Capturing and audio sync, taking another stab at it!
 

Now that I am finally done with school and have gotten some other pressing projects around the house done, I am wanting to take another shot at my VHS conversion project.

When we last left our fabled hero, I was having two problems with the workflow that was advised by this forum. The first is that I am having audio sync issues where the audio would begin to drift around the 20 minute mark and pretty much keep drifting. Now, whether this was due to dropped frames or not, I don't think it is since the issue persists on both the dirtiest of tapes along with well preserved and well recorded ones.

My second issue is that there were several projects that I did complete, shorter tapes, that I was able to avoid the audio sync issues, only to find that I am unable to do anything with them. I had used Huffy for capture, but nothing I have tried for playback seems to understand it much less convert it. I have tried using Handbrake for conversion and it won't read it. I have tried using VLC for playback on another computer and it won't read it. There is very little purpose in spending all of this time capturing if I can't do anything with it. TLDR version, I need to find a way to convert a Huffy capture into a usable format such as mp4 for streaming playback.

My last question is if I don't care too much for the best quality and the playback in the preview window works without any sort of sync issue, why should I not just nip this in the bud and do a screen capture of just the preview window? Is there any sort of drawback to this?

Dropped frames is the reason for audio drift.
Using VirtualDub? You have audio playback on capture disabled, right?

New computer, same codecs? Which Huffyuv? Basic/statndard, 64, MT, etc?
It's probably a simple codec issue.
You didn't install a "codec page", did you?

Screen captures are a mess. I'd avoid that. The available software alone is lousy.

Unfortunately, I have found that having audio playback is enabled or muted produces the same results. The key problem seems to be length. Anything recorded in around a half an hour or so won't lose sync, but longer ones will.

I have tried using both the VDub with presets from this forum (1.91 I think) as well as the 64 bit version of it. Same problems. And yes, I have installed K-Lite onto the machine. However, I have tried to bring them to another machine to see if I could use something to convert these AVI's to a playable format and have found that nothing I have tried will do it. Handbrake won't recognize the file at all and playback on VLC or Classic Media Player won't recognize the codec. I have also tried using Avidemux and I guess I just don't understand what I am doing on that one.

Screen caps have been the only thing that has worked since I started this project. In some respects, I wish I had continued with it because I wouldve been done by now. In others, I would not have been able to get some tapes to play at all using the equipment I was using from the start, so that content wouldve been lost. I'm really looking for something that will just work.

So again, my two problems are that I have some audio drift which you and I have tried to troubleshoot quite a bit to no success since I do not have access to a computer running Windows XP or for some other unknown reason. My thought is that it may be likely that I dont have XP is a strong factor since it is the only constant that hasn't changed since I started. I have tried multiple cards, have as clean a signal as I can with a TBC and a Panansonic and have tried different encoding methods from Huffy to Lag to even Xvid.

And again, the second problem is that the videos I did successfully capture cannot be either converted or played back on any other device. The point of this is to have them available to be played back by the family and archiving comes in a distant second. This is the reason I had suggested simply opening VDub and screen capturing the output with a different piece of streaming software such as Xsplit or OBS. This method may not provide the best quality, but it does work and converts it into a usable format. I guess I am simply trying to figure out if there is any other things I have not tried before I give up out of frustration and just do it in that way.