VHS capture quality with ATI MMC 15Mbps MPEG2 vs. JVC DR-M100S?
 

Some years ago I captured VHS with AIW & MMC at 352x480 MPEG2 and looked great on a 32" SD TV, but no longer acceptable when displayed on a 55" 1080p HDTV compared to 15mbps 704x480 MPEG2 captures.

I read a bunch of threads on this and other forums about the JVC DR-M100S LSI encoder which apparently has better capture quality than AIW MMC, but was wondering if anyone has experience with how they compare at higher bitrates? I read the JVC max bitrate is 9Mbps (7.5/8/9Mbps modes are CBR) and MMC can capture up to 15Mbps (I'd also be using CBR), where I don't mind higher ATI MMC bitrate to catch up to DR-M100S quality.

My current workflow is JVC HR-S5800U -> DMR-ES15 (TBC-ish passthru) -> AIW VE 7500 PCI (Theater200) & TB Santa Cruz audio -> ATI MMC 9.02 & WinXPSP1 Home (Intel Q6700 Conroe; less than 15% utilization and no issues with dropped frames). I don't like the look on the 55" TV of upper/lower borders with 720x480 capture and "Record Cropped Video" checked, while 704x480 capture is perfect.

In addition, would a DR-M100S simplify the setup by removing the DMR-ES15 passthru (IDK if the DR-M100S has internal electronics that would do the same TBC-ish job)? I wouldn't mind picking up a DR-M100S if it would improve capture quality from the ATI MMC setup, and can repair most of the flashing "LOADING" failures by myself that I read about except for something like a failed DVD drive which would need a donor unit.

Capture lossless first and encode later, If you capture straight to MPEG-2 that's it, you're done, you can't remove the 16 pixels to keep the 704 active video area, you can't do video editing... Anything you attempt to do to the video will require decoding/encoding. Besides, MPEG-2 is less efficient, For 19 Mbps h.264 will give you almost no artifacts and you get to keep the chroma sub at 4:2:2 and the file size will be less.

My understanding is lossless VHS capture needs Avisynth QTGMC deinterlacing and 59.94fps h.264 to look decent. Never tried it and apparently long processing time, where the 15Mbps MPEG2 ATI MMC capture looks fine and wondering how a JVC DR-M100S would compare.

You can set Vdub to do exactly that with mpeg-4 but neither way is recommended.