Woe is me. Connecting my VCR to a capture card

Wandering · #1 06-25-2018, 09:06 AM

Quite unexpectedly I got sucked into this analogue to digital conversion stuff, so please excuse me for keeping beginning of this thread title so uninformative. I simply don't know what specifics to start with. The second part of it is basically just a teaser.

Perhaps a little background first. Three months ago I never even heard of time base correctors, digital noise reduction and all that stuff. I was happy enough just recording TV programs for later viewing with my Compro VideoMate DVB-T300, a Philips based video capture card. It's 13 years old now, based on a Philips SAA 7130 chip and doing its job rather well. It's an analogue-digital hybrid, so it handled our analogue Tv stations as well as the digital ones when they replaced the analogue broadcasts. It also replaced a very ancient VCR I bought second-hand around 30 years ago for the same purpose.

Eventually I thought I'd have a look at some of what I recorded on tape over the years. Some of those recordings were worth keeping, especially two or three episodes of "The Big Gig", an Australian comedy show that never made it to a commercial release on any medium. The card, and a more recent VCR (Panasonic NV-HD620MK2) I bought for 10 bucks took care of those well enough, except for the noise at the bottom, of course. My tapes turned out to be in excellent condition.

So far, so good. Then the excrement hit the fan. I was talking to the volunteer curator of a tiny museum in my little town. Somehow I mentioned something about how I captured video from tape to computer. He opened the door to a store room and pointed to a metal shelf containing a couple of hundred video tapes. Could I do them, pretty please? I took five and said let's see how I go with them.

The tapes turned out to be atrocious. Jittering all over the place. This is how Google brought me to this forum. I spent quite a few hours reading and decided that there's no way of getting around buying a VCR with TBC and a full frame TBC as well.

After a few weeks of searching I wound up buying a JVC HR-S9600 from VCRShop.nl. It turned up today. Hoorah! The packing was A1 with the carton eight times the volume of the article sent. The difference was padding. Not a scratch on the machine. I was actually surprised how elegant the thing looks in real life. A label stuck to the top left front corner assures me that the thing is 2000 compliant, so when that date comes I'll not be hit by the millennium bug. Phew. It also means the machine was likely made not long before 2000.

In addition to the recorder itself I received the remote control to go with it, a SCART cable and a neat photocopy of the 76 page manual. And there is my first problem. The SCART cable seems to be the only way to connect the VCR to a receiver of any sort. The composite and s-video sockets are ingoing only as far as I can make out. So. how do I connect the VCR to the capture card?

That was the first question of many more to come. I hope you don't mind the longwindedness.

hodgey · #2 06-25-2018, 09:29 AM

The S-Video socket and audio RCA jacks at the back should be output, they're even labeled. Alternatively you can get a scart adapter with composide and s-video connections at most electronics stores. Though, make sure you get one with composide + audio and not an RGB one, preferably one with a S-Video output and an in/out switch on it. For the scart connections you will have to manually set in the VCRs menu whether to output composite or s-video, as the s-video luma and composite use the same wire.

Wandering · #3 06-25-2018, 09:41 AM

Thanks, hodgey. The rear RCA jacks on my unit are left and right channel audio only. There is no video RCA plug. The front RCA jacks appear to be "in" only, unless I missed something reading the instruction manual.

How can I tell the difference between a composide + audio and an RGB adaptor?

hodgey · #4 06-25-2018, 10:08 AM

RGB adapters will have red-green-blue rca jacks, while composite adapters have the normal red white yellow ones and often a s-video connector as well, and are much more common. Something like this.

You will get better quality using a S-video cable though, in a composite cable the color and brightness signals are mixed and often interfere with each other, causing visible artifacts. How noticable will depend on the signal, and how well the capture device handles it. In an s-video cable the color and brightness use separate wires, so that's not an issue. This is one advantage with the SVHS VCRs compared to cheaper VCRs that only have composite out.

Wandering · #5 06-25-2018, 10:17 AM

Thanks again. I'm looking at this adaptor: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Premium-...QAAOSwHUhaE~qq. Jacks are yellow, red and white. Description is "RGB Scart to 3 RCA Phono +S-Video Audio In / Out Switch AV TV Adaptor SX". All good?

hodgey · #6 06-25-2018, 10:34 AM

Yeah that one will work. It would be better to use S-Video though if possible, in which case you don't need an adapter.

Oh and I've also gotten a VCR from the same seller. Also had a great experience with them. Must have been expensive to ship' all the way to australia though.

Bogilein · #7 06-25-2018, 10:35 AM

I have had a look at your picture from the rear. The red and white cinch connectors are for the audio out and on the left side from the scart connectors is a small round connector which is the s-video out. This one you have to connect with your capture card.

Wandering · #8 06-25-2018, 10:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hodgey

Yeah that one will work. It would be better to use S-Video though if possible, in which case you don't need an adapter.

Oh and I've also gotten a VCR from the same seller. Also had a great experience with them. Must have been expensive to ship' all the way to australia though.

The delivery charge was only 30 Euros. The sum total most decidedly was not cheap, though. 370 Euros for the VCR. Altogether that amounted to 586 Australian dollars.

This new hobby is going to put me on a starvation diet. I am unemployed, 65 years old, but not entitled to a pension till December and I have not even sourced a full-frame TBR yet. :shiver:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bogilein

I have had a look at your picture from the rear. The red and white cinch connectors are for the audio out and on the left side from the scart connectors is a small round connector which is the s-video out. This one you have to connect with your capture card.

The SCART adaptor is really cheap, and I expect the cost of an s-video cable to be only a little - if any - more. Trouble is finding one. I want one about 1.8 metres in length. So far I've only located s-video to RCA cables. At any rate, one of each will be good. I can experiment which works out better from case to case.

themaster1 · #9 06-25-2018, 11:26 AM

You don't want long cables, short cables is best for audio and video (less than 1 m)

lordsmurf · #10 06-25-2018, 11:27 AM

That's right at $435 shipped, which is real;y good for a high-end JVC in good condition. eBay USA is mostly junk for VCRs, but eBay UK/Germany often has nice units. The major problem is that most sellers are xenophobes, and refuse to ship outside their countries. So you have to get a proxy, or plead with the seller.

Diets are good for you! Eat more salads, more veggies.

The external TBC is always the big-ticket item. Every hobby has costs, every profession has costs. With video, it's the VCR and TBC. And compared to many hobbies, video is actually cheap. My dSLR and lenses make a video workflow look cheap. In fact, the camera body alone could buy a workflow, with funds left over.

You never want to use SCART for capturing, nor composite. You want direct s-video, and 6 foot max (1.5m), preferably half that (3ft, under 1m). These can easily be found on either Monoprice.com or eBay (USA), and for mere dollars. The shipping will probably cost more than the cables.

Wandering · #11 06-25-2018, 11:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

That's right at $435 shipped, which is real;y good for a high-end JVC in good condition. eBay USA is mostly junk for VCRs, but eBay UK/Germany often has nice units. The major problem is that most sellers are xenophobes, and refuse to ship outside their countries. So you have to get a proxy, or plead with the seller.

Diets are good for you! Eat more salads, more veggies.

The external TBC is always the big-ticket item. Every hobby has costs, every profession has costs. With video, it's the VCR and TBC. And compared to many hobbies, video is actually cheap. My dSLR and lenses make a video workflow look cheap. In fact, the camera body alone could buy a workflow, with funds left over.

You never want to use SCART for capturing, nor composite. You want direct s-video, and 6 foot max (1.5m), preferably half that (3ft, under 1m). These can easily be found on either Monoprice.com or eBay (USA), and for mere dollars. The shipping will probably cost more than the cables.

So I'll be looking around for an s-video cable. Scrabbling around in one of my boxes of assorted bits of junk a few minutes ago I found a 1.5metre s-video to RCA cable. S-video to s-video would be better, I suppose.

And no need to tell me about cameras. Back in the days we still used film I kept buying Nikon SLRs and Nikkor lenses. The price of my Nikkor 500mm mirror lens alone was eye watering.

These days I make do with a Canon IXUS point and shoot pocket thing. Damn frustrating at times, especially when the thing doesn't want to focus on what you want it to focus on, and all sorts of other adjustments like time exposures, speed, apertures and f-stops are simply not on the menu.

Wandering · #12 06-29-2018, 05:49 AM

After a bit of trial and error I managed to get the VCR and the capture card to talk to each other. I am amazed how involved digitising analogue video and audio actually is. Three months ago I thought it was just a matter of plugging the cassette machine I bought for the purpose (a Panasonic NV-HD620MK2, costing $10) into my capture card, and clicking on some buttons. That actually brought some reasonable results with the first couple of tapes. They were in good condition...

Since then, I have rapidly become aware of just how much one needs know to consistently get optimal results - and how little I know about how to attain them.

For instance, despite spending a lot of hours now perusing this treasure trove of a forum, I am not sure if I even plugged my equipment together in an optimal way. After some failed experiments I finished up connecting the tape recorder's video to the capture card via an s-video cable, and the sound via the RCA sockets to the 3.5mm socket to the same thing. It took me a while because I imagined that the sound had to be channelled through my Xonar sound card. Problem was that I failed finding a way for the sound card to pick up the signal. Just in case someone could suggest a better way to connect the lot I attached diagrams illustrating the available sockets of my capture and sound cards below. A photo showing the sockets at the back of the video recorder can be seen in the opening post.

So, now I am stuck with finding the best way of converting the capture file to a format suitable for DVD authoring. I looked at capturing in mpeg format, but configuring that option is utterly confounding. I have no idea whatsoever about what all those options mean, let alone which choices are the best. Link to a relevant thread please? Or just a pointer to a thread or tutorial where this is explained?

Oh, and another thing. The JVC unit I bought came with a physical handicap. Half the time a cassette insertion fails. The machine attempts to spit it out again, an electric motor makes a desperately whirring sound for a second or so, then the machine shuts down. The vendor will undoubtedly say it must have been damaged in transit. Does anyone know if I could fix the problem myself?

Lastly, I do need to find and buy an external frame synchroniser. more about that later.