I have some VHS tapes that I want to convert to digital. Does anybody have any experience with this? I have some old VHS players that still work. I know you also need a converter or capture card. What's the best one that will work on Linux with ffmpeg?
Converting VHS to Digital
Colton Brooks
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Nathaniel Morgan
no personal experience here but it looks like you need a kit, they're not too expensive
Blake Cox
First off use S-Video, it's better than composite. Chinkshit capture cards meant for VHS converting are so ubiquitous that they're both cheap as shit and functional, pick whichever one you want. They should should just up as a USB camera input so pretty much any recording software should work fine.
Justin Sanders
I have an old, working graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 3870) from 2007 that has an S-Video port. Could this somehow be used to capture?
Carson Martin
Okay, I am currently looking at the Pinnacle Dazzle DVC100. It looks like the cheapest one that isn't utter dogshit (I hear EasyCap is terrible). Judging from the pictures it has an S-Video port, too. Not sure if my VHS player has S-Video, will have to check. Might have some cables too
Liam White
No that's just an S-Video output to connect to a TV or whatever. You're going to go out and get a dedicated USB capture card for S-Video input.
Yeah that looks fine. Pretty much every VHS player has S-Video out so you shouldn't have a problem there.
Austin Martinez
s-video is pointless for VHS capture, because the signal on the tape itself is already composited
Evan Thomas
You will want a TBC. Either a VCR with one built in, a Panasonic DVD recorder that has one built-in, or a professional one that's stupid expensive.
Samuel Lee
>get composite capture card
>capture with OBS at good quality (like 5000 kbps)
>deinterlace with ffmpeg
>(optional) upscale for better quality using video2x or topaz
That's all you need to do
For the record, I have an old Avermedia C039
Only downside is it doesn't save captions but those are usually easy enough to get online
Carter Lee
Also note that although VHS resolution is basically 320x240, you should capture at 720x480 (or 576) because oversampling is necessary to squeeze every last bit of detail you can get out of it
I capture at 720x576 even though I live in NTSC-land because occasionally the picture will be lower on the screen than it should be and capturing at 720x480 would have resulted in the bottom 20 or so lines being cut off
Robert Russell
>Also note that although VHS resolution is basically 320x240
It's 480i.
Lincoln Williams
I was mixed up with EP/SLP speed tapes and how those butcher resolution even more
But still, always capture at 720x480 or 576 to ensure you don't lose any of the limited signal a tape can store
Juan Diaz
The horizontal resolution of VHS is debatable since it's analog. It's estimated to be about 352 pixels, which afaik is why DVDs have a specification for 352x480.
But it definitely has 480 lines. It's a pet peeve of mine where people assume VHS was 240p because old videogame consoles were.
Cameron Jackson
it is 480i (at least NTSC tapes are, 576i for PAL), that's not enough information for a digital sampling, namely it doesn't say what the horizontal resolution is
the reason for that is of course it's an analog format, there isn't a fixed horizontal resolution
that's not to say it's unlimited of course, actually it's pretty shit, only a bit over 300px in equivalent resolution horizontally (luma), and 40px for chroma (colour)
even in low speed modes, the line count is always the same, it has to be, otherwise the TV won't be able to sync to it, this was before the time when it was practical to add circuitry to rescale the picture (like a DVD can have fewer lines than the output because it has internal scalers to bump it back up to 480i/p)
Alexander Morris
there's likely nothing to gain from going over 352x480/576, but people tend to use 720 or 640 anyway just for them 1:1 pixels (really doesn't matter with modern scalers)
Jaxon Foster
imo 720 or 640 just looks nicer. I guess redundant pixels help with compression.
Isaac Rodriguez
I did this method after a cheap USB converter delivered unsatisfactory results. It simply works and now almost all my tapes are digitized.
youtu.be
Anthony Edwards
>deinterlace with ffmpeg
na, use QTGMC, it's much higher quality than any of the built in ffmpeg filters
clip related, this was from a Hi-8 camcorder tape
(this is a 50Hz/fps PAL video, so it's only smooth if your monitor is at a multiple of that rate)
well it's not going to make the video much bigger, so there's also not much to lose, either
Robert Martinez
here's it in 352x756 just because
i'm not sure how Hi8 tape compares to VHS in resolution
this looks basically the same resolution-wise to me, halving the resolution does make qtgmc processing twice as fast (and video encoding), so there's that
Connor Foster
why QTGMC? doesn't look particularly better than what w3fdif can output.
Justin Powell
probably the main issue with using this resolution is that it looks worse if your player has a shitty scaler, while the supersampled 720px version has a nicely blended horizontal line baked into the video
Lincoln Fisher
the main thing qtgmc adds is motion estimation, it doesn't just prevent artifacts, it prevents resolution loss from motion as well, because it takes motion into account (due to each field only being half the video's resolution, a sufficiently fast moving camera can reduce the video resolution by up to half, but using motion estimation to correlate moving parts of the image, you can reconstruct a lot of that loss)
this does mean it's relatively very slow as well, but that's not much of a problem when we're talking about SD video on modern machines
ps. it's also a very high quality denoiser, too, with minimal detail loss, since it can tell moving fine detail apart from noise