VHS to DVD conversion: My way doesn't look very good!
 

Okay maybe Mr. Sinatra inspired me to try my VHS conversion my way instead listening to the advice posted on this forum. Or, maybe it was just me being stubborn. In any case I kept telling myself that the people on this forum just take things too far and most of the discussion is just hyperbole. Well, I guess the bottom line is I'm many hours into the process and I'm disappointed in the finished result of my VHS to DVD conversion. I'm hoping that if I eat a little crow I won't get lambasted too much.

This is what I did and what I used.

I'm converting VHS home movies. I used a retail consumer Panasonic VCR (model PV-V4022-A), a Avermedia M116D capture card with Conexant CX23416-22 MPEG II Encoder and AVS4YOU capture software. The AVS4YOU software captured in MPEG II at 720 x 480 at 6,000 kbps. I then converted to DVD using AVS4YOU. Watched the DVD on Hitachi 42" Plasma TV.

I don't think the finished product looks very good. What I would like to know if anyone would care to answer...

What should my expectations be for a good finished product? I watched the original VHS tape after watching my newly created DVD and I was shocked at the contrasting quality. (I did watch the VHS tape on a newer CRT TV if that makes any difference). The original VHS tape had much better color and sharpness. My main question is this. How close quality wise will a DVD/VHS conversion look as compared to the original VHS tape? Almost the same or will there always be some quality loss?

Given my list of sub-par equipment, what one change would net the most quality improvement? I guess I don't fully understand why getting a better VCR helps. If I'm happy with the picture quality when the VCR is showing the tape on the TV wouldn't that mean that the VCR should be showing the same quality when the image is being captured?

I'm leaning toward getting a ATI 9600 video card. If I only change the capture card will I notice any quality improvements?

On a side note, I did try using the Avermedia software instead of the AVS4YOU to capture at 720 x 480 7,000 kbps and I didn't think it looked much better.

Thanks, and please go easy on me.

You answered your own questions there.
As a side note, I don't understand why people continue to use encoders like AVS4YOU when even casual reading on web should steer one away from them.

Ok, since you asked and aside from the fact that any better equipment is always desirable, if you can use virtualdub to capture with, installing huffyuv, then encode to mpeg later on with a better choice.
It isn't clear to me either whether you actually encoded to mpeg once or twice, if twice, that would cause a big drop in quality.
Either way ditch AVS4YOU.
Not sure about your capture device either, you may need to replace it either with a better capture device or get a good dvd recorder.
In any event, it would be in your best interest to read through as many guides here as possible so that you will learn why things are the way they are.
Hope I didn't come across too strongly, others here are more knowledgeable that I and can help you better.

No need to beat yourself up over it, it's a common situation to be in - the same one when I started. I didn't disregard any advice, but I didn't do enough research, and I thought my expectations were lower. I was wrong; they are actually quite high. It sounds like your eyes have been opened too. At least now you know not to follow the advice of Sinatra when it comes to VHS :D

A good conversion should result in the DVD looking better than the tape. Not by a little, not somewhat, but obviously better. The amount of improvement depends on how much you're willing to invest into the project - which is time more than anything else.

The problem is that even if you're happy with the image on the TV, your capture card isn't. VHS is full of noise and defects, and if you're capturing it unfiltered to a compressed format like MPEG2, your encoder will not play nice with it. Your tape is guaranteed to look worse once digitized. Even if capturing to a lossless format, all that noise must be filtered before encoding to DVD, and there's only so much you can do in software. There are some VHS errors that must be resolved by hardware.

So to answer your question, the one change that would net the most quality improvement would be a good VCR with line TBC. This will help clean and stabilize your tapes for a smoother and nicer capture.

For you, I'd recommend getting a top DVD recorder, such as a JVC DR-M100. More info and other models can be found on this site. Providing your tapes are in decent shape, this will make your work easy and provide satisfying results. If I were you I'd avoid PC capture entirely at this stage, if you're able to. Another piece of important hardware to look into is a TBC.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and have a thorough read of this site. There is no better friend to have for VHS conversion than a firm understanding of the process. Otherwise you're just guessing your way through the test. Hope this has helped.

you MUST use a good JVC or Panasonic Super-VHS vcr.
anything less will yield sub-par results

here is LordSmurfs good VCR list: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...ing-guide.html

CRT TV is very forgiving to VHS compared to 42" plasma. Apples and oranges. It's possible to have 'what you see is what you get' capture from your sub-par VCR but you need a) better capture device b) lossless capture. Not very practical. Heed the advice of previous commenters and LordSmurfs FAQs.

I originally purchased the AVS4YOU to convert some miniDVD's to regular size DVDs. I also was looking for something to convert to a format that would display on my AppleTV. I downloaded several different programs and I found the AVS4YOU to be the most user friendly and have the most features. After reviewing all of the programs that I received for the one low purchase price I found out that they supported VHS to DVD conversion so I decided to take a stab at it. I purchased a capture card that was listed on their website as one that they supported. In my defense, I am just a green horn and I didn't see any "bad reviews" of AVS4YOU. I'm just exploring the hobby of filming videos, editing them, converting them etc. I find the whole process of working with video intriguing. I'm somewhat OCD so I guess that's how I ended up on this site. (Does that mean that you guys are OCD?)

I'm not sure either. I believe I captured in native MPEG. Then when I "converted" to DVD it was in the same MPEG format. Not sure if it's re-encoding or not? What typically happens when you used the "convert to DVD" function? I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. (I just stick in a blank DVD).

I want to be better, REALLY. Just remember I'm a newbie.

Wow, this is a real kick in the stomach for me.

Okay, I might capitulate on this.

I find this statement fascinating. I guess i never even considered the DVD recorder route. Are you saying that I just plug my VCR into the DVD recorder and let the machine do all the work? I don't "fiddle" with capture resolutions or bit rates? What about chapters? I did find that adding chapters made my home video more "veiwable." (Assuming you overlooked the crappy video quality). Are you saying the DVD recorder would work better than an ATI 9600 capture card?

Only very specific models, and only in certain workflows (MPEG transfer). A JVC DR-M10/DR-M100 (or comparable LSI Logic models), for VHS tapes, would yield better quality because of the chroma noise reduction. However, the ATI would be superior for any lossless or high-bitrate (Blu-ray compliant) MPEG capturing. It's not a simple "X is better than Y" sort of situation.

You do need to pay attention to the "recording modes" and equivalent resolution:bitrate ratios, when using DVD recorders. :2cents:

It's easy to make a lousy DVD than it is to make a good quality one. However, you can easily make a DVD that looks better than the tape, if the right hardware (and software, as needed) is used.

Unfortunately for you, this wasn't necessary. You could have very easily copied the discs. If you wanted to merge several mini-DVDs, then you could have simply demuxed the discs, edited/merged as desired, and re-burned in original quality. I have little doubt that AVS4YOU raped the quality of your video, as it's a low-end Chinese program.

Are you saying that the ATI AIW card is not a good capture device? Is lossless capture expensive and hence not practical?

No, not at all.

The issue is that VHS is noisy. A cheap VCR makes it worse. MPEG compression does poorly on noisy video sources. The only way to capture a 1:1 quality version of a noisy source is to capture it losslessly (or uncompressed). Of course, that's a bit silly, as the goal should be to make it look better. Unless you're working in some sort of law enforcement situation, there's no reason to continue maintaining videos in crappy quality. Improvement should be the goal.

I don't know about ATI AIW. Aside from what LS said, it's not practical to have 30-40 Gigabyte per hour -files for presentation. For archival, I would in most cases recommend keeping the original lossless files.

Well that was supposed to be good news for you actually. What I meant was that with the right tools and knowledge, particularly a high-end VCR, your DVD will look better than the original unfiltered, unstabilized tape. So no need to worry about keeping that raw image, because you won't want to after seeing the improvements of a better capture chain, should you choose to invest in an upgrade.

Ouch! Okay that one hurts. If I recall I did try to copy the miniDVD's to regular DVD's but they wouldn't play on my LG DVD player. I thought that I needed some software to help convert them to a regular DVD format. In hindsight, I believe the reason they wouldn't play was because of the crappy Memorex (Ritetek) DVD's I was using. Later after many hours of frustration, I tried some Verbatim DVD's I bought off of Bonanza. (I think they have the purple inky stuff). I have since purchased but not received some TAIYO YUDEN DVD-R SILVER THERMAL PRINTABLE 8X. Do I get any good faction points for this purchase? Since I still have the original miniDVD's nothing should be lost (except my pride and time). As far as de-mucking [SIC] and editing the discs to merge them together, what software would you recommend for do this?

I suppose you are also going to say that the AVS4YOU is not good for converting the miniDVD's to play on my AppleTV?

I'm not really that big of a tool even though the evidence is mounting against me.

OT: Even if you needed to convert the MiniDVDs to DVD-spec compliant stream, many of the best tools are FREE.

Yep, that would do it. :o

Both are excellent. Points are hereby doled out. :p

Follow the guide: How to Edit Video from Homemade DVD on a Computer (Windows) -- that shows how to extract the video.
Editing is optional, not required.
And then re-authoring can be done with freeware like Simple DVD Creator (menu-less).
See this for freeware authoring discussion: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/dvd-...ee-frills.html

Not ideal, but that would work for "viewing only" copies (not archival).

Hahaha.... :salute:

I installed VirtualDub and did a capture. The file was so large that I immediately got a call from Bill Gates asking me to come to work for him on the next version of windows. I'm assuming I was capturing in lossless? Will the Huffyuv make the file size smaller? I didn't have time last night to try it. Does the Huffyuv work inside VirtualDub or is it standalone? Also, I seemed to be dropping a lot of frames. Do you always drop "some" frames?
When I play the captured file using MediaPlayer it was choppy. Is this normal?

- Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 YUY2 video is about 75GB/hour.
- Lossless Huffyuv 4:2:2 video is about 35-40GB/hour.
- High bitrate 4:2:2 Matrox MPEG-2 is about 20GB/hour, +/- depending on exact bitrate.
- DV 4:1:1 is about 13GB/hour.

Playback of uncompressed video is lousy. It's not a distribution format (meaning it's not meant to be watched). It's intended for editing and specific archival scenarios.

Dropped frames, when dealing with uncompressed video, is usually an I/O issue. Your hard drive is too slow. Even a 7200rpm IDE drive is pushing your luck. With a SATA drive, it's not quite as bad. Uncompressed video more comfortably operates on a RAID array, though you then have all the downsides of using RAID.

When capturing Huffyuv or MPEG-2, I almost never drop frames. The exception is VHS frames that are simply shot, and the encoder is fed absolutely garbage signal off the tape. The signal is so screwed up that the TBC can't even make heads or tails of it. That cascades across several parts of the workflow, and that includes dropped frames. The computer needs more time than is allowed to process the mess, so it's just dumped for the next frame. This is an acceptable reason to drop frames (or duplicate them).

And when you start working for MS, please let somebody know that Windows 8 looks ridiculous. :p

As a side note, I've noticed that making VirtulDub's write buffer larger removes the occasional drop I got. Default is 512kB. I've multiplied it with 16 or 32.

When my capture disk can write >100MB/s and has 64MB cache, dropping frames with 5-7MB/s capture was ridiculous. 512kB is not enough for everyone. :)

I'll make note of this in the pending updates to our VirtualDub guides. :thumb:

I forget this quite often myself. (This and several other settings in VirtualDub. Easy to overlook stuff.)

EDIT: I just check the deployed local copies of VirtualDub:

Attachment 2895

I think audio buffers should be left low. Not sure how this could potentially affect skew, if at all. Need to read up on it sometime.

CPU and disk I/O is still going to be the primary bottleneck. The RAM less so.
And when your system has 4GB of RAM, not much need to be stingy with Pentium III type RAM settings! Remember the age of VDub!

Also from "Disk I/O" options:

Attachment 2896

I'm sure that the hard drive that I was saving the capture file to is old. I think it's a 10 GB drive. It's probably a ATA33 with advertised 33 Mbytes/sec burst. At 75 GB/hour I would need 21 Mbytes/sec. Probably well below the sustained transfer rate of this old barnacle. But I thought a fast 7200rpm Ultra 100 should be able to do at least 40 Mbytes/sec sustained. Shouldn't that be fast enough?

Depends on the drivers. "Sustained" is the keyword.

Example: If using some old VIA 4-in-1 driver, forget about it.
It's about as sustained as a Jack Russell on caffeinated crack. (Up and down, all over the place.)

Since my old capture method made all of the Vegas casino owners happy by coming up all lemons I think I've come up with a new and improved plan for capturing VHS video.

I found a P3 1100 Mhz machine running WIN 2000K in my basement. I was planning on installing a secondary 80 GB hard drive for storage and an ATI 9600 video card with the purple dongle thingy as my capture card. I was planning on using VirtualDub with the Huffyuv codec for capture. Then use TMPG to encode to MPEG. (Will TMPG run on WIN 7 or will I have to run it on my antediluvian P III?) I hopefully will have a JVC HM-DH5U for my input VCR. Does this sound like it will work?

Not a Pentium III, no.

Would the P III work for capture only? Or "no" throw the useless P III in the trash along with the AVS4YOU license key.

Will VideoReDo accomplish this task?

If the ATI 9600 is not an option for you and if you have another PC that is more modern, you could give the Diamond ATI Theatre 750/650HD USB or PCIE cards a whirl along with the home version of Neat Video. For $88.00 it's not much of an investment. For the ATI card, if you don't install the drivers that come with the disc (or configure the tuner, which causes issues for many people) then you can capture in VirtualDub using HuffyUV with it.

The 650/750HD both have one potential snag that seems to be a problem for some and not for others -- and that is issues with AGC, causing the capture to blow out whites in the picture. I have not personally seen those issues with my 750HD at all in the months I've been using it, but YMMV. Perhaps they've made some revisions to it since the first batch of cards came out. The captures will be noisy, as the device itself does no filtering, but I've had a lot of success with using it alongside the temporal filter in Neat Video for noisier footage, even when paired with a consumer Panasonic deck, although as you'd expect, I get better results with my JVC deck as it has it's own NR and TBC.

I previously used the JVC DR-M100S recorder for 95% of my stuff and I have to say it is also quite stellar -- and of course, much less time consuming. It's kind of amazing how good the captures look, given it's capturing and encoding in real-time.

- AVS4YOU may have some use later. No idea what, but don't trash it.
- The P3 is just too old for anything having to do with video. Audio, sure, maybe. Video? Fat chance.

Yes. :thumb:

For computer-based cases, you also have the ATI 600 USB cards. And then today I saw a couple of Tevion USB "TV Tuner" cards on eBay, and those work nicely.

There's several safe options out there -- especially from ATI, between the USB, AGP and PCI-E cards. It's all a matter of hunting for them, and spending time to situate your setup to work as needed. Well, that and owning a stack of audio/video hardware: S-VHS VCRs, TBCs, audio mixers, etc, to truly get the best quality possible.

Quality Still Bad
 

I'm going backwards with my captures. The best I've been able to do is still horribly pixelated on the TV. I played my original source tape on an el cheapo VCR and it looks 10X better than any of my recent captures. Best quality I've achieved to date is with my original AverMedia PCI card with MPEG chip on it and AverMedia capture software. I haven't tried that card with the better VCR. Maybe that will do the trick. I might try that card again or just keep the original tape and VCR. Time to move on. As Solomon said, "Let us hear the conclusion to the whole matter..." The conclusion could very well be that VCR's rule!

ditch the P3 - that is a total waste of time.

the JVC HM-DH5U is an excellent VCR.
hook that into a TBC-1000 or AVT-8710 and then to either a AIW(xp) or ATI600USB (windows 7) capture card or a JVC DR-M10S dvd recorder.
you will get excellent results

Blah. I monitor my VCR capture live with SDI tube video monitor and there's no difference between a) VCR -> Analog to Digital Converter -> SDI monitor b) VCR -> SDI monitor (using monitors s-video input). VCR doesn't rule, your capture hardware or playback chain just has problems.

I tested my theory and tried my Avermedia capture card with hardware MPEG2 compression, Avermedia capture software and my HM-DH5U. It looks good. Better than any other captures I have been doing with my old setup. My old setup was: AIW Radeon 7500 to capture in HuffyUV with VirtualDub then encode to MPEG2 with TMPG. So, I'm thinking either VirtualDub or TMPG is hosing me with Macroblocks. I was following the guide on this site for encoding to MPEG2 with TMPG so I'm assuming all of those settings are correct. As far as VirtualDub is concerned I have the "Noise Reduction" enabled with the default setting. Any ideas?

-- update --

I think the problem I was having was with my DVD player encoder. It doesn't handle 352 x 480 very well. The Avermedia card captured in 720 x 480 and therefore looked better than my VirtualDub capture at 352 x 480. I tested this theory out by buying a Sony DVD player from Wal-Mart. I've since decided to do all captures at 720 x 480 to avoid any future problems. I realize this comes at a cost.

I have since decided to skip the AVI capture anyway and just use my ATI MMC with mild video soap to capture to mpeg2. For whatever reason, I think it looks better than the AVI capture in VirtualDub. I think some of my source tapes were recorded on twice and I have a color bleed issue?

I think I'm fairly happy with the results I'm getting so I'm forging ahead with my conversions and archiving. My workflow is as follows. JVC HM-DH5U, AVT 8710 TBC, ATI 7500 Radeon. I then use VideoReDo for "editing" and DVD authoring.