Settings for capturing old compact (S)VHS tapes?
 

First many thanks to all who support this site. After deciding to convert our old analog PAL (S)VHS family tapes to a digital format, I found a lot of useful information on this site.

Advice given on this site is to first capture as much as possible to not loose information and to compress using a lossless format like Huffyuv, or Lagarith, followed by editing and correcting (the more difficult part), followed by compression for playing and/or archiving.

System setup (which took quite some time to gather and installed):
1. an old but good VCR capable of playing S-VHS tapes, a Philips VR1000 (made by JVC).
2. S-VHS out and audio L/R out into ATI purple adapter/cable, into ATI AIW 9800 128Mb AGP card in a
3. Intel P4 2.8 Ghz 1Gb PC operating on Windows XP SP3 with also an installed
4. Terratec DMX-Xfire (Crystal Soundfusion) audio card, directly connected to output of ATI AIW 9800
5. Drivers for ATI AIW coming with MMC 8.8
6. Software for capture Virtualdub 1.10.4

Setup for capture of Virtualdub:
a. Streamformat PAL-B (lines detected 624), FPS=25, color space/compression YUY2, output size 720x576(i)
b. Compression Lagarith YUY2, 4:2:2 interleaved
c. Audio compression PCM 48kHz

Does anyone have a suggestion for improvement?

Welcome to the forum.

By "S-VHS out" I assume you mean "S-video" cable. SVHS is a tape format. S-video is a type of signal transmission and cable.

If any of your recordings are slow 4-hour or 6-hour tapes, expect very soft images with a JVC player.

You don 't need MMC to capture lossless video with Virtualdub.

What about analyzing and controlling signal levels? http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post45238

No frame-level tbc in circuit? What would you do about dropped frames and bad audio sync?

I'm surprised you haven't already tried a couple of captures yet.

Some corrections, thoughts...

- S-VHS not intended to play SVHS tapes, but rather to play VHS tapes better than a plain VHS player.

- S-VHS is a format, s-video is the wire (separate video, which places Y/luma and CrCbn chroma on separate carriers. As opposite to composited, which, as the name suggests, composites YCrCb onto a single wire.

- As fast as possible Single-core allows lossless and DVD-spec MPEG, dual/quad-core allows higg-bitrate MPEG too. 2gb is recommended minimum, though 1gb can suffice (I used an RDRAM 1gb system for many years to capture DVD-spec MPEG and lossless).

- XP SP3 installs a lot of "security" junk that nags you. SP2 best, but SP3 works if all that stuff is disabled. You should not have it online anyway. A few softwares due require SP3, like some Adobe apps, but at this late date, I'd not bother trying to install anything aside from the capture software and use it for that sole task.

- VirtualDub 1.9.x is (for some reason that I've never understood) more stable than 1.10.x for capturing.

- Lagarith capture probably won't work with 1gb single-core system. Use Huffyuv.

Aside from that feedback, seems fairly decent to me. :congrats: