Transferring a VHS.

[rick]

Never heard of that unit .... you can re-interlace using Virtualdub if that is what format you want

[rick]

A well used approach (apologies if already covered) is using PlayThrough on a Camcorder . Take video output from VHS recorder sVideo if possible, cable into camcorder input then firewire output direct to PC ... Camcorder does no recording it 'passes through' converted digital signal.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Or rather it doesn't. I was initially delighted to see a decent picture from the VHS on the laptop screen.

Had been sorting through the tapes to see which I wanted to transfer.

So got stuck in. Decided to record to an external drive, USB connected. So I can move it to where required easily.

Lots of unwanted judder on replay. Viewed on the Windows media player. Basically, useless.

Years ago, I'd no problems making perfectly watchable DVDs from VHS using Win XP.

Also tried recording direct to the laptop SSD. Same problem.

[Peter Able]

Thanks. MS2100E is the chip inside:

- at least it was the day they sent out mine !

It seems to be quite a common one - and works well, if you avoid using the USB extension lead supplied with it.

I've tested it on an interlaced VHS commercial tape, that I had previously captured with an old DV2000 capture card and there's nothing like the amount of data in the new file - and it shows whenever a object is moving - smooth edges in the old, interlaced version. Jagged motion with the new unit.

Won't show with something like an old cinema film - which starts with

25fps, but the new capture thing degrades the 50 field per second videos.

I tried Virtualdub last night - a long re-learning curve after so long. I don't want to re-interlace the new capture unit's output. The damage has already been done by the MS2100E !

(See Block Diagram

)

I don't understand why everyone is so keen on progressive. Interlacing was introduced for good reasons - most of which are still valid.

PA

[Paul]

Some device info here. It's a single chip, that it almost looks like it is a USB composite of some sort, with two "portions" and the driver may be offering two firmware files.

I can find at least one comment that recommended using a back USB2 port on a desktop and not a front USB2 point. The analog electronics are noise sensitive to interference picked up on front-port USB2 wiring.

I might try changing the power schema to "High Performance" on the computer and keep the CPU clock pegged. This might only be a tiny issue with an AMD system (the ACPI power reduction can be too clever, and it drops the CPU speed 30 times a second, which can wreak havoc with multimedia chores).

It could also be the device doing it (MPEG2 compressor gutless).

Given that DiamondMM has two designs, nothing prevents them from spinning a third, which is not on the LinuxTV site yet. They could keep the plastics and put something else inside.

I could not find any comments (yet) about using the Linux driver scheme. The availability of firmware is a potential problem there (not in /lib/fw due to unclear license). My TV tuner, which has capture capability too, has the same problem - the firmware for it, comes from the website of a private person as no distro will carry it on their server.

You can switch the VCR to channel 3 output, and use a tuner card to do capture, as an alternative interface. I've found that my DVD STB, it works best if using a separate Channel 3 modulator and having viewing devices receive it that way. The picture actually looks pretty good that way. With most of my other Composite experiments here, I had varying degrees of DC restoration problems. Like, sending a FreeBSD screen to the TV set over Composite, the picture was always too dark. The video card I was using, is the last of its generation, and has plenty of analog outputs, but I've got nothing to receive the finer of the signals. It has YPrPb, which could look great given a chance.

Paul

[Dave Plowman (News]

Crikey. I'd say the chances of getting an analogue TV card to work in a modern PC rather remote?

[Paul]

Well, you'd have to find one first :-)

Again, the tuner I got, has "one of everything". It has analog, digital, and has an analog cable for baseband capture from the VCR (or from my "budget" DVD player).

The other tuner is older, and is just a BT878 and tin can tuner. A so-called WinTV card. It's been retired for a few years, sitting in the computer unused. The tin can tuner is just an analog one, so its days are over where I live. All we get here is digital now. The newer tuner card can handle the digital directly. But if I had to... the new card can also tune channel 3 on a (F-series) coax.

I could get the WinTV card running again. I'd probably flip over to Linux and try it there.

My newer card is no longer for sale, and at the time, the other option was a digital quad, which I declined, because I wanted the card with "one of everything" on it :-) That's how I buy hardware here. The ancient video card was also a "one of everything" card. I wanted that so I could have a YPrPb, even if the odds were looking slim of using that signal set. Probably a TV set today, would be missing that on the back too, with my luck.

But you're right about the software side, you own the hardware purely as an enabler, with no guarantee of having software to use it.

The very first capture device I bought, cost 500 and had a SCSI interface on it. At the time, I thought SCSI "would last forever", and on the very next computer with SCSI, my capture box would not work. Out 500, just like that. Bad planning = full junk room...

But video capture has been this awful (unfriendly) for years and years.

If these newer pieces of junk were in stock at my store, I'd have probably bought a couple of them, just for the morbid fun they offer. The Diamond one, I can see it for sale, but it takes days to get here. I don't think anyone has a VCR capture product sitting on a store shelf that I could grab. It's all bazaar sellers that stock them. And then you wait for delivery.

I live in a city, but you honestly couldn't tell. I might as well be on a rural road in the middle of nowhere. Shipping would take the same amount of time.

I've lost my only electronics store here, and that would normally be a trigger to leave the city... Now I can't even get an LM317 when I want one.

And we walked uphill, both ways, to school.

Paul

[John Rumm]

So long as you have a proper PCI slot there is no reason why not. Just because the TV tuner part has not signal to listen to, does not stop the rest of it doing something.

[NY]

True, but you *may* find that a modern version of Windows doesn't have drivers for that PCI card and/or the capture software may not run on a modern version of Windows.

I keep an old Windows XP PC with an analogue capture card and software (I acquired it in part exchange for some PC repair work I was doing for a guy) because I don't want to bugger up my more recent PC in case adding the drivers from Windows Update doesn't work. I keep it off my network just in case it is more vulnerable than more recent Windows, and transfer recorded files by memory stick rather than network.

Apart from the fact that it refuses to record copy-protected pre-recorded VHS tapes, it produces a much better picture than a much more recent USB device that I bought which *does* copy copy-protected tapes: much less banding and dot-patterning.

I judge that I am less guilty of copyright infringement if I have bought a VHS copy (and therefore paid royalties on it) and I'm simply converting from one format (analogue VHS) to another (digital MPEG), as opposed to borrowing a friend's tape to make my copy and therefore not paying royalties on my copy. As far as I know, the film (Shooting Fish) has not been released

*uncut* on DVD; the only DVD version has had a lot of UK-specific references cut out for the US market, and that is the version that is sold even in the UK.

There needs to be an exemption in copyright law which say that if a copy is not / no longer available for sale, you are allowed to make an amateur copy yourself, maybe with a mechanism for paying a nominal royalty fee to the copyright holder. At present, the law seems to say "you cannot make you own copy even if you are willing to pay a token amount for it to the author".

[Peter Able]

I do that, too, by having a small Win2K partition. (XP uses more processor capability than Win2K). The DV2000 analogue card beats the EasyCap USB with a couple more bits of A2D conversion, plus it leaves interlaced video as interlaced.

Sssshhhh !

PA

[Dave Plowman (News]

How many laptops have a PCI slot?

And how many modern MBs one either?

I'm already using a PCIe to PCI adaptor to use a decent sound card with analogue inputs. Which takes up more space than a single card.

[John Rumm]

I have a little box of tricks you can insert into the CVBS video link that sticks an adjustable black level luminance clamp on in the vertical retrace - blanks the macrovision bars that fool the AGC on the capture side...

Sometimes by applying the same logic it easier to count the VHS copy as a "license", and go find an already digitised torrent :-)

[John Rumm]

None. But a laptop is not really really the place to start for this application.

Many still still have at least one - and more if you move away from just Micro ATX boards.

(might have more difficulty if you wanted an ISA slot though!)

Yup, that is another way...

[John Rumm]

Depends on what you mean by still valid. Interlaced video gave double the perceived frame rate without the associated increase in bandwidth.

The main reason for using it was to overcome the short persistence of the phosphors used on CRT displays, and thus reducing visible strobing and flicker effects.

With most modern screen technologies (or real cinema!) the frame is "illuminated" for the whole frame, and maintained on screen until the next is shown. So interlace no longer has a direct benefit.

The trouble comes when you take a source that was originally interlaced and want to render it on to a modern display. It's a difficult thing to do well.

[Dave Plowman (News]

It surely isn't impossible to make an adaptor for analogue video over USB3 for VHS quality?

[NY]

That's another reason that I bought a USB converter, so I could use it with my laptop which is a damn sight easier to take downstairs when I was copying things off the VHS (*): a big, heavy tower PC with a (flatscreen) monitor, a keyboard and a mouse is a *tad* more difficult to move around!

(*) OK, I know it would have been easier to bring the VHS to the PC rather than the other way round ;-)

[Peter Able]

That's just one aspect of - and not an argument against - interlacing.

An indisputable benefit of interlace is making motion appear less jerky.

I guess that the downside of interlace is that freezing the playback produces a hybrid frame.

PA

[Peter Able]

Not for "Under a tenner including software CD".

Most of the cards I've had in the past haven't been better than the ebay EasyCAP I got for £5.27 - after reading your OP.

The one exception has been the ~£30 DV2000. In the absence of detailed specs, I believe that it has a few more bits of A2D resolution - and can be made to transfer raw data - provided that the host can sustain about

75MByte/sec data transfer, card-to-storage.

PA

[John Rumm]

The main argument against, is that there is no real requirement for it today (other than for backward compatibility with older display equipment).

Depends on what you are watching. If it's a telecine converted film originally playing at 24fps (or probably 25 with extra frame pull down) interlacing can't rally get you anything extra that is not present in the source material.

If it was shot on video originally in interlaced format, then yes it will probably look smoother.

Also what you get when you de-interlace if you are not careful...

[Robin]

On 16/03/2021 09:38, Peter Able wrote: <snip>

I await with some trepidation the postmodern "critical scan theory".