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08-22-2016, 10:29 PM
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Thanks for your reply! I completely forgot about it! But the long delay was no problem at all and your reply was quite a pleasant surprise! Yes -- I wanted to tell you more when I wrote, but was restricted by your web site's "140 characters or less" restriction. If you knew ME -- you'd know that I can't ever express myself in 140 characters or less! That's why I asked you to e-mail me. Anyhow, I stumbled on your web site article on VHS woes, looking for info on VHS artifacts -- and your article was the only one I had ever found that finally explained what causes that ridiculous "pinking/greening" effect. I get some of that a lot with old tapes. Depending on how bad (or minor) it is determines whether the tape is worth my efforts to transfer it to DVD. However cropping that out would be totally unacceptable -- for me, anyway. Most often -- I do the transfer anyway and just ignore that defect.

Anyhow -- I just wanted to FYI you -- if you weren't aware already -- that there is NO consumer VCR whatsoever, nor has there ever been a consumer VCR that had any semblance of high quality and reliability. I'm not STUPID! It's so obvious that those VCR discrepancies and defects were specifically and intentionally DESIGNED into them for the consumer market -- since VCR manufacturers had to make bargains with the devil -- that is, the entertainment industry, who obviously didn't want any competition. I've always been convinced that for fifty dollars more per VCR, manufacturers could have readily much improved their products! The bottom line is that a 179 dollar VCR had hardly ever had that much less quality than an 800 dollar VCR -- which was the retail price of my JVC HR-D630U, in which I only paid six-and-a-quarter for, buying directly through JVC out of Chicago. And yet -- I should have known all along! When I began transferring some of the JVC's old recordings to DVD -- after my long-time beloved finally gave up the ghost and died (for good this time), in 2012, and then having to play those old tapes on a decent but cheap 179 dollar Hi-Fi VCR, I finally noticed! My JVC NEVER produced a signal that it put on any tape that was in ANY way superior than any signal put on tape by a cheap VCR -- it was all window dressing! All those "digital" circuits acted upon the OUTPUT -- NOT the input! So the picture quality that came out of many of those old tapes -- without the aid of the JVC's magic -- turned out to be just the same as any other garden variety VCR output -- crappy! Go figure! Man! I really don't know how we put up with that for so long! Not to mention having to have them be in and out of the repair shop constantly -- at least once a year!

As for restoration of a screwed up tape with a TBC -- if that'd even work -- there's NO tape whatsoever that I can think of that's WORTH paying 300 dollars for -- for a machine that I'd probably never use again! And as for commercial VCR's -- which I am sure are mandated to be high quality and highly reliable -- you have to pay AT LEAST three grand for one of those! Nuts to THAT!

Hence -- capture cards for our PCs -- they're great! An old friend/PC guru bought my PC's components from ewiz.com and sent them to me back in '08. I assembled and set up my PC which is quite a hobby for me. One component was a 25 dollar KWorld capture card. Turned out, though, the tuner was defective and there was noise in the audio input -- but the video line-in was fine. Hey! Maybe THAT'S why it was only 25 bucks! You think? So anyhow, I co-ax my cable box output to my system using my
cheap VCR's tuner as a surrogate, and then simply line-out the VCR video output to the capture card's video line-in; and I line-out the VCR's audio outputs to my motherboard's audio line-in (via an
RCA-to-eighth-inch plug converter) -- and voila! It's been a smashingly successful operation ever since! So how nice for me! Right?

So anyhow, I just wanted to tell you -- I know! I know! Thank heaven we've been able to move on! And I guess I am impressed by how superior the video quality has turned out to be, processing video via my PC's capture card. And I am certain that one need NOT pay an arm and a leg for a decent capture card. Eighty Bucks? Whatever. Bottom line -- as it was with VCR differences (of which there were none!), I hazard to say there's probably not much difference between an 80 dollar capture card and a 500 dollar one!

I will think about joining your forum. Up till now I've shied away from them all -- I dunno -- I'm too private of a person, I guess. And -- I don't like being abused by other members. I had a bad experience once joining in on a conversation -- albeit a controversial topic -- on USA Today's web site. Still -- I DO comb through many a forum seeking information, oftentimes successfully. On many of them, though, I find it somewhat funny and quite amusing when one member has a technical problem, and a bunch of other members -- who have NO idea whatsoever what the solution is -- respond, often saying dumb stuff like "uninstall the software/hardware and then reinstall it!", or "Do a clean reinstall of of your Windows OS." Yeah -- right! I would NEVER do that! How 'bout "reinstalling your brain!" (Ha ha! Just kidding!) (Besides, BTW, I probe until I find the cause -- I like doing that and besides -- we ought to know what those causes are -- the answers are oftentimes quite enlightening and significant! I am very intimate with Windows and especially its' registry. I tinker with it all the time! And I have done a lot of research over time, finally at long last uncovering many of Microsoft's secrets, of which there should never have been so many!)

Still, on many other forum web sites, there are others who reply to member's problems and inquiries saying that they don't know the answer!!! Why on earth would anyone ever DO THAT!?! Beats me.

Thanks!


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  #2  
08-23-2016, 10:41 PM
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kpmedia kpmedia is offline
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Quote:
Yes -- I wanted to tell you more
I will think about joining your forum.
This was such interesting forum fodder that I just had to copy/paste it into a post for others to read. It's always interesting to hear about the journey others have taken to turn their VHS into DVDs. We also don't like to "hide" advice (or useful comments) in PMs or emails.

Quote:
Up till now I've shied away from them all -- I dunno -- I'm too private of a person, I guess. And -- I don't like being abused by other members. I had a bad experience once joining in on a conversation
We don't let this happen. This is a forum used by serious hobbyists and professionals, and we rarely get such misbehavior. Video requires patience, so you don't have impatient/rude kiddies running around. Literally, it's maybe once per two years when problems happen, and we deal with it immediately. I think we've only had to ban one person in the past decade.

Quote:
On many of them, though, I find it somewhat funny and quite amusing when one member has a technical problem, and a bunch of other members -- who have NO idea whatsoever what the solution is -- respond, often saying dumb stuff like "uninstall the software/hardware and then reinstall it!", or "Do a clean reinstall of of your Windows OS."
Also something that we rarely allow or condone. (That advice is stupid.)

Quote:
Yeah -- right! I would NEVER do that!
I never do either!

Quote:
Still, on many other forum web sites, there are others who reply to member's problems and inquiries saying that they don't know the answer!!! Why on earth would anyone ever DO THAT!?! Beats me.
The only time we do that is when nobody else has answered the post. Nobody goes unanswered on this site. We try, at least. Most people have the common sense to not post simply to say "I don't know". That's usually the behavior of spammers, and we always zap those immediately. Other sites aren't so savvy when it comes to spammers, and they leave up a lot of garbage posts.

I'll let some others here reply to the video aspect...

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  #3  
09-15-2016, 01:05 PM
sscohn sscohn is offline
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Thanks, KP! I just want to add, since you seem interested, that over the last 4 years, I have remastered 80% of my video movies/programs on VHS directly from cable TV (via my DVR service), and processed onto DVD on my PC, (1030 DVDs so far!), since most of my treasures were rebroadcast. (Turner Classics was a Godsend!) As for the rest, the stuff that would NOT be rebroadcast in all likelihood, I transferred maybe 100 VHS tapes. But for every one of them, once the final edits were done, I had to send each program through VirtualDub, using DivX compression, in order to use VD's smoothing filters, which were quite miraculous!,to eliminate that VHS "fizzle", which is a slow process, taking four times longer than the length of the program. But THAT did NOT deter me one bit! It was worth it! (If my JVC VCR was still working, I wouldn't have to do that!) In addition, I had to install and use Donald Graf's old de-interlacing filter to eliminate a strange artifact of the process, which was that every time the video changed from one image to another, there'd be one frame of the transition that would poorly blend the two images, rendering one of them as a splotch! But Graf's de-interlacer eliminated all that! How nice for me! Nice filter (but not so nice a guy -- Graf! -- oh well!). Over half of my VHS transfers came out quite nicely! The rest? You can't win 'em all, I guess!

Also, I want to emphasize that software issues -- particularly MS Windows issues are a huge challenge for me that fascinate me and spur me to find causes and solutions. Although I would never "uninstall/reinstall", which is a dumb method, I DO recognize that if one were a tech working for some employer, and one of the company's PC's needed fixing, and quickly! -- that MAY have to be the method. But for me, I have the luxury of time, and I insist on knowing the cause of an issue, so I dig until I find the solution and then document it. All too often the cause is one or two things and the solution is fairly simple. All in all, I have solved 85% of my software issues this way. The other 15%? I'm still workin' on it! And I WILL prevail! By now, there's NOTHING that Microsoft can hide that I can't find, in their evermore arcane systems! I "get" it -- why they shroud so many things in secrets -- but I think they, and other software vendors, are way too obsessive in their efforts to protect their copyrights -- which I think they pervert the spirit and meaning of.
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