Needed Help Digitizing VHS Tape

Hey guys, perhaps some will have slight interest in this. I'm trying to digitize two Star Wars VHS tapes I made back around 1999/2000-ish. If you have interest in any of this this content I can upload it. It has a lot of coverage from that era:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9byeNy3WLUPdGVvajg3LVZwZGM/edit?usp=sharing

The problem is, I have pretty mediocre equipment. I bought a $20 capture device off Amazon and have an old VHS player that's probably worth $10. See here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9byeNy3WLUPVUdESGt0ck4xNm8/edit?usp=sharing

When trying to capture the VHS the tracking on the VCR is not very good. The audio will often fuzz out or the screen will flicker blue. Does anybody have a good idea how to fix this or optomize my capture using the equipment I have?

Thanks!

P.S. Love this site for the short amount of time I've been lurking. Just trying to give back to the community! --Hopefully someone is interested in this stuff.

Cool thanks man and thanks for understanding where I'm coming from. Yea I don't want to spend $200 on some old S-VCR thing. Although the ez grabber came with some of its own software I'm trying to use/learn virtualdub. 

I think initially I need to fix the source of the problem which is the VCR and then improve things from there. So are there anymore old VCR tricks or maintenance things I could do to improve the capture? The main thing is, like I said, the tracking kind of has a mind of its own and freaks and by going back and forth, and back and forth. Usually it stops automatically tracking on not a very good picture, then I have to manually adjust the tracking. So there's no way I can just leave the VHS tape to play, I have to sit and watch the whole thing to fix the tracking as it goes. Kind of annoying. 

As far as picture quality this is what it's looking like so far:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9byeNy3WLUPendWQlN1NUxYcFU/edit?usp=sharing

I have one of those EZGrabber2 devices, they're pretty decent actually. More than adequate for your VHS tape. The VCR matters far more.

Maybe you could borrow another VCR, look in the free section of Craigslist, etc. to at least get one that can play the tape without major distortion.

There's still plenty of VCRs to be found in thrift stores, if yours is decrepit.  I brought a nice SVHS Sony home for $15 last summer to have as a backup.

One key problem with capturing from VHS is that because it's mechanical and analog, it produces an imprecise video signal that digital capture devices have trouble dealing with.  A professional would use a "Time Base Corrector" (TBC for short) to stabilize the signal, which can dramatically improve the quality.

Other capture options include:

standalone DVD recorders; I've come across those in thrift stores, pawn shops, and yard sales for under $20.  Some claim to include TBC of some sort, and supposedly some can be used to pass through a corrected video signal to another capture device.  Downsides are that the discs sometimes need to be formatted first, and/or finalized after, and video is recorded as MPEG2, so it's not ideal for editing if you copy the disc to the computer later.

TV capture cards and USB devices; these nearly always have inputs for composite and Svideo and audio.  Sometimes this capability isn't even mentioned on the box.  Some include hardware MPEG encoders, but usually it's best to capture to DV so the video can be edited easily.  I've come across ATSC tuners at thrift stores (USB and PCI-E); good computer recyclers like Freegeek will probably have a box full.  Hauppauge is a common brand.

Camcorders; some MiniDV and Digital8 camcorders include video inputs.  These are reputed to have decent TBC, and they can often pass through the video to Firewire, so the camcorder becomes an outboard Firewire capture device.  This requires a Firewire port, obviously.  Note that even a camera with a broken CCD or MiniDV mechanism should still work fine.

If you google video capture and TBC and VHS you'll find various helpful discussions.  This is kind of a distillation of what I've learned from reading and doing some captures myself.