Use VirtualDub or OBS when capturing VHS RCA to UVC?

[mightyenigma]

I tried following Joseph Leonard's VHS capture tutorial on YouTube (not the best place to go but he seems to know a few things better than most out there).
The results were washed out and blurry, but I think it is because I didnt buy the equipment he recommended, and to get from RCA interlaced to the 1080p HDMI port the other UVC capture device i bought instead requires, I used a "AV2HDMI upscaler" which gives me similarly bad results whether displaying on my HDMI television set or when capturing to computer.

I think what might be happening is the AV2HDMI box is already doing too much to the signal, upscaling and deinterlacing to make it suitable for hdmi.

Joseph Leonard's tutorial tells me to set OBS to do deinterlacing and Lancz??? Something noise reduction so I think the assumption is that i would be capturing something less processed and closer to the original signal into OBS via that UVC device in my USB 3 port.

One of the UVC devices he recommends is supposed to work well with USB 2.

My VCR is a 4 head Panasonic Omnivision I picked up from a thrift store, manufactured in 2002. Has no tracking buttons and outputs only to RF and RCA.

Anyway I think i better use his recommended UVC device instead, and take the conversion to HDMI out of the equation completely. but that brings me to the next part of the question which is, should I use OBS if I am capturing from a UVC or will I get better results with VirtualDub?

[lordsmurf]

Welcome.

OBS is software created from digital streaming/"broadcasting", not analog videotape capture like VirtualDub. But it's the least of your problems here. By the time OBS or VirtualDub even see the video signal, it's been completely screwed.

That cheap little $5 HDMI box was made to connect old pre-HDMI DVD players and video game consoles to a modern HDTV that only has HDMI. And it's pretty bad at it, too. The signal is stretched to 16x9, and with the TV remote you put it back to 4x3. The real problem was letterboxed DVDs became "postage stamped", with both pillarboxing and letterboxing.

The items are unable to process videotapes whatsoever. It's a meat grinder. VHS goes in, a mess of wrong colorspace and wrong/de interlace comes out.

I've never heard of RetroRGB / Joseph Leonard, but the long-winded "full of dead air" live-stream video series I saw (skimmed) was clearly of a person that had never captured video whatsoever. He had no idea what he was doing. Lots of wrong statements, weird conclusions. Youtube has a lot of awful advice, in terms of video capture, and that's definitely another one. Ignore, avoid.

To not mince words here, you're trying to follow some really shitty advice. And the "best" outcome from it will be miserable quality video.

You cannot take a random thrift store VCR, a cheap $5 device, and make good video. Quality video conversion requires gear that costs more than a McDonald's cheeseburger meal. It will cost more than a month of Netflix. You won't need a another mortgage either. But video gear are tools, not much different than buying cameras, or really high-end phones with nice cameras. At minimum, for any degree of quality (and using eBay for buying gambling), you're looking at $500 budget. And yes, that's extremely cheap, dirt cheap. These items are not sexy, but more like washing machines and lawnmowers, merely essential tools for tasks.

Panasonic Omnivision VCRs are some of the worst decks made in the 1990s. (Ironic, given how the S-VHS decks, like the AG-1980P, were some of the best ever made.)

"UVC capture device" is not really a term, especially when it comes to capture cards. "UVC" is "USB video class", but it almost exclusively refers to webcams. When it comes to video capture, treating capture cards like webcams not a good thing. That was a stupid idea from Microsoft, starting with Windows 10, and is why so many USB capture cards now fail to function correctly (or at all). Win10/11 nuked a lot of really good capture cards.

The generic "UVC" stuff you're probably referring to is the lowest of the low-end, the Easycaps and Elgatos (and similar), which earned the nicknames Easycrap and Elcrapo.

If that's the takeaway from this guy's videos, then it's like the old I Love Lucy episode, where she thinks she's a writer, and writes a novel. And a publisher wants it for a text book! But they want to publish it in a chapter titled "Don't Let This Happen To You!"

Again, all of this low-end gear makes the video look vastly worse than it exists on the tape.

Meat grinder.

VHS conversion has 3 requirements: VCR > TBC(s) > capture card. Not just any random gear, but items known for quality. By contrast, your attempted setup is one of the worst VCRs made, some of the cheapest Chinese USB junk ever made, and zero TBC. That won't work.

This can all be easily corrected, and you can be happily capturing videos with excellent quality. But you have to open your wallet, and spend what is needed to accomplish it. However, buy it, use it, resell it. Quality gear holds value, while junk is yours forever (sunk cost, pissed away funds). Quality gear can be a temporary cost, not a forever cost. You don't buy it, use it, and then toss it in a drawer.

Video conversion is somewhat binary: quality, or not-at-all quality.

So, armed with all the above info, which do you choose?
- Quality video conversion?
- Or crap, which you've already seen and experienced?

[aramkolt]

A link to the specific guide/video I think would be helpful here.

OBS is an interesting topic. Pros would be modern device compatibility, single step capture with live deinterlacing/scaling/compression ability, and once set up, there's very few steps to do additional captures. It does, interestingly enough, report dropped frame statistics if you set it to do so and that's been one of the weaknesses sited with most capture software. I am unclear however if it is only showing the dropped frames due to slow PC hardware however.

Cons are that live scaling and compression could cause you to drop frames depending on your system specs since it isn't just capturing at that point, it's also doing live processing. So if there are any hiccups in processor demand, you may start dropping frames because your system is to slow to do all that you are asking of it, or some antivirus or update might try to occur in the background, which you do not want. Dropped frame statistics that it can show would likely indicate if that is happening.

Virtualdub, on the other hand, can insert frames and drop frames as needed to preserve a target frame rate which is kind of like a software TBC if you think about it. Issue is that dropped frames are lost data forever, so you really don't want to be seeing dropped frames in virtualdub either. A single inserted frame or dropped frame on a regular interval of every 3000+ frames I believe is due to a clock difference in the TBC in your capture chain and Virtualdub, so those do not concern me if I'm understanding the concept correctly. If you're following the recommended use of Virtualdub, you don't have it do any compressing or scaling during capture (to something like your destination format of a progressive/deinterlaced/H264 file at the capture stage anyway, and that's because of the above.

I haven't done thorough testing myself, but theoretically, if the signal is already digital (such as HDMI or SDI) going into OBS, I don't see how recording would be any different than recording any other digital signal regardless of the capture software used (as long as you are not trying to simultaneously crop/scale/deinterlace/compress at the same time - which a lot of guides probably suggest that you do). Of note, I am speaking about keeping the signal in its source format, so 525/480i via HDMI or SDI, not an "already-covered-to-progressive signal". You are basically relying on the hardware capture chain to have already stabilized the video and digitally corrected the frame rate (with TBC) prior to the signal ever hitting OBS. I've observed that even some older TBC's like the For.A FA310, that they will continue to output a sync signal (color burst with a flat waveform after, which I guess is technically "black burst") even if you completely disconnect the incoming video cable during a capture, and therefore, your capture data should never show a dropped a frame as far as the capture card is concerned. I don't know that the other recommended TBCs will do that because they support both NTSC and PAL, so they wouldn't know what type of sync signal they are supposed to be outputting if the video signal drops out for long enough or if the signal becomes unstable enough. FA310 only supports NTSC and therefore always will output an NTSC sync signal (unless you have the "P" version at the end, and then it's PAL).

So, my thought is that the rest of your chain is much more critical if you are using OBS. All of the stabilization of the signal needs to have already occurred in your other devices by the time it hits OBS since OBS isn't going to help you there like virtualdub can.

Lancz is lanczos which is a scaling algorithm and it is therefore going to be somewhat dependent on your hardware as mentioned above whether it can do all of the capturing AND processing that you are asking it to in realtime. Better bet would be to capture the signal "as-is" in a 525i/480i/NTSC and then do your upscaling/cropping/compression in a separate step. If you're ok with the result and you don't see dropped frames on the statistics within OBS, you may be fine to do those other things in realtime, but you might have to repeat your capture if something else starts using more processor in the background than you expected.

In your case, all of your image degradation you are seeing is due to your hardware chain plus any scaling/cropping/compression you are doing live within OBS depending on the guide you are following. The AV2HDMI is doing the deinterlacing AND scaling it sounds like, and that's likely to be poor as most hardware scalers and deinterlacers anecdotally give poor results, but even more likely so of a $5 device. Odds are it is throwing away half of the fields, though I haven't seen a "nearly-all-inclusive comparison" on an identical starting source that compares the most common hardware scalers. I suspect there are some professional hardware deinterlacers that can give 90% of the quality of something like QTGMC if you're trying to reduce the number of steps and save a lot of time, which may be a fair tradeoff depending on your goals. You'll note that all of the guides here recommend capturing interlaced, and that AVI2HDMI is already violating that recommendation and that is most likely why your captures are blurry.

A quick test to see where the quality drop is coming from would be looking at what the video output directly from the AV2HDMI looks like on a TV. Your OBS capture of that signal should look identical in quality when played back on the same TV if OBS isn't doing any processing to the signal and is capturing with a visually lossless codec.

First thing I'd recommend would be switching to a known good USB capture device that passes an interlaced signal if you're looking for the best quality and also using a TBC of some sort. Sounds like this is more of a budget setup, so adding a DMR-ES10 to your existing VCR is probably fine, though next upgrade to consider would be an SVHS VCR to use the S-Video output. On a budget, I'd probably go with the GV-USB2 for the capture card which is about $50 on Amazon, and it's returnable if you don't like it which is nice. You're still going to want to feed the USB device with a very stable signal, particularly if you're planning to use OBS though. I'd at a minimum do a few captures with Virtualdub first and verify that you aren't seeing a bunch of dropped frames there with your final hardware chain before moving over to OBS.

I don't claim to be an expert, that's just my $0.02. Sorry that my opinion got a bit rambly there haha.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

single step capture with live deinterlacing/scaling/compression ability,

But it looks terrible.

Quote:

Virtualdub, on the other hand, can insert frames and drop frames as needed to preserve a target frame rate which is kind of like a software TBC if you think about it.

- OBS is "live" software, loss is expected.
- VirtualDub is about data integrity, loss is not expected or desired. It does what it can to preserve the incoming information.

No, not a software TBC of any kind.

Quote:

I haven't done thorough testing myself, but theoretically, if the signal is already digital (such as HDMI or SDI) going into OBS, I don't see how recording would be any different than recording any other digital signal

It was designed for digital signal source and output, not analog. But even then, it is "live"/streaming/"broadcast" software, and loss is expected. It treats loss like a speed bump, not caring about the temporary mess, and resumption of stability is sought. Zero care for prior corrupted/bad data. That's how TS (transport streams) work, and this isn't really any different of a concept.

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I don't know that the other recommended TBCs will do that

Yes, those do. Non-recommended often do not. (FA-310 is not recommended either, for other reasons, but it probably does that function, most FA do.)

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because they support both NTSC and PAL, so they wouldn't know what type of sync signal they are supposed to be outputting if the video signal drops out for long enough or if the signal becomes unstable enough.

No. Only the TBC-1000 autosenses, and it generally locks NTSC/PAL at power up. Others are manual set.

Quote:

So, my thought is that the rest of your chain is much more critical if you are using OBS. All of the stabilization of the signal needs to have already occurred in your other devices by the time it hits OBS since OBS isn't going to help you there like virtualdub can.

Correct --- sort of. VirtualDub needs proper clean incoming signals as well.

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Better bet would be to capture the signal "as-is" in a 525i/480i/NTSC and then do your upscaling/cropping/compression in a separate step.

Correct.

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I suspect there are some professional hardware deinterlacers that can give 90% of the quality of something like QTGMC

Nope.

Quote:

First thing I'd recommend would be switching to a known good USB capture device that passes an interlaced signal if you're looking for the best quality and also using a TBC of some sort. Sounds like this is more of a budget setup, so adding a DMR-ES10 to your existing VCR is probably fine, though next upgrade to consider would be an SVHS VCR to use the S-Video output. On a budget, I'd probably go with the GV-USB2 for the capture card which is about $50 on Amazon, and it's returnable if you don't like it which is nice. You're still going to want to feed the USB device with a very stable signal, particularly if you're planning to use OBS though. I'd at a minimum do a few captures with Virtualdub first and verify that you aren't seeing a bunch of dropped frames there with your final hardware chain before moving over to OBS.
I don't claim to be an expert, that's just my $0.02. Sorry that my opinion got a bit rambly there haha.

Yep. And that final was worth at least $1.

[mightyenigma]

This is the video:
https://youtu.be/tk-n7IlrXI4?si=SXH0kXN97450cMBw

Sorry; it was Jim Leonard, not Joe.

He seems to be going for "good enough" instead of archival-quality in this tutorial, which is what I am looking for too. I just needed something better than what people usually get from HDMI converters, so I probably shouldve followed his advice on which UVC to get.

I just want to get my VHSs captured at watchable quality and add them to my Jellyfin media server so as to avoid wearing the tapes out from repeated watching on the VCR. Some of these tapes were never remastered or restored by the publishers to an easier medium to capture or rip, so VHS is all that can be captured from, and the captures people have done so far are WORSE than what I came up with!
Also we probably have a few home videos besides the out of print movies.

This is an attempt to get a good enough, watchable rip of the movies, that is kinda close to the original.

Someday I will want to capture the pure as-close-to-original, archival quality master as I can, but right now that is a luxury.

I feel like if I can get my hardware chain sorted out so that it captures the interlaced but time base corrected signal, without doing anything else besides digitizing to the extent necessary to get it onto the computer, then I can accomplish my goals for less than $100. Is that realistic?

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mightyenigma

that is kinda close to the original.

This is what we all want. However, it cannot be even remotely achieved if not using bare minimum quality gear. So no thrift store VCRs, no random $5 cheap Chinese USB/HDMI doodads from Amazon, etc.

Quote:

https://youtu.be/tk-n7IlrXI4?si=SXH0kXN97450cMBw

"The Oldskool PC" has been discussed before. His videos are a mixed bag, some good info, but some pretty bad mistakes as well.

For example, Dazzle units are notoriously awful capture cards (and no, those are not Pinnacle cards either -- Pinnacle bought the lousy company, and just kept churning out the junky cards to suckers).

His advice to use OBS is just bad. Previous, he'd at least suggest VirtualDub.

And I wish he'd learn to stop using the term "60p". It is not 60p, never was, never will be. It's 59.94p once deinterlaced (from source 59.94i, aka 29.97fps interlaced), and no you cannot round. There is an actual 60p, and he confuses it with 59.94p. That will have catastrophic effects on audio sync, because he's flat out wrong here.

^ This is the sort of stuff that reveals their lack of knowledge. Open mouth, insert foot.

He may know a lot about vintage computing, but his knowledge of video capture is inept.

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He seems to be going for "good enough" instead of archival-quality

He's not doing either one. He's making low-quality video here. It's not "good enough", nor an "archival quality".

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the captures people have done so far are WORSE than what I came up with!

Making video worse is easy. Just have $0 budget, be lazy, and have no care.

It's sort of like nuking a chicken nugget/strip in the microwave, where you get a dry-yet-soggy rubbery POS -- vs. putting it in the oven (or toaster oven) for 20-30 minutes, and getting a crispy moist tasty piece of chicken. If you're impatient, don't care, and want to eat garbage, it's easily achievable.

I cook (oven and stove), but I'm not a "professional chef" or some such nonsense. I just have patience, spend the funds on proper tools (pots, pans, turners, serving spoons, etc), and I care about what I eat. Video is literally no different in this regard. None.

So anybody that has a diet of unhealthy TV dinners probably doesn't care about how awful their video looks either. In fact, I'd suggest the demographic has heavy overlap.

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This is an attempt to get a good enough, watchable rip of the movies,

As a cartoon/TV/movie collector, hearing about bad conversions is always so saddening.

Quote:

Someday I will want to capture the pure as-close-to-original, archival quality master as I can, but right now that is a luxury.
I feel like if I can get my hardware chain sorted out so that it captures the interlaced but time base corrected signal, without doing anything else besides digitizing to the extent necessary to get it onto the computer, then I can accomplish my goals for less than $100. Is that realistic?

Gun to my head, $100, and a task to convert videos that don't look like total shit?

Challenge accepted.

Requirement #1 is a Panasonic DMR-ES10 or ES15 DVD recorder, for passthrough. No, not using it to make DVDs -- again, for passthrough. That will eat up at least $75, probably all $100.

However, you claim to be good with electronics, and I see an ES10 unit that doesn't power on for about $40 shipped/taxes on eBay. You're gambling here, in order to save a meager $50, but it could work out. Remember, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Knowing the odds is what matters. The odds for this exact situation are good. A non-powered ES10 is usually caps. So replace them. It'll take a lot of time, patience, and buying some cheap caps online for under $10. To me, time (days) is more valuable than $50. But hey, there you go.

So assuming $50 for ES10 DIY, that leaves $50.

You have a lousy VCR. That's unfortunate. I don't know what's worse here -- an Omnivision, or a cheap USB card. Argh, decisions, decisions.

I have to go with a better VCR. Find a Sharp or Toshiba, maybe a Sony at worst. Stay away away from consumer level VHS Matsushita-made crap decks (90s-00s Panasonics, JVCs). Those were fodder, not at all the quality of the Matsushita S-VHS decks (JVC, especially with line TBC -- or Panasonic AG-1980). So $15 at Goodwill/etc. And time to shop, to wait and find one. It may be quick, it may be a month of waiting for the right donation to come in. This also assumes it works properly, or at all, which is another story (and not a good one).

That leaves $35. Settle for the least-worse model of USB card, and pray you find it cheap somewhere used. And I see a certain Startech for $30 shipped/taxed.

So, yeah, $100 can build something. Still not good, minimal, even if everything works as you hope. You'll spend a lot of time just trying to acquire the gear, make it work for you. Also a gamble in there, and you could easily just lose $50 on the ES10 buy, if it's not mere caps.

$100 is really not a realistic budget.

In terms of food, you're taking $1 (one dollar) to the grocery store, and hoping to buy a full meal. Not happening. At best, you'll get a loaf of fresh baked bread, and some free condiments. Mmm, ketchup bread, yummy. And later, you'll get a tummy ache.

Being ridiculous cheap is why video conversion never works out for DIYers. Most quit before they start converting anything meaningful, some never even get to the testing phase. Just an exercise in wasted time and funds, and they'll usually blame somebody/something else for why it all went wrong.

[mightyenigma]

No problem taking good advice; that's why I'm here.

The results OldSkoolPC got looked way better than what I was getting. If I try doing it his way, I'll try to leave a note in the folder warning not to spread the cancer of bad VHS digitization on my just-for-now quality, and point out to myself for later when I have forgotten where the video file came from, that the original VHS is way better and I will regret not doing the job properly. I think I'll also include all the advice given here and a link to this post, so that future me will not accidentally propagate a bad transfer, thinking it's a good one.

I just have one more thing to ask:
I saw your recommendations for what kind of VHS player to use, TBC add-ons, passthroughs, etc. and capture cards, but I think it will be very difficult for me to for example get hold of a Windows XP PC with AGP slots in the mainboard, so I might still have to go with a UVC thingy for capture. Since this seems likely, what's the best UVC thingy for the job?

[Gary34]

Quote:

I feel like if I can get my hardware chain sorted out so that it captures the interlaced but time base corrected signal, without doing anything else besides digitizing to the extent necessary to get it onto the computer, then I can accomplish my goals for less than $100. Is that realistic?

$100 isn’t enough for a decent workflow. I remember having a similar budget at one point. In my defense there is a false economy when it comes to this task and also years of marketing that tell you that this task is cheaper than it is. Most methods take massive shortcuts that affect things more than new people think they will. I started out with bad hardware and then upgraded things. When you get a good Svideo VCR it’s a holy shit moment. It’s a big upgrade. Night and day difference. Setting a $100 workflow budget is like trying to hire someone to digitize your tapes for 10 dollars a tape. It’s asking for trouble. It’s a good idea to just save up some.

If you do go real cheap do the videos you care about least first.
The more you play tapes the more they degrade. You might change your workflow up before you get to the tapes you care more about. It’s best to play them as few times as possible.

[mightyenigma]

Absolutely agree. I got more and more worried each time I tried a workflow that didn't give me the desired results, had to switch to a less valuable casette to test things on. I should look into getting a casette that just has test imagery and sound on it for this specific purpose, one that shows right away where there are any artifacts, alignment issues, etc.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

It’s a good idea to just save up some.

Age apparently matters here. I was recently reading how this is foreign concept to many Millennials, and most Gen Z. That's a bad habit. I think it's extremely true with video.

And debt is fine (few $$$ on CC), if you have a plan. Especially if it the amount is relatively small, such as costing less than a single month of rent or mortgage, which most video gear will.

Video is also often about priorities. I find that the same people who grouse about video gear costs waste tons of money on vices (video games, cigarettes, weed/drugs, etc), or extravagances ($1000 iPhones, etc). I have no sympathy here. Quit whinging.

[Gary34]

Quote:

I got more and more worried each time I tried a workflow that didn't give me the desired results,

Some of the other options besides this place are worse that you might realize. Once you get past the marketing and understand what you’re seeing the super cheap services and cheap devices aren’t a good option at all.

https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...x-rip-off.html

https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...-services.html

https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...learclick.html

Which I don’t think you can get a clearclick for 100 dollars. Some of the clearclicks run twice that.

If that really is what you can afford to put into it then it is what it is but if you can raise your budget your videos would really benefit.

[aramkolt]

I maintain that testing capture chains against each other across multiple users is difficult because we never have the same starting source material or VCRs. I'm working on making a DVD with various test patterns and sample video clips with "burnt-in" linear time code overlay (meaning that you can see a visible timer with each frame having a unique labeled number). The purpose of the linear time code is to identify dropped or duplicated frames after a capture has occurred if the capture method does not report statistics. The idea is that you'd download, burn, and play this DVD with a DVD player and then capture the analog outputs directly with your capture chain, or record that output to a VHS tape first and then capture from that VHS tape. Different users could then post the results and those would be more directly comparable. That, and we know what the source material looks like digitally to compare it to.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

Which I don’t think you can get a clearclick for 100 dollars. Some of the clearclicks run twice that.

Such a huge waste of money for those. Vastly overpriced for low-quality compressed output only. (I have capture cards in the marketplace, some of the best made, for less than the cost of the ClearClicks).

ClickCrap is another earned nickname here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

I maintain that testing capture chains against each other across multiple users is difficult because we never have the same starting source material or VCRs. I'm working on making a DVD with various test patterns and sample video clips with "burnt-in" linear time code overlay (meaning that you can see a visible timer with each frame having a unique labeled number). The purpose of the linear time code is to identify dropped or duplicated frames after a capture has occurred if the capture method does not report statistics. The idea is that you'd download, burn, and play this DVD with a DVD player and then capture the analog outputs directly with your capture chain, or record that output to a VHS tape first and then capture from that VHS tape. Different users could then post the results and those would be more directly comparable. That, and we know what the source material looks like digitally to compare it to.

That won't work whatsoever. It's too digital domain, not analog domain, errors are burned in and not repeatable. That'll mostly prove the quality of the DVD, or the DVD player, and nothing else. Nothing analog, nothing to do with the capture card.

[mightyenigma]

So between $500 and $3,000 looks like, to not be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

I remember my dad having an S-VHS player and some other stuff in his basement office 20 years ago. It sounds like he settled on the same things you're all telling me, so I'll ask him about his setup and what kind of results he's gotten.

I'm always on the lookout for more cost-effective means of doing things, but again, there's the danger of being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

[aramkolt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

That won't work whatsoever. It's too digital domain, not analog domain, errors are burned in and not repeatable. That'll mostly prove the quality of the DVD, or the DVD player, and nothing else. Nothing analog, nothing to do with the capture card.

If the test DVD is recorded to VHS first and then the capture is done from the recorded VHS tape, how is that not back to analog domain? The idea is to create a more or less identical starting analog source for people to try with different capture chains that they may have. It can reveal dropped frames during capture (with the linear time code that is unique to each frame present) and the various patterns will be stress tests where certain deinterlacing or capture methods will show artifacts that weren't present in the original.

To be clear, all patterns are starting off and staying in a digital form before it's compressed to MPEG2 for DVD, so there should be no errors "burned in" other than any artifacts that occur with the MPEG2 compression itself and the 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. These artifacts should be relatively minimal with a high enough video bitrate. The captures from the VHS tape recorded from this DVD you'd want to look as close as possible to the MPEG2 files that were originally on the DVD. This should easily be able to identify automatic gain control issues, sharpness, interlacing/deinterlacing defects, frame drops, etc.

[lordsmurf]

Ah, I read that wrong. Hmm.

Well, the 4:2:0 downconvert is still an issue. More ideal would to create VHS test tapes. Perhaps we can collab on that at some point. It is interesting, and I have a stock of unused blanks.