Recording VHS tapes to PC

[Jonchilds]

I've recently started copying VHS tapes to the PC so we can put them onto a DVD and throw out the old VHS collection as we're rapidly entering a time where VHS is no longer a suitable medium for family video.

I have a working VHS player, and TV card capable of accepting an RCA signal.

Whenever I record or transcode the tapes, I end up with either mouse-teeth (jagged edges on moving objects) or a stutter where it looks like walking people are skipping. These problems are mutually exclusive - You get either one or the other.

I get the mouse teeth when recording to an uncompressed AVI format, and the skipping when recording to DIVX or transcoding to X264. The mouse-teeth effect is too well defined to come from the source.

Recording resolution is 768x576, with the aim to downsize/compress in the DVD authoring software as needed.

Can anyone provide some pointers on how to get the best results with this setup?

[merctom]

why are you recording at 768x576? PAL is 720x576

[Veefore]

The "mouse teeth" that you describe is probably the interlacing of the video. As for the jumping, I think that the computer might be using a different frame rate than the video, causing frames to drop out. This may also be what is causing the interlacing to be so visible.

I have converted some of my old video's to dvd using my dvd/video recorder which has a dub function. I don't get any of those issues using it.

[merctom]

PAL in australia is progressive not interlaced

[darkfibre]

If they are copyright movies you may be getting an effect from the macrovision copy protection on the VHS tape. Does your capture sotware have an option to ignore marcovision?
Macrovision puts odd info between the frames.

[Barfrangipani]

PAL is freaking analogue

And PAL is definitely interlaced. Sorry Tom, you're not having a god day mate.

And including overscan 768 is roughly correct to keep the correct aspect ratio

[Jonchilds]

Isn't PAL 4:3 - which would make is 768?

I'll try again with a de-interlaced feed. I thought PAL was progressive, but seems like it's 576i.

[Jonchilds]

The VHS tapes are copies of Super-8 tapes and home movies. If they were commercial movies I wouldn't waste my time converting them.

[Para045]

Maybe find someone who has a HD DVR, then you can just connect the VCR to the HD and copy them all then burn to disc

Missus did that with all her old VHS tapes a year or so back when we got a HD DVR as she tried using a converter like you and it didn't go too well
Now I just have to get around to getting all my old Bathurst/Drag racing VHS tapes on disc

[Klink]

The interlacing artifacts (mouse teeth) are only going to be visible if you are watching the video on a computer or a LCD/PLASMA/LCD that is in progressive mode scan.

If you are going to be watching the video on a regular TV through a DVD player etc. the artifacts will not be visible.

If you wish to remove the artifacts, you need to do it while capturing (if your software has a de-interlace option), or, use Virtual Dub (found here: Welcome to virtualdub.org! - virtualdub.org) with the deinterlace plugin (found here: Mordor.net - Video editing software Resources and Information.).

Worst case scenario, get your video to me and I'll happily deinterlace it for you.

[Jonchilds]

The DivX filter I was using had a deinterlace option, but seems to screw the aspect ratio up slightly.

Tried again with an MPEG2 filter and it has come out ok after first inspection. Is there a difference between recording top or bottom fields first in interlaced modes if your source is also interlaced?

Thanks for the offer klink, but it's easier to re-record in an appropriate format.

[MisterP]

What capture card do you have? If your trying to do on-the-fly software encoding to DIVX or H.264 then you`ll need a pretty hefty machine depending on post processing and image quality your after.
Generally these devices (good ones at least) have hardware MPEG2 encoding, which means all the encoding is done onboard the capture device. This would be the easiest and probably the best quality output you can expect to get given that your source is an analogue tape. If you want you could clean up noise/depeckle with the filters in VirtualDub MPEG2/VirtualDub MOD and see if the quality improves. You`ll also be able to de-interlace which should get rid of the choppy tearing look.

Hope it helps

[Jonchilds]

I've got a Leadtek DTV2000H - It was intended as a DTV card, but I'm making use of the extras.

I can do on-the-fly encoding to DIVX with about 65% CPU use at highest quality/bit rate settings available on the free codec pack. I don't see the need to post-process the file as it's fairly noise-free and the VCR has a sharpen option which is acceptable to me.

The biggest problem comes when trying to use the DVD Movie Factory software to convert DIVX to DVD format as it doesn't multi-thread. Using MPEG2 format is a pain if you need to trim the file and I end up waiting 10 mins for every single file action.

Tearing/stuttering problem was solved once I knew that PAL was an interlaced format.

[slabbie]

get a cheap DVD recorder, one without a HDD will do, plug it into your VCR and record movie directly to disc, then if you want to convert the movies to DivX, there's tons of free programs that'll do that.

[MattyA]

I just bought an easycap for this same purpose. I have a DV8 Handycam, i hope i dont run into the same problems.
$35 to my door.

[Jonchilds]

Problems were all sorted after some codec & disk space issues.

I had set it to use one of my 1TB drives as scratch/working space but it decided it still wanted to use my C: with only a few GB free and kept crashing 20h into the conversion (program only single threaded )

Only other issue was some formats were easier to trim blank video from than others. DIVX worked much better than MPEG2 as it seemed like it would process the whole file in order to skip forward a few seconds.

Much smoother now that I know how it all works...