OSD imperfections in JVC VCR or ES10/15?
 

Hi everyone.

I have had a few pieces of gear arrive in the past week and believe I am finally ready to get my VHS tapes digitised to a high standard. My set up is as follows:

JVC HR-DVS2 > Cypress CYP100G TBC > Tevion USB > VirtualDub

I am using S-Video at each step and the Tevion has come directly from Lord Smurf (thank you!).

My test captures are looking good, but I want to be sure they're not suffering from any problems before I get started on my tapes. My main concern is from the on screen displays, which maybe is not the best thing to judge by but I've got some questions. Of course these would all be turned off for capture, but I've left them on for now while getting set up.

1. The JVC menu. It looks acceptable at 100%, but if I play back full screen the edge artifacts and background pattern are noticeable. Is this just inherit in the JVC's OSD, or are these being introduced somewhere along my capture chain? I have tried with multiple S Video cables to no avail. I've also tried bypassing my external TBC and it still seems to be present (although harder to spot due to the other signal problems). Two screenshots attached. I should note that this has been present across three different JVC VCRs.

2. JVC OSD via ES10/15. I've been trying to experiment various connection methods for using the Panasonic ES10 or ES15 as a pass-through for problem tapes. What I've noticed is that the 'Play' triangle from the JVC gets passed through the Panasonic with no problem at first, but when the tape playback begins the triangle exhibits vertical jitter. Is this because the Panasonic's semi-TBC is correcting the video's picture, and as a consequence the OSD is jittering? I've attached three videos of this. #1 is straight from the JVC, no jitter. #2 and #3 are from the ES15 and ES10. Both are using the front input but the same thing happened across front and rear S Video inputs as well as SCART >S Video through an adaptor. #3 highlights the pre/post jitter triangle.

3. General picture quality. Lastly, if anyone has any feedback on the general picture quality from those samples, it would be appreciated. I've also attached a fourth, non-cartoon clip if that's a better indication. None of these are the standard type of video content I digitise, but they were within reach and all commercial tapes, so I thought they'd be good tests.

Thanks in advance!

JVC Menu (JVC HR-DVS2 - Tevion USB).png looks odd. Some sort of resolution interlace error, maybe? The card is fine, it has to be a settings issue. Verify 720x576 in main capture window, check Video > Capture filter/pin settings, check Video > Custom resolution.

I don't understand the "triangle" comment yet, need to swap to my video system to preview it.

Back soon...

Sorry I included that as an example of the menu capture when bypassing my external TBC. No problems with the capture once video playback begins (beyond general non-TBC issues). :)

All this is normal. I believe the OSD Menu output from this and many other VCRs (not just JVC) is a 240p signal to avoid vertical jitter/shimmering on CRT TVs, which is slightly non-standard and confuses some A/D converters, hence the behaviour. Additionally I believe it outputs chroma over the luma channel, and maybe also vice versa, which is what causes the background pattern.

The OSD wiggling a bit over the video is also normal, the OSD character insertion chip in the VCR is pretty primitive compared to the video decoder in the ES10. The OSD chip will try to determine approximately where a line starts and mix in the OSD, the ES10 can determine this much more accurately and resize the lines to the correct length, which will warp the imperfectly added OSD a little. It's even more pronounced with major sync issues when the OSD chip struggles to determine where the field starts. With the VCR TBC turned on the OSD will usually be quite stable as it's added after the TBC in the VCR has corrected line lengths and replaced the horizontal synchronization signal with a freshly generated one.

Excellent, thanks for the reassurance!! My eyes were starting to fall out of my head after looking so closely in my captured footage to try and see if that pattern was coming through. Kind of like a Magic Eye puzzle, only backwards.

Excited to start working through my tapes now :D

The JVC OSD is 240p, just like 1980s/90s video game consoles. Lots of capture cards either flat out won't capture it, or treat it as interlaced leading to weird artifacts.

Prior to this I've been using an ADVC-110. The JVC menu text was always a little jagged, but I'd never noticed the background pattern before. The DV compression was obviously masking it, although until recently I had no idea that compression was even being applied. I've learnt a lot in recent months thanks to this forum!