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Ask Slashdot: Best Service To Digitize VHS Home Movies?

Posted by timothy on from the nod-is-as-good-as-a-wink dept.

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.

3 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Quick Pro Res for analog input by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    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?

  2. I had a bunch converted and .... by OFnow · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  3. Re:Do it yourself? by QuietLagoon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...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.