I've recently undertaken the task of trying to capture some of my mother's old VHS tapes to digital. Almost all of them are old VHS camcorder tapes. I think one of them is a copy of an old TV documentary that would be cool to do as well.
The VCR that my mother has is a Philips DVP3340V DVD/VCR combo. It does not seem to be the best quality. It certainly does not have a TBC. It only has a composite output for the VCR.
I started without doing much research and got an Elgato Video Capture USB device for cheap and it seems to be working ok for me. I was not very happy with the Elgato software, which seems to be at least applying it's own lossy compression (it outputs as mp4), deinterlacing, and cropping, resulting in a pretty blurry output. This led me down the
VirtualDub/Avisynth rabbit hole, thanks mostly to this site.
One of the reasons I got the Elgato, as opposed to a dedicated video capture card, is that I don't currently have the ability to budget hundreds of dollars on this endeavor. However, I would like to maximize my bang for my buck and get the best video that I can out of it, within reason.
I did not have luck capturing in
VirtualDub with the Elgato, as I've seen quite a few reports of online. The audio was significantly out of sync by the end of a 45 minute recording with the Timing Menu drop/add frame defaults on. With them off, it was totally out of sync even at the beginning of the video, with no reported dropped frames. So, I used AmaRecTV instead, and it seems to have worked great, the audio is in sync.
I've captured the first tape to an avi with the
huffyuv compression. Then, I've just used QTGMC to deinterlace it for viewing on the PC. I'm much happier with that result than what came out of the Elgato software. I'm interested in trying to improve that further, but definitely have a lot more to learn.
Can I significantly improve my capture by purchasing a better used VCR and/or DVD pass-through for less than $200 or so? I know some people say not to buy from places like
eBay, but I'm not sure where else I would get something like this. I'm not afraid of trying to do my own maintenance/repairs (with a guide at least). I'm fairly handy and am competent at soldering, but I don't have a significant amount of experience troubleshooting electronics with unknown issues.
I attached a screen shot example of the difference in quality I have achieved so far with my efforts. (edit:hmm, it seems to have scaled down a bit on upload and isn't quite as obvious as the original screen shot)
Any and all advice on going further (or what i've done wrong) is more than welcome. Thanks!