Inconsistent timing with same settings?
 

Hello!

I've been capturing some test VHS tapes in the hopes of eventually capturing old family videos. My shamefully cheap setup is the old family panasonic PV-7451-> either a hauppauge usb live-2 or elgato -> new desktop with an AMD 8-core processor @ 3.6 GHz and windows 10 (yuck) -> virtualdub -> lagarith lossless codec.

Originally, I had an issue where the timing would drift heavily over time and there was an increase in audio pitch over time. I was able to remedy this issue by turning off the built in retiming tools in virtualdub, as I assumed the capture devices had some built in. This worked perfectly for a week or two on both devices and I got some decent quality captures with perfect audio sync. The fact that I was able to do this perfectly recently leads me to believe my cheap setup is not immediately to blame.

Then I came back to test out some other tapes and the audio drift (without the pitch change) is happening again, but this time its with the settings that worked perfectly before. I thought this may have been an issue with using a different tape but the Jurassic Park tape I used before is now also showing this issue with the corrected settings. I tried out the capture on the software that came with each capture device just to check and there are no timing issues on those captures.

Interestingly, when I recheck the options for retiming that were originally selected (and gave me bad audio sync), the audio sync gets significantly better but there is still gradual drift. I'm assuming because I've checked with the tape that worked before and with the software bundled with the capture devices that its some issue with what I'm doing on virtualdub, however I haven't updated any software or changed any settings since it last worked.

Has anyone ever run into this issue before and/or know what I could be messing up?

If you need any more information on my setup or settings let me know!

Thanks!
:salute:

With Hauppauge USB Live I experienced problems using VirtualDub, and did not succeed to have a good setting in the timing parameters to avoid (cumulative) asynchronous audio and video even in absence of drop/inserted frames.

Now I use AmarecTV or my own GraphStudioNext capture graph.

I'm not familiar with AmarecTV. Does it give you similar recording/encoding options to VirtualDub?

No.
............

It is just a capture program, does not edit video nor encode. But is excellent in capturing.

The difference compared to VirtualDub is that does not feature internally a Histogram to fix the levels, but is not a problem: a Histogram can be opened in parallel with a Graph inside AviSynth or with VD itself