Best digitization equipment for my budget?

[Vault_Dweller_B0i]

Hello, I am not sure on what capture card and TBC to get to reliably digitize my family's VHS, VHS-C, and Video 8 tapes at my budget

I have a windows 11 pc, but if needed, I am fine with getting an additional pc that is Windows 7 or XP. Besides the pc I might need, I have a budget of about $450 for the VCR, TBC and capture card. I have read the recommended VCR models list so I think I'm fine with picking a VCR. I already have a SONY DCR-TRV350 to play the Video 8 tapes as I tested and it seems fine, but If it's not, is there a list of recommended Video 8 players? Thank you for reading and ask whatever questions you have.

[lordsmurf]

$450 will not buy a VCR, TBC, and capture card. Not even eBay gambling is that cheap.

That leaves budget options:
- lower end (but non-crappy) VCRs, preferably JVC non-TBC S-VHS
- TBC(ish) minimalist "also has" devices
- capture card just costs what it costs, there's really no budget end here (good cards, or crap cards, very binary), and model available depends on Windows OS in use, preferably WinXP/7 on offline system

Something most people fail to understand is this: buy it, use it, resell it. Quality gear holds value, crap is yours forever (and often uber-budget gear is yours forever as well). Video gear is not something you buy, use, then toss in a drawer or closet. It holds value, and it needs to be kept in circulation.

So understanding "buy it, use it, resell it", is the budget still a lowly $450?

Understand video is extremely cheap compared to other tools used for other tasks: lawnmowers (and all the yard tools needed), water heaters, sewing machines (and all the accessories), etc. Or to other hobbies, be it cars, action figures, or photography. Proper tools needed for a proper job, crap tools for a crap job.

$450 would get a non-TBC JVC, ES10/15, and capture card. But those are eBay gamble prices, you may spend the next few months fighting shady eBay sellers ("tested!" and "working!" is often BS), and not actually converting the video.

DCR-TRV350 is Digital8, so confirm is it has TBC for analog, or plays analog at all. Noting that many/most DV cameras compress the analog to lower DV quality on output (not passthrough as analog). But if this a budget project (money matters more than quality), and that's what you have, that will suffice.

[aramkolt]

On a budget, you could probably find one of the line TBC JVC combo units where usually the MiniDV drive has gone bad. VHS part usually still works fine. Beauty of ebay is if they claim it works and it doesn't, you can return it even if they don't allow returns because it is not as described. So you could have to go through a few returns potentially, but hopefully not.

It is is pretty hard to beat an ES10/ES15 if solid/non-flickering video without geometrical image distortion is your priority at the cost of some added smoothing/detail loss. I'd feel more confident in leaving a capture unattended using an ES10/15 as you sometimes will need to repeat your capture using one anyway if you later find a bunch of jittering artifacts or other geometry issues, and you almost certainly need one if your VCR doesn't have a line TBC anyway. I did a test capture of a commercial video tape on an SLV-R1000 which is a pretty high end Sony VCR which doesn't have a line TBC and it had pretty extreme flagging/upper geometry bending despite being a high end machine. My understanding is that a full frame TBC won't correct that, really only the ES10/15 will.

I probably wouldn't try to find a standalone recommended TBC at all with that budget. The ES10/15 also kind of negates the need for the line TBC in the VCR if you plan to pass all of your content through it, so any late model S-VHS JVC VCR with low hours would probably work fine in that case.

As for capture cards, I've made a few posts about a seller that has some inexpensive all in wonder 9200 SE's on ebay and. you could get the card and breakout cable for $35 shipped, but they require a relatively old PC usually from the Pentium 4 era or a bit later (2000-2005 maybe and it would need to be running XP) that have an AGP graphics slot which you you could probably find for nearly free if there are any local computer recyclers or if you post on Facebook asking if any of your friends have an old tower PC laying around. You'd then want to put a new SSD for the operating system and a separate several terabyte hard disk drive in there to capture to.

I have yet to do a direct comparison of the AIW Rage 200 chipset to something more modern like the IOData GV-USB2 here: https://www.amazon.com/DATA-connecti...00428BF1Y?th=1

The IO data is well reviewed and does work with Windows 10 and 11 and preserves interlaced frames appropriately, so if having something that works with your existing computer saves for the budget for other hardware elsewhere, that could be worth it alone, especially if you're not wanting to cobble together a vintage PC running XP where you could still ultimately run into driver issues.

Eventually I'll do some conversions with both the IOData and an AIW cards and see if visually anyone can tell a difference. Could even be that the IOData is superior in some cases (I'd argue it is very much superior from a compatibility/modern hardware standpoint), just hard to tell without actual comparison videos if there's a noticeable improvement in quality when using the older recommended AIW cards.

One place where the AIW cards may likely outshine the IOData is capturing to MPEG2 (preserves interlacing which is key for post-processing) within ATI's default capture utility (MMC) which is compressed (not lossless) and typically was used as a DVD format, but if the bitrate is high enough, it's fairly tough to tell too much of a difference between lossless capture which takes up about 30GB an hour vs something like maybe 5GB per hour for the MPEG2. Dealing with significantly smaller file sizes may be worth the slight drop in initial capture quality. No one around here really likes the Elgato video capture, but those files sizes are more like 1GB per hour, so there's plenty of added bitrate in using ATI's MMC at 5GB per hour AND you get the interlacing preserved.

MPEG2 I used to think was hard to work with, but things like Hybrid for post-processing will accept it just fine. There are free/simple MPEG2 splitters out there that can take clips from a larger file without needing to re-encode anything which is nice too if you're doing full captures on the hunt for specific scenes.

[Vault_Dweller_B0i]

I have since increased the budget to $650 and I have gotten myself a working Panasonic AG1970P

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vault_Dweller_B0i

I have since increased the budget to $650 and I have gotten myself a working Panasonic AG1970P

Did you get it yet, or just buy it? Because odds are AG-1970 units long ago failed, including even my own. An idiot seller on eBay would easily claim that my unit "worked" (lights up, plays a tape for 5 secconds), but then it's quickly unusable. Transport issues, caps failed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

, you could probably find one of the line TBC JVC combo units where usually the MiniDV drive has gone bad.

Those models tends to be abused, and especially eBay-source decks. I was recently sent an amusing (to me) group of images, along with the misleading auction listing. The seller was an ass, and I helped the buyer shut all that BS down quickly. Another person learned a hard lesson about why eBay is a video gear dumping ground.

Quote:

Beauty of ebay is if they claim it works and it doesn't, you can return it even if they don't allow returns because it is not as described.

It's not that easy. Sellers fight back, and you don't always win the cases. Furthermore, it takes time, sometime even 1-2 months, to go through the entire process from buy to actually having the refund. It's not like walking back into Walmart, and getting a no-questions-asked refund.

Quote:

As for capture cards, I've made a few posts about a seller that has some inexpensive all in wonder 9200 SE's on ebay and. you could get the card and breakout cable for $35 shipped, but they require a relatively old PC usually from the Pentium 4 era or a bit later (2000-2005 maybe and it would need to be running XP) that have an AGP graphics slot which you you could probably find for nearly free if there are any local computer recyclers or if you post on Facebook asking if any of your friends have an old tower PC laying around. You'd then want to put a new SSD for the operating system and a separate several terabyte hard disk drive in there to capture to.

ATI AIW AGP are some of the best cards made, and you can absolutely get a steal of a deal on those cards. But you pay for it in other ways. Old IDE based HDDs are small and slow, albeit it minimally functional. On a tight budget, you take what you can get. But SATA AGP systems based on Intel/AMD dual-core and Asrock boards are where cost creep in, and those are ideal, not the ancient P4 IDE systems.

Quote:

The IO data is well reviewed

For PAL, not NTSC.

[Vault_Dweller_B0i]

I have already received the VCR. I have seen a few videos talking about the short lifespan and poor repairability of the AG-1970P so for a backup I did buy another VCR. It being the Toshiba W-808.