VHS to Capture Card via Yamaha HTR-5750 Poor Picture Quality
 

Hello. First of all, I'd like to say I love these forums. I've been hovering around for a few years, just reading and soaking up the info. But now I have been tasked to digitize some old VHS tapes, so I'm jumping right into it! My VCR is a Toshiba M752. My capture card is an Avermedia m791 PCIe NTSC/ATSC tuner and capture, with only S-Video and RF inputs for video. Since my VCR only has composite out (and RF), the only way to make the connection to my capture card is to go through my Yamaha receiver and use it's S-Video out to the card. With my VCR hooked straight to my TV (2009 Samsung 42" flat-panel), the picture is very good. But if I go from VCR - Receiver - Capture card, the picture is bad. Like the interlacing is coming apart and it needs deinterlaced badly. Oh and I am using your VirtualDub with added filters capture program. When I hook the VCR up to capture card via RF connection, the interlacing problem isn't bad at all, just grainy and all-around crappy RF-type quality picture. My cables are all quality cables. Not high quality by any means, but not bottom of the barrel either. I've tried 4 other sets of cables and all look the same. I just bought 2 JVC HR-S6900U SVHS players that both eat tapes to see if I can fix them. Would make it much simpler to have the S-Video out and I'm guessing better overall quality internals. I know there are several pieces of info that I probably forgot to mention, so I'll do my best to answer all that I can if someone knows why the picture might be bad. Thanks in advance!

What do you mean by this? Maybe a picture showing the issue would be more helpful.

Are you sure there is no way to use composite in on the card? Maybe it's done by using a composite to s-video adapter cable and setting the card to a composite input or similar, or the composite input is somewhere else than on the card itself. As this seems to be a card from OEM machines, there may be a breakout box or something.

I believe that the Avermedia m791 shipped with a composite video adapter. Sounds like you got one with the adapter missing. (That often happens with used gear.) It may be that you can use a s-video-to-RCA cable, connecting the composite output of the VCR to the "Y" input of the s-video adapter.

TV sets generally are much more tolerant of sloppy video signals than capture cards. That may account for the image lookignnmuch better on the TV than what your capture card yields.

Yes, I am positive that there is no way to directly connect my composite video out cable to my card. The card is from an old gateway PC and I've used it before with an 8mm camcorder and had good results. I have a Gigabyte z97x-sli motherboard, with an i7 4790k CPU, 16GB of DDR3, a 4GB GTX 1050ti GPU and a EVGA 600w PSU. I can boot from Windows 7 or 10, both 64-bit pro versions. I've tried both operating systems, with the same results. And I just went to try to take pictures of the video and now there's no video on VirtualDub. I messed with the settings and all are correct, but only sound. Tried 3 other software programs and all had no video.....UGHHH! Just tried a cheap EasyCap USB capture thing and the video is in black and white.....well....there's maybe a tiny bit of color, but there are also horizontal lines that are colored. Tried different video cables and all are same. This is frustrating as hell!

Yeah, I agree about my TV. Just sucks there is no way to output from TV to my PC for capture....or just record my TV screen somehow. The S-Video to composite adapter works one way. If you try to use it from composite to S-Video, it won't work. They make converter box type things, but the ones that are supposed to actually work pretty good are expensive. Oh and I wonder what type of composite video adapter this card came with? I can't find anything about it, but am very curious.

Why not you use one of the suggested DVD-Recorders (Panasonic ES-10, ES15) to improve your capture.

The DVD-Recorder in passthrough mode can do the composite to s-video conversation.

I can't really afford it right now. Spent waaaaay too much on Christmas. But my receiver has Composite to S-Video conversion, so that's why I'm able to get a picture.....although it's not a good one. I was hoping someone had this problem in the past and figured out it was just a setting or something I needed to change. And I did buy 2 JVC HR S6900U SVHS players that I got for a steal. I was only able to get them cheap because they spit out tapes as soon as you try to load one. I'm hoping it's only the mode switch being dirty on at least one of them.