Panasonic Blu-Ray VCR - junk?
 

I saw a listing for a Panasonic VCR that can do Blu-Ray as well as VHS. If I recall correctly, it has an HDMI output on the back of the unit, which makes me believe it can upscale. However, even though Panasonic is a reputable company for VCRs, I am not sure that a weird combo box would be very good as a capture source. It's a BD70V

Technology Connections did a video explaining that a RCA to HDMI as well as a HDMI capture card is the best way to digitize VHS tapes, but I don't agree at all. It looks like in that setup, it upscales the VHS.

By the way, isn't OBS not a good capture tool for VHS tapes, as it's primarily for gaming and not optimized for framedrops or even saves the capture as MPEG2? I prefer having MPEG2 because it's easier to deinterlace

The HDMI output of the Panasonic won't work with a capture card, because it has HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) applied to it, even when playing non-Macrovision-encoded tapes. HDMI capture cards are required to detect HDCP and block it from being captured at the hardware level, so no software is able to bypass the block.

There are ways to strip off the HDCP, such as by using an HDMI splitter, but you have to ask if it's worth going through such through just to get a mediocre-quality capture of VHS.

What's your favorite capture card? I saw your video on the Elgato and I went with the ClearClick because you advised against getting Elgato. Do you have a cheap, budget friendly one you like using?

My go-to capture device isn't a card at all, it's the A/V input mode of a Sony DCR-SR100 camcorder. It captures from composite or S-video, has a TBC, and saves the video in 9 Mbps MPEG2 files. The quality is identical to using Sony's standalone "DVDirect" DVD recorders, which you can find dirt cheap because nobody wants to burn DVDs anymore.