Need input! improve the quality of VHS

[cyber-junkie]

I have some old movies from the vhs days that I am trying to improve the quality on, I have already transfered them to dvd using a vidicraft enhancer and that helped some and would like to see if virtualdub would do anymore?

The dvd's will play on windows media player, but won't up load to windows movie maker or virtualdub, so I downloaded EasyDivx and it see's the movie files but when I try to transfer to a folder on my hard drive I made it says something like can't copy to a un-natural space, or something like that.

Am I going about this correctly or what do I need to do?

Signed: Confused!

[admin]

Easydivx isn't the right tool here. That's a freeware divx converter, nothing to do with quality enhancement, filtering, restoring video. I've never even heard of it, so I doubt it's good for encoding anyway. I downloaded it, took a look at it -- Easydivx looks to be a really old and poorly coded software.

Windows Media Player is honestly a terrible software video player. VLC is a much better choice, for a number of reasons -- if nothing else, it uses an internalized codec system to help you "play anything". Get it from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

To get the video off the DVD, use this method: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/edit-dvd-recorder.htm

If this is a commercial DVD, you may need more advanced methods (including decryption), depending on what it is. many retail DVDs have "extra stuff" in the video streams, such as multiple audio and subtitles, which demands special extraction methods. Read about that more here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/edit-dvd.htm

After you do that, you'll have the audio and video on your computer, and you can further edit or restore in VirtualDub.

What you do in VirtualDub largely depends on what you have to work with, and what's wrong with it. I'd have to see example to suggest more.

[cyber-junkie]

I have been reading and reading...
Downloaded decrypter and decyped..
Downloaded virtualdub and how it was decyped is not a valid file for virtualdub...Downloaded Avidemux and the file plays here, is Avidemux not as good as virtualdub for what I want to do?
Do I have to somehow convert the file to a file virtualdub can edit?
Trying to learn...Is the an introduction to all this or a dummies guide?
Thanks

[admin]

We've sort of hit on this in another thread earlier today...

Are you using the VirtualDub downloaded form this site? It's at http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/show...-pre-1727.html and includes the necessary plugins and common filters you'd need to open and restore your videos.

There's not a "for dummies" guide -- at least not yet. That's on the 2010 to-do list for this site. one of many. The video restoration guides are in for a major injection of new information, as well as updates the the few existing items. In the meantime, I just help people question by question. This forum is pretty rich in information, although it's admittedly not as organized as a guide. It was question-and-answer format, all over the place, spread out across a few years. Forum searches may come in handy, for simple terms like "virtualdub" or "vdub".