Timeline for What do I need to know about buying a VCR for digitising old VHS tapes?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 19, 2020 at 12:26 | answer | added | kdgregory | timeline score: 0 | |
| Dec 18, 2020 at 9:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackAVP/status/1339857963998208000 | ||
| Dec 18, 2020 at 0:27 | comment | added | Hashim Aziz | @supercat Would any of that be possible with the hardware I'm planning to use? My intended workflow was to capture from the VCR to DV via the USB capture card, and then apply any fixes in FFmpeg and/or Avisynth. | |
| Dec 18, 2020 at 0:20 | comment | added | supercat | ...result of the VCR's efforts at trying to clean them up, it may be harder to distinguish what parts of the picture one should use, and what parts should be discarded and reconstructed. | |
| Dec 18, 2020 at 0:20 | comment | added | supercat | I suspect that the best way to digitize VHS tapes would be to capture the a relatively "raw" signal from the tape head, and then decode the color and perform any cleanup digitally. In many cases where one sees what looks like tearing, what one is actually seeing is the output of a delay line which is used to fill in places where a tape drop-out was detected. If one digitally captured the actual recorded signal with the drop-out, one could easily detect where the drop outs occurred and use motion interpolation techniques to clean them up. If instead one captures the... | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 22:43 | vote | accept | Hashim Aziz | ||
| Dec 17, 2020 at 21:27 | vote | accept | Hashim Aziz | ||
| Dec 17, 2020 at 21:28 | |||||
| Dec 17, 2020 at 18:11 | history | migrated | from retrocomputing.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Dec 17, 2020 at 9:57 | comment | added | pndc | @occipita While SCART does support RGB and YC, every VHS recorder I've had does only composite video. A S-VHS recorder may thus prove useful if it outputs YC, although the colour in ordinary VHS recordings is so low-bandwidth that there may be no quality improvement from keeping it separate. | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 1:07 | answer | added | Exasperation | timeline score: 9 | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 0:17 | comment | added | Hashim Aziz | @occipita I can confirm that all the VCRs I've seen on eBay so far have been SCART, I chose the USB capture card because it contains the necessary SCART-to-composite cables. | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 0:11 | comment | added | occipita | @snips-n-snails - here in the UK, it would be unusual to find a VCR without SCART, which contains component outputs. | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 0:08 | comment | added | occipita | I don't think this question is on-topic here, as it isn't about retrocomputing per se, but about retro-electronics to be used alongside (presumably) a modern computer. That said, a VCR sold in the UK without specification is almost certainly PAL (and it probably doesn't actually matter, as the PAL or NTSC signal is directly encoded on the tape and AIUI the VCR doesn't actually interpret it in any meaningful way, at least not for standard playback). An S-VHS player will be useful if the recordings were made with an S-VHS recorder, but otherwise is irrelevant. | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 0:04 | comment | added | snips-n-snails | Video on VHS is stored separately as luma and chroma, so if you don't use a VCR with S-Video output, you'll need a really good external comb filter to have any hope of recovering the original signal without dot crawl artifacts. | |
| Dec 16, 2020 at 23:32 | history | asked | Hashim Aziz | CC BY-SA 4.0 |