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VHS Capture?

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I'm probably going to need a lot of assistance if I'm going to transfer the tapes from the Executor boxset. I'm hearing about how I need a Hauppage card or something, and that the soundtrack might be encrypted and difficult to transfer correctly. I'm new to it all - can somebody help?

Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.

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What you need first is a video capture card; best are internal one, even if latest USB are not that bad. If you are lucky you can get an older model, still very good for VHS capture, at a really low price.

Sound card inside your PC could be good enough; but an aftermarket sound card will do quite surely a better work; again, it's possible to find it too at a very low price used.

Macrovision is usually present in almost all pre-recorded VHS, but I had not problem to capture some of them... maybe you could defeat it passing through a DVD recorder, but frankly I'm not messing about macrovision things from a very very long time, so first get a video capture card, then IF the issue will arise, you will surely find someone here who could help you!

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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Well I've decided to chance getting a VHS-DVD combo player, see if that'll do the job for me.

Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.

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NOOO!!! (^^,) Seriosly, any used 10$ PCI video capture card that could capture uncompressed AVI is better than any DVD recorder!

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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Oh dear... it's rather too late now. ...I don't even know how to install these capture cards.. ;(

Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.

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Macrovision protection is more likely to cause problems when trying to capture using a DVD recorder. My guess is you'll get a "protected content - unable to record" message or similar.

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Blast it! Well I'm going to have to send that player back now, aren't I?

Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.

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 (Edited)

FrankT said:

Blast it! Well I'm going to have to send that player back now, aren't I?

That's probably for the best anyway. Combi players tend not to be of very high quality. Some of the best VHS players are the the 'prosumer' decks made by Panasonic, JVC and the likes. I myself use a Panasonic SVHS deck with an on-board time base corrector (TBC), and it performs much better than the several bog-standard VHS players, including a mid-range Sony deck, that I had used before. Some consider an external TBC essential, too, but I ended up selling mine because it was introducing momentary tearing problems and dropped frames once every 30 minutes or so. If your tapes are in good condition then an external TBC probably won't be necessary anyway.

You'll get best results using a PC capture device so that you can produce a median of multiple captures of each tape for the best results. I use a lossless codec for capture, and it still produces very large (40GB+) files at 720x576 resolution. If you have a desktop PC with a bit of hard drive space to spare, PC capture is absolutely the way to go. With a laptop its trickier because the hard drives are slower, which can mean dropped frames, but still very possible with SD capture.

If you post your PC specs, we can help advise on the options available.

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Ok - what sort of specifications do you need?

Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.

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CPU and hard disk type and speed is the most important, but if you write all the PC specs it will be better to understand which could be the best capture card for your hardware.

Agree with CapableMetal: if you can find out a S-VHS recorder is even better! JVC and Panasonic are the best brand for VHS/S-VHS decks; the best are the professional ones, that you could obtain now for a fraction of their cost as new, but be aware that probably the latter could have the head very (ab)used and so give a worst result than a low usage consumer model.

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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Well let's see...

  • CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz
  • CPU Speed: 3.3 GHz
  • RAM: 4.1 GB
  • OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 (build 9200), 64-bit
  • Video Card: GeForce GT 620; Pixel Shader v5, Vertex Shader v5, 2 GB Dedicated Video RAM
  • Sound Card: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
  • Free Disk Space: 154.9 GB

    Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.

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    FrankT said:

    Ok - what sort of specifications do you need?

    Processor, Memory (amount), Hard Drive(s) (size), Motherboard (to ascertain slots available), Operating system software (Mac/Windows ... what version) ..... stuff like that.

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    Hard disk speed and cache amount are valuable data, too, more than size, to know if you could capture without "stuttering" or frame loss; though, looking at your PC spec, I think it's quite safe to tell it's powerful enough to capture analog audio and video without problems. I use VirtualDub to capture, but I'm not sure if it works under Windows 8.1...

    Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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     (Edited)

    FrankT said:

    Well let's see...

    • CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz
    • CPU Speed: 3.3 GHz
    • RAM: 4.1 GB
    • OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 (build 9200), 64-bit
    • Video Card: GeForce GT 620; Pixel Shader v5, Vertex Shader v5, 2 GB Dedicated Video RAM
    • Sound Card: NVIDIA High Definition Audio
    • Free Disk Space: 154.9 GB

       I take it from your graphics card that this is a desktop machine. Can you remove the side panel and get a look at the motherboard? If you can see any free slots you can ascertain whether they are PCI or PCI-E(xpress). This is important as the two aren't compatible with each other. PCI-E is more flexible because it comes in different sizes (x1 being the smallest and x16 being the largest) but x1 cards can fit in any size PCI-E slot.

      Take a look at this picture from Wikipedia of the different types; the top four slots are PCI-E and the bottom is PCI. If you can see any of these free on your motherboard you will know what you are aiming for. The rest of your specs seem fine for standard definition capture.

      EDIT: If you can see the label on the top your hard drive whilst you're looking for available slots, if you can see a model number write it down and let us know and we can check out the specification of that too.

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      I would if I knew where the side panel was.. I... really don't know much about this kind of thing... I'm probably going to have to hand this operation over to someone else - you know, send my tapes off to someone who knows better than me.

      Ol’ George has the GOUT, I see.