lossy is not an issue

[im_thatoneguy]

There is a $49.99 codec now for windows. Works better than the Apple codec on a Mac for us. It is slow though, they haven't accellerated it for SSE3 yet.

http://miraizon.com/products/c...

Re:lossy is not an issue

[Wescotte]

Quicktime provides a decoding of ProRes on Windows. Also, ffmpeg can encode and decode ProRes and all it's variants (proxy, lite, HQ,and 4444).

Most important:

[microcars]

Make sure the service you find does cable straightening or uses "MASSIVE" brand cables.
This ensures all the 1's and 0's get through. Cables with kinks can cause some of the 1's to get stuck.
I use 1 inch diameter cables to import all my VHS video footage.
Why would you trust your VHS footage to anything less?

Re:Most important:

[Lord Maud'Dib]

I was always told the 0s got stuck at kinks as they were wider. The 1s can slip through when they are oriented correctly. Also, ensure your cable cross profile is oval to better accommodate the 0s. Which reminds me of another audiophile tip - purchase a parity alignment module and set it to the correct orientation, that way both 1s and 0s are oriented longitudinal to your cable.

Re:Most important:

[microcars]

I was always told the 0s got stuck at kinks as they were wider.

That is an old wive's tale that has been proven wrong.
www.TheTruthAboutCables.com did an in depth study a few years ago.
I forgot about the parity alignment module though, thanks for the reminder.

Re:Most important:

[sysrammer]

I'm sure it's a long-time habit with you, but novices need to remember that VHS tapes are magnetic, so it helps to align the source player with the Earth's longitudinal field lines.

Telecine Service

[dprimary]

Look for a Telecine service house they do all the professional film transfer work. The rates I'm seeing is about $150 to $200 an hour plus drives. 10 bit uncompressed SD is around 2 gig a minute. I have to think it is 4:2:2 since that is what most listed for HD. If it something you are going to edit you might want a ProRes copy as well which is about a 4 to 1 compression to make your workflow and drives easier to handle. You can also do color correction and other post work if that is needed.

Re:Telecine Service

[ihtoit]

you're talking telecine which captures at ~600dpi for 8mm, ~3K-5K for 35mm and 70mm *film*, this is transfer from *tape* which unlike film has hard specified limits.

Re:Telecine Service

[dprimary]

I'm telling the him places that will provide the service that meets his requirements. They transfer between many types of mediums, film to video, video to film, analog to digital, one video format to another.

Re:Telecine Service

[ihtoit]

my bad, it was stupid O'Clock when I was reading this. There's a link to a chain transfer service somewhere around, I had a look at that earlier, they charge something like $20 per tape-hour and upload to SD-DVD - citing the "What the hell is the point of transferring lower-than-broadcast-in-any-light to HD?" justification for doing so.

To the AC who tried to poo-poo my earlier suggestion of capturing in SD because WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF CAPTURING IN HD?, THIS IS WHY NOT.

be paranoid, record multiple copies

[woodendogwonder]

Don't use a mail-order service. The tapes could be exposed to magnetic fields from a variety of sources. The tech will most likely record in a lossy format and then export to your lossless format.
Do record multiple passes, preferably from different playback devices.
Save the multiple passes so in the future they can be sent through reconstruction software to correct for tape rot, etc. Enhancement software normally uses consecutive frames, but it might help having two interpretations of corrupted magnetic tape.

Re:be paranoid, record multiple copies

[spire3661]

Good call on the multiple recording. We are about 5 years out from having trivial video transform and stacking just like photos now.

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[Anonymous Coward]

"Get a capture card (good luck finding one that captures RAW), plug it into a high-end VHS player, stick it all in 32-bit PNG channels if you want. The end result will be so insignificantly different to your original but will cost ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more."

All capture cards with standard Windows drivers can capture "RAW". End user get to choose what compression to use. Also, why would anyone capture video as PNG files? There are several lossless video compression formats.

Re:Fire...

[amiga3D]

I've got some on old reel 8mm tape.

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[amiga3D]

I think the point is that he doesn't want the picture to degrade even more. Just because it's not the best now, if you use shitty equipment it will go from not good to total crap. There are some nice vhs edit decks on ebay for not bad prices. I bought a dual 8mm deck off there that cost nearly 2 grand new for only 150 bucks. The output was indistinguishable from the original.

ScanCafe

[605dave]

I tried capturing boxes of old tapes, and gave up because it was so time consuming. So I sent a box to ScanCafe (who had done great work scanning tons of old pics), and they did a really good job. Yes I could have done it myself, but yes I am glad that I sent it to them,

And no I am not a ScanCafe rep, or have any interest in promoting them. I just had a good experience.

Here's how I did it.

[epyT-R]

Bought a used panasonic svhs deck with svideo out and a time base corrector. Got a used capture card that has svideo in. I used an xfi card I had laying around to capture the audio at 48khz 16 bit (for dvd/ac3). It is possible to get old pro-grade vhs equipment with component outputs and a requisite component in capture device, but this is more money, and I wasn't convinced it would make much difference over a short-run svideo link for low grade standard vhs.

After installing lagarith lossless video codec, I used virtualdub to capture the video/audio output of the vhs player at 720x480. This results in losslessly compressed avi which could be edited in virtualdub to cut out unwanted parts, or it can be loaded in vegas or premier. After the editing, avisynth scripts could optionally be used to filter the noise out. There are gpu enabled plugins for it that work really well for this. After the editing and tweaking of the optional avisynth filters, the footage is probably as good as it will get. Just load up the scripts in virtualdub and reencode back to lagarith again, or if the filtering was skipped, just save out the edits made back to lagarith.

I also wanted my stuff on dvd to hand to non-technical family, so I used hcenc to push the avisynth script to dvd compliant mpeg2. This encoder does an excellent job and takes avisynth scripts as input. For the ac3 audio, I used aften. I used dvdlab to create menus and master the dvd image. I suppose if menus aren't needed, the dvdlab step could be skipped by using dvdauthor, instead, to create the dvd-video file structure and imgburn to burn it to a disc. I do recommend at least placing indexes at regular intervals so that the video can be skipped through with the chapter skip buttons.

This windows-centric method really wasn't that hard and should be doable with OSS equivalents. In terms of cost, the deck I managed to get my hands on cost me $100, and the dvdlab software is cheap (free as in beer and uncrippled if you use it within the first 30 days of installation). Like everything else, it's a cost/benefit ratio calculation, but I really doubt anyone else could've gotten a better result, even with pro-grade hardware.

lagarith
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec...
hanks's mpeg2 encoder

http://hank315.nl/
virtualdub
http://virtualdub.org/

ac3 audio encoder
http://aften.sourceforge.net/

to master the mpeg2/ac3 elementary streams from hcenc and aften into dvd-video
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.n...

optional, if you want a nice gui for menus and mastering/authoring of a dvd-video compliant image/disc.
http://www.mediachance.com/dvd...

to filter the video. requires learning its scripting syntax, and reasonably powerful gpu if you want to use the gpu accelerated plugins
http://avisynth.nl/index.php/M...

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is that he doesn't want the picture to degrade even more.

And the counterpoint is that even a $20 dongle capturing MPEG2 is going to have a far finer degree of quality in the capture than can be fed in by VHS tape under even the best of circumstances. If you're catching 1" marbles with a 0.5" screen filter, moving to a 0.25" screen filter won't catch you any more marbles.

Homemoviedepot.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Homemoviedepot (http://www.homemoviedepot.com/) has an option where they send you an
uncompressed version on a harddrive instead of recompressing it to a dvd.
I've used them for 8mm and they are easy to work with and can probably tell you more about
their process.
VHS quality is rather poor to begin with so the quality of the conversion is probably not
as important as it is to make sure that it doesn't get compressed or reconverted multiple times.

Re:Do it yourself? -With Magnavox DVD Recorder/VCR

[C0L0PH0N]

I bought a Magnavox ZV427MG9 DVD Recorder/VCR, available at Amazon for about $280, or on a Sears website for $180. I converted a large tub of precious family VHS tapes directly to DVD in this machine. I played around with different resolutions, but the highest resolution was visibly better, so I went with that. Then I copied the VOB files from the DVD's to my computer, and imported them into Cyberlink's PowerDirector, which has no trouble with the VOB files. The VOB files have a frame width and height of 720x480 at 29 frames/second, which I think gets the most information possible from these old VHS tapes. From PowerDirector, I can save these videos in a variety of formats, keeping the 720x480 and 29 frames/second, such as MP2, MP4, H-264, etc, etc. This has worked extremely well for me, and I think justified for my family the purchase of the machine. We are sharing it around to increase the benefit of purchasing it. In doing a bit of research before this project I read that combined DVD Recorder/VCR's automatically kept the voice in sync with the video, a problem apparently with some capture cards. I can only report excellent results for myself, given of course that VHS recordings aren't of the quality of modern hi def recordings.

Link to Marching Ants

[Taco Cowboy]

Why are the link to Marching ants got screwed ?

Here I post the link as it is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Another reason to DIY Re:Do it yourself?

[davidwr]

If you are trying to copy a commercial tape or anything you recorded off-the-air, most places won't touch it without a copyright clearance.

Some may bend a bit if it's something that clearly has no commercial value, like a 20-year-old news clip showing your kid winning a high school football game. But don't count on it.

For /. readers who have the complete Tom Baker Dr. Who episodes complete with PBS pledge breaks showing a much-younger you manning the phone bank, good luck finding a company that will copy those for you. They *might* copy the pledge breaks but not the Dr. Who.

Re:Another reason to DIY Re:Do it yourself?

[doccus]

For /. readers who have the complete Tom Baker Dr. Who episodes complete with PBS pledge breaks showing a much-younger you manning the phone bank, good luck finding a company that will copy those for you. They *might* copy the pledge breaks but not the Dr. Who.

Well, it looks like a lot of Tom Baker Dr Who fans have gone the cheapo route.. I have heard ;-) that the copies on torrents aren't rips from DVD but all the PBS ones with bad edits , including about 240p quality. Just like it was when first aired! This time I'd recommend better to save up yer pennies and get the DVDs.. For the episodes that were shot on film (and quite a few were) it really does look a whole lot better..

CostCO

[curmudgeon99]

Take them to CostCo. They digitized some movies I had taken in Russia in 1997 and they looked great.

Re:CostCO

[sysrammer]

In Soviet Russia, video tapes record y...

Sorry. It's late. I've been working too hard. And I have a pain in the diodes all down the left side of my body.

Video Capture Device

[Anonymous Coward]

Any recommendation on which Video Capture Device to buy?

Or, alternatively, any link that you can suggest which does a truthful comparison on the various Video Capture Devices on the market?

Thanks!

Home conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

I used a JVC hr-s3911u I bought some years ago and a Hauppage 150 card
with Linux. Use the S-VHS connection.

I have a recording of the Star Wars Holiday Special made on one of the first
4-hour units. That VCR had skinnier heads than a two-hour VHS.

Compared to what I've seen floating around, my recording is noticeably sharper.
Alas, my reception wasn't the greatest.

Some capture cards are more tolerant of time base instability than others.

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[danknight48]

You have to think mathematically - significant digits. If the original only have 3 significant digits, there's absolutely NO POINT in worrying about anything with 3 or more significant digits handling it. All you're preserving is error anyway.

Incorrect and bad advice for analogue sources with a digital conversion.
Analogue doesnt use digits, its not digital.
The beauty of analogue is that it doesnt comply to 1's and 0's. Its a wild beast of waves. When you convert those analogue waves to digital, you will always loose quality in the conversion.
So using the highest possible digital sample and bit depth ensures we have the best digital conversion possible. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't a perfectionist.

Example:
If recording analogue audio at 44,000 digital samples per second, we can get 4.3 times the sample rate (and accuracy/quality) when using 192,000 samples per second. Sticking to 44khz means you lose alot of possible data from analogue sources. We essentially could be missing areas of the analogue sample after conversion.

If your VHS videos mean alot to you, and you want the best digital conversion:
- Do it yourself
- Buy the best hardware available for your budget. By ensuring the source input (eg: tape player) is the highest quality possible will make most of the difference.
- The video capture card is also key here, find one that has high end DAC's and high digital sample/bit rates to match.
- use the highest possible bit and sample rates you can for digital conversion (ideally match the capture cards max specs, anything higher than those will just result in resampling digital, which you dont want).
- Save the video+audio as "RAW, no compression", then when you get time, research a lossless codec to suit your needs.

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[danknight48]

- The video capture card is also key here, find one that has high end DAC's and high digital sample/bit rates to match.

Mistype without morning coffee:
The video capture card is also key here, find one that has high end ADC (analogue to digital converter) and high digital sample/bit rates to match.

Sometimes i wish slashdot had a 3 minute edit window and delay before updating after posting, really do.

iPhone FTW!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I typed "vhs" and "betamax" into my text app... recognizes, capitalizes fine..

Re:Does the original magnetic tape have those prop

[ledow]

The analogue signal on a VHS tape corresponds to an exact (enough) representation of a PAL or NTSC signal, which you can capture in as much detail as you like but it will hardly vary.

The storage mechanism may be able to cope with more, but the actual useful data that could ever come out down a cable is limited to a quite precise specification. As such, higher resolution samples aren't going to help.

Also, VHS isn't entirely analogue. It has a magnetic representation on tape that is - again - highly specified to enable readback.

As such, it's not akin to, say, photographic slides or negatives (but even they have a useful resolution beyond which we won't see any advantage in delving), but more akin to storing computer data on audio cassette - something which formats like TZX encompass entirely even if they do not store every single magnetic charge that may be on the tape.

Your magnetic tape is 0's and 1's, by the way. Stored using a helical layout to stripe them around the tape.

Answer the question

[thejahn]

The lossy is not an issue comment may come close to answering the question... however, I do not think anyone answered the question... the person wants to have the tapes digitized to a lossless format for archiving. This implies post editing without MORE degradation than the tape already has. The question also implies creating a digital copy that in 15 or 30 years, has a chance of being playable on a PC or some digital media player. I would also like to know of a lossless video/audio codec and maybe a freeware piece of software that can grab the stream from a video capture card to edit and store video. I use a Happauge USB TV tuner card to capture video from a VHS player or a passthrough on a DVD player from my VHS-C player. I capture to DVD quality recordings but one it is digitized, I find it difficult to find a frame editor to trim the video. I have not tried post editing color or audio in the movies, I only wanted them to be playable as-is in the future, not clean them up. Personally, I keep old compressed VMs and some basic instructions around to allow for reinstallation of old Windows software and old media playing software for most of my stored digital content. The instructions include gaining access to external storage drives outside the VMs or to access cd and dvd images in the forms of ISO files.

Re:Answer the question

[Anonymous Coward]

ProRes Quicktime will be playable decades from now. It's in use at nearly every professional video house anywhere and supported by millions of video capture devices. It's also extremely good at what it's designed for--a time and space efficient format for visually lossless video.

Re:Happy Sunday from The Golden Girls!

[Jethro]

> Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.

Change approved.

Copy VHS cassettes to Computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I use EyeTV "hybrid" by ELGato. I connect my VCR/DVD player to my computer using the RCA jacks on Hybrid. I can watch and /or copy anything.
I did my music too.

Re:Fire...

[Anonymous Coward]

> My buddies dad still owns porn on Betamax.

Tsk. There's no accounting for people's weird fetishes.

Denoise them, or don't bother

[ulatekh]

Years ago, I became obsessive with producing high-quality DVDs from my extensive VHS/LaserDisc collection. Eventually, that led to the creation of y4mdenoise, part of the mjpegtools package. If you're willing to spend the time to let your computer chew on your digitized video, this tool will squeeze virtually all of the noise out of your signal.

Without it, you're wasting most of your bitrate just to encode noise. A video encoder can't tell the difference between noise and high-frequency detail.

If you don't want to spend that much time, then yuvdenoise, also in the mjpegtools package, does pretty well too.