No signal from Elgato capture card?
 

I am trying to digitize my old family VHS videos. I bought a Toshiba W603 VHS player and an Elgato Game Capture HD card from 2012. You can see my setup in the attached images. The final cord you see is a USB-to-USB-C adapter.

I installed the appropriate driver for the capture card (ver. 2.3.3.42), and I tried to capture the footage using the associated Game Capture HD 3.20.33 software, but when I play the VHS tape, it says there's no signal, as you can see in the screenshot. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and I hope someone in this forum can tell me.

Welcome. :)

However, this is an example of "what not to do" for converting videotapes.

Even if we overlook
- the low-quality composite-only VHS VCR
- and complete lack of any TBCs

The problem is especially Elgato cards, which earned the nickname "Elcrapo" for their lousy video cards. Elgato makes some great items, like the Wave:3 USB mic, but not everything they made is good. Same goes for all companies out there. Some products, and even entire product lines, are trash.

A primary problem is that 4:3 interlaced video does not work well, or at all, with HDMI. Most HDMI connections force badly-deinterlaced and badly-upscale 1080p, and this Elgato is no different.

At very minimum, you need:
- better capture card, such as ATI 600 USB or certain Pinnacles (non-Dazzle).
- lossless capture, using VirtualDub, even AmaRecTV, not OBS
- some form of TBC, even a bare minimum ES10/15 for passthrough

Otherwise you'll never get quality, or never anything at all.

I think it's fine to see for yourself what the quality looks like with the Game Capture HD, but odds are that it will look pretty terrible, In a perfect scenario where it locks onto the signal well and doesn't drop frames (which is unlikely without some type of TBC as Lordsmurf mentioned), it will still throw away half of the data (will likely blend or discard half of the video information taking the interlaced signal and saving it as progressive) and it'll encode it to blocky/lossy/low bitrate MP4 format with poor audio quality at the time of capture.

I found a video on YouTube below showing just how unstable this specific card is for this task, see below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35jhY4EHE98

It'd probably improve to not as visibly glitchy with the addition of an ES10 or ES15 as Lordsmurf pointed out which will stabilize the signal to some degree, but you're probably still better off using a different capture card altogether that can capture interlaced video more easily.

Based on that demo above, it is apparently much worse at tolerating unstable signals than the regular Elgato Video Capture which is marketed for VHS capture. That still suffers from the same quality issues, low bit rate, and blocky MP4, and poor quality audio encoding mentioned above, but it'll at least watchable on a small screen. You're basically trading all of that for small file sizes and simplicity of use when used with the original software. Alternative capture software like virtualdub might allow it to capture in higher quality so no harm in seeing if it shows up as a useable device in virtualdub, but based on that YouTube video, I don't think it is going to lock onto the signal well regardless of capture software used.

Back to your original question - My guess as far as why there's no video viewable is that you could have the wrong input selected in the software as it may not autodetect which input you are using. I'd also do your initial testing with a stable signal like what the Game Capture HD is meant for - something like an older game console that has composite output. If you can't get it to display that (which is a much more stable, digitally precise signal), then there's no way it'll display the VCR's output, so I'd start there to at least see an output and make sure composite input is configured correctly. Could also be that the drivers are broken in the operating system as well.

EP/SLP tapes have a weaker signal than SP. The USB-C adapter and the thin rca cables aren’t helping. It’s good to avoid adapters when you can. The bigger issue is the card though. The hardware deinterlacing and capturing to h.264 is bad. H.264 is heavily compressed generally and if you are capturing from a composite regular VCR you are going to have all kinds or noise. Noise doesn’t compress well. Compression works by utilizing redundancies and noise isn’t redundant. These guys do everything in logical steps. They reduce noise in hardware first then in software they remove noise before they sharpen so they don’t sharpen noise. By the time they compress to H.264 (mp4 container) the video editing is done and the video is ready to be compressed for uploading to YouTube or w/e you want to do. Losslessly compressed files are better for editing because you don’t lose nearly as much data during editing.

That is really bad. There’s no point in doing a transfers like that. YouTube is good for finding horrible digitizing techniques. They recommend me those now. I’ve noticed the worse ones are the animated ones because the bad deinterlacing, compression etc.., is more noticeable.