VHS to DVD conversion: My way doesn't look very good!

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenAcres

But I thought a fast 7200rpm Ultra 100 should be able to do at least 40 Mbytes/sec sustained. Shouldn't that be fast enough?

Depends on the drivers. "Sustained" is the keyword.

Example: If using some old VIA 4-in-1 driver, forget about it.
It's about as sustained as a Jack Russell on caffeinated crack. (Up and down, all over the place.)

[GreenAcres]

Quote:

Dropped frames, when dealing with uncompressed video, is usually an I/O issue. Your hard drive is too slow. Even a 7200rpm IDE drive is pushing your luck.

Since my old capture method made all of the Vegas casino owners happy by coming up all lemons I think I've come up with a new and improved plan for capturing VHS video.

I found a P3 1100 Mhz machine running WIN 2000K in my basement. I was planning on installing a secondary 80 GB hard drive for storage and an ATI 9600 video card with the purple dongle thingy as my capture card. I was planning on using VirtualDub with the Huffyuv codec for capture. Then use TMPG to encode to MPEG. (Will TMPG run on WIN 7 or will I have to run it on my antediluvian P III?) I hopefully will have a JVC HM-DH5U for my input VCR. Does this sound like it will work?

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenAcres

I found a P3 1100 Mhz machine .... Does this sound like it will work?

Not a Pentium III, no.

[GreenAcres]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

Not a Pentium III, no.

Would the P III work for capture only? Or "no" throw the useless P III in the trash along with the AVS4YOU license key.

Quote:

If you wanted to merge several mini-DVDs, then you could have simply demuxed the discs, edited/merged as desired, and re-burned in original quality.

Will VideoReDo accomplish this task?

[robjv1]

If the ATI 9600 is not an option for you and if you have another PC that is more modern, you could give the Diamond ATI Theatre 750/650HD USB or PCIE cards a whirl along with the home version of Neat Video. For $88.00 it's not much of an investment. For the ATI card, if you don't install the drivers that come with the disc (or configure the tuner, which causes issues for many people) then you can capture in VirtualDub using HuffyUV with it.

The 650/750HD both have one potential snag that seems to be a problem for some and not for others -- and that is issues with AGC, causing the capture to blow out whites in the picture. I have not personally seen those issues with my 750HD at all in the months I've been using it, but YMMV. Perhaps they've made some revisions to it since the first batch of cards came out. The captures will be noisy, as the device itself does no filtering, but I've had a lot of success with using it alongside the temporal filter in Neat Video for noisier footage, even when paired with a consumer Panasonic deck, although as you'd expect, I get better results with my JVC deck as it has it's own NR and TBC.

I previously used the JVC DR-M100S recorder for 95% of my stuff and I have to say it is also quite stellar -- and of course, much less time consuming. It's kind of amazing how good the captures look, given it's capturing and encoding in real-time.

[admin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenAcres

Would the P III work for capture only?
Or "no" throw the useless P III in the trash along with the AVS4YOU license key.

- AVS4YOU may have some use later. No idea what, but don't trash it.
- The P3 is just too old for anything having to do with video. Audio, sure, maybe. Video? Fat chance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenAcres

Will VideoReDo accomplish this task?

Yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by robjv1

you could give the Diamond ATI Theatre 750/650HD USB or PCIE cards a whirl

For computer-based cases, you also have the ATI 600 USB cards. And then today I saw a couple of Tevion USB "TV Tuner" cards on eBay, and those work nicely.

There's several safe options out there -- especially from ATI, between the USB, AGP and PCI-E cards. It's all a matter of hunting for them, and spending time to situate your setup to work as needed. Well, that and owning a stack of audio/video hardware: S-VHS VCRs, TBCs, audio mixers, etc, to truly get the best quality possible.

[GreenAcres]

I'm going backwards with my captures. The best I've been able to do is still horribly pixelated on the TV. I played my original source tape on an el cheapo VCR and it looks 10X better than any of my recent captures. Best quality I've achieved to date is with my original AverMedia PCI card with MPEG chip on it and AverMedia capture software. I haven't tried that card with the better VCR. Maybe that will do the trick. I might try that card again or just keep the original tape and VCR. Time to move on. As Solomon said, "Let us hear the conclusion to the whole matter..." The conclusion could very well be that VCR's rule!

[volksjager]

ditch the P3 - that is a total waste of time.

the JVC HM-DH5U is an excellent VCR.
hook that into a TBC-1000 or AVT-8710 and then to either a AIW(xp) or ATI600USB (windows 7) capture card or a JVC DR-M10S dvd recorder.
you will get excellent results

[juhok]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenAcres

As Solomon said, "Let us hear the conclusion to the whole matter..." The conclusion could very well be that VCR's rule!

Blah. I monitor my VCR capture live with SDI tube video monitor and there's no difference between a) VCR -> Analog to Digital Converter -> SDI monitor b) VCR -> SDI monitor (using monitors s-video input). VCR doesn't rule, your capture hardware or playback chain just has problems.

[GreenAcres]

I tested my theory and tried my Avermedia capture card with hardware MPEG2 compression, Avermedia capture software and my HM-DH5U. It looks good. Better than any other captures I have been doing with my old setup. My old setup was: AIW Radeon 7500 to capture in HuffyUV with VirtualDub then encode to MPEG2 with TMPG. So, I'm thinking either VirtualDub or TMPG is hosing me with Macroblocks. I was following the guide on this site for encoding to MPEG2 with TMPG so I'm assuming all of those settings are correct. As far as VirtualDub is concerned I have the "Noise Reduction" enabled with the default setting. Any ideas?

-- update --

I think the problem I was having was with my DVD player encoder. It doesn't handle 352 x 480 very well. The Avermedia card captured in 720 x 480 and therefore looked better than my VirtualDub capture at 352 x 480. I tested this theory out by buying a Sony DVD player from Wal-Mart. I've since decided to do all captures at 720 x 480 to avoid any future problems. I realize this comes at a cost.

I have since decided to skip the AVI capture anyway and just use my ATI MMC with mild video soap to capture to mpeg2. For whatever reason, I think it looks better than the AVI capture in VirtualDub. I think some of my source tapes were recorded on twice and I have a color bleed issue?

I think I'm fairly happy with the results I'm getting so I'm forging ahead with my conversions and archiving. My workflow is as follows. JVC HM-DH5U, AVT 8710 TBC, ATI 7500 Radeon. I then use VideoReDo for "editing" and DVD authoring.