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This Guy Is Digitizing the VHS History of Video Games (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: UK-based gaming journalist and blogger Chris Scullion is on a mission to preserve his collection -- and maybe your collection, too -- of these old video game VHS tapes. In the 80s and 90s, video game companies and trade magazines made these tapes to accompany popular titles or new issues with bonus material or promotional footage, giving a glimpse into how marketing for games was done in the industry's early days. Scullion has 18 tapes to upload so far, and plans to provide accompanying commentary as well as the raw video as they go up on his YouTube channel. Scullion's first upload is a promotional tape for Super Mario All-Stars, given away by Nintendo UK in 1993. It's hosted by Craig Charles, who played Lister in the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. Digitizing his collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He's capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing -- a higher frame rate than many standard commercial digitizing devices that capture at 30fps -- so that no frames are missed. Some of the tapes he's planning to digitize have already been converted and uploaded to YouTube by other people, he says, but most are either poor quality or captured with less-advanced grabbing devices.
Everyday I come to this site, and everyday I think we'll talk about some exciting tech news. But all that's here is news about some dude recording video tapes in his basement and people being mad about beta software not working.
It's almost as if the editors aren't actually nerds.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Nintendo's DMCA Takedown in 3... 2... 1...
I have some old VHS tapes I'd really like to digitize, but don't know where to start, and I'd really have no problem spending the $$ to get the right stuff to do it right like it sounds like this guy is doing.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Curious about capture method(s) I have a D-VHS deck which among other things... will output analog VHS to firewire.... I would be interested in seeing a delta on this capture versus D-VHS to FW... still.. very cool.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
You can't get more nerdy than that!
The My Life in Gaming guys and some others in NA have already done this to some extent, can find things on Youtube.
Some guy is ripping old VHS tapes!!
I recently got a new iPad and I'm loading it up with scanned PDFs of Byte Magazine from the early 1980's that I've read as a teenager. Remember when interfacing a data acquisition device with device drivers written in C to a data acquisition program written in Pascal meant writing your own code to make the two play nice?
As the years go by, I am amazed by how much history is overlooked. For example, I thought that I was an uber Star Wars nerd, until I realized that I had never heard of the Holiday special. Despite being cheesy, it was our first introduction to Bobba Fett.
If video games qualified as art I might care.
I'm so pleased to see that creimer gets downvoted almost right away. Praise jesus!
Might be easier to read the book, "The Ultimate History of Video Games: from Pong to Pokemon and beyond...".
Why?
VHS only has about 333x480 (NTSC) or 335x576 (PAL) resolution in luminosity, much lower color resolution. There is no point capturing it at higher resolution - you're just wasting storage space with duplicated or made-up pixels.
The framerate thing I can sorta understand - both NTSC and PAL were interlaced. So for example, the actual resolution of NTSC VHS was 333x240 @ 60 fps interlaced, which when deinterlaced (the alternate lines of video interpolated) created 333x480 frames @ 60 fps. While modern computer video formats do support interlacing, I've noticed annoying artifacts when they're converted badly (you'll see horizontal lines during quick panning or quick horizontal movement). So I can understand.capturing at 333x480 @ 60 fps when it only contains 333x240 @ 60 fps of information.
Maybe if he had access to the original Betacam tapes I could understand capturing in HD. Those had 720x480 or 720x576 resolution with 10-bit 4:2:2 chroma compression. But if your source media is plain VHS...
PAL is 50 FIELDS per second, not frames.
There are 50 vertical fields per second interleaved with each other. Each field consists of every other line, so each field is half the vertical resolution of the full signal.
There are 576 vertical scan lines in the signal, so each field is 288 lines.
The human eye is fooled into seeing a full 50 frames per second due to the high field rate.
By converting to 50 FRAMES per second, he is interpolating each field into a full frame signal.
So in this case, each field is being doubled to a frame, and then being scaled again by 2.25 times to arrive at 1080. So you're taking an extremely low resolution frame and up-ressing it. He would be better off leaving it at 480-50P and uploading it like that. Less data to encode and compress. As is, you're taking 288 lines and scaling up to 1080 lines. Upscaling has its limits as far as how much it can improve the signal.
The actual spatial resolution of a VHS tape is about 200 lines anyway. (the amount of detail you can perceive inside that higher resolution signal)
Also, hopefully he is correcting the D1 aspect ratio to 1:1 (square). It looks like he did in the video I watched.
VHS was the absolute worst of the worst in terms of signal quality, but it was there first and it won over Beta. Sony got their revenge later with Blu Ray. /former broadcast engineer
I don't like his posts but he's going to ruin his life by drawing so much attention to his cringy internet footprint.
Has he ever commented on this? It's almost sad except he's doing it to himself.
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Get a FireWire S-VHS/MiniDV Tape deck. This can output the analog VHS tape through the firewire (IEEE-1394, mostly the mini 4-pin connector) to a computer. This allows you to hook it up to Mac, PC, Linux, and the DV driver is built into the OS pretty much. I can import into quicktime, Adobe, Windows Media, any program in Linux/etc..
Try a JVC HR-DVS2U or HD-DVS1U. They do both VHS, S-VHS, MiniDV and don't care about macrovision. Plus it works with the RCA/S-Video input ports and sends it out via DV Protocol. I use these in my business and have two of them. They are about $200-$500, but they never have looked better. And it works on Commercial VHS as well!
Well that guy is an idiot as he upscales the stuff to 1080p which is completely pointless and only provides degradation of quality.
The smart thing to do is to use a propper framegrabber which does no deinterlacing. Firewire ones are good and their 25 MBps codec is practically lossless, yet gets down the data to a decent size. Also they both capture audio and video in perfect sync.
Then, and only then, you de-interlace in software to get the 50 or 60 fps. ffmpeg or avconv can do that easily.
For (S-)VHS or other colour under formats, you should use an S-Video cable, for component formats you should use component framegrabbers.
So to summarize:
1. Get a decent VCR (some Panasonic or JVC S-VHS should be good enough for VHS) If you are digitizing many tapes, it might be good to to have several ones, as they are typically worn out in different way and some tapes may play getter on some VCRs than others.
2. Get a decent framegrabber (anything Firewire should be good, but others may be, too, it having both video and audio inputs is a good sign)
3. Deinterlace to 50 or 60 fps (depending on the video standard) in software afterwards.
Video Game B-Roll by My Life in Gaming have been doing this for over a year and have almost 50 full promo videos on YouTube, in HD, with no commentary: https://www.youtube.com/user/V...