Anonymous
Unregistered
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/gadgets/7829032/Its-curtains-for-obsolete-videotapes
* It's curtains for obsolete videotapes
HEY PRESTO: Now you can easily banish those old VHS tapes to the rubbish bin, having transferred the contents to a DVD or just a file.
The age of the video cassette is dead, long live the digital recording.
goodgotd
Member
this is news? it looks like what comes out of the Roxio Video Capture USB is MPEG-2, and that eats space fast. what you need to worry about is videotape players that will last long enough to play all your tapes. and play them well. not to mention the time to do the job.
I've had my ADS DVD Xpress DX2 since 2002, and can choose MPEG-2 or DivX- with a hardware DivX encoder. and I still capture only video I can't find a faster source for...
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
I went through several VHS recorders and cameras over a 10 year period. One camera died on me when my 12 month old daughter threw sand at me while I was filming her on the beach (black volcanic sand from the Canary Islands) another one died when I was changing over a film cassette at a summer fair. A gust of wind blew a load of dust into the open door of the cassette loader. Every time I took one of these cameras or video tape players for repair I was told it was the clutch that was damaged due to miniscule dust particles getting into the clutch mechanism. From that first video camera dying till getting my first digital camera 8 years later I went through five video cameras. As for video tape machines, my first DVD player/recorder lasted 10x longer than any of my VHS machines ever did (maybe a slight exaggeration on the 10X, lol).
As for transferring and converting analogue recordings to digital recordings I always used the software that came with my first digital camcorder
and previous to that software that was bundled with a video card. I've never had any problems transferring the tapes to files and then onto disc, so will definitely not be purchasing this software which at £46 is a little too expensive for me.
mikiem2
Moderator
Tape &/or film &/or film prints die, literally... no matter how carefully you store them over time they physically break down. Digitizing *Analog* video tapes is a special case -- hardware analog filtering & such work much better than digital methods developed to mimic those analog filters [research wave theory if you're curious why]. That makes using a good DVD Recorder the best way IMHO to digitize your old VHS, SVHS etc. tapes, because a good DVDR includes that analog filtering. It also makes converting a large number of tapes Doable -- set the VCR or whatever player to play, set the DVDR length to record, get them going, & go do something else.
Once they're done, I use PgcDemux to transfer the separate video & audio streams from the DVD rewritable disc to the PC hard drive, then use those files to create a DVD layout I burn to disc -- DVDRs use a special format that will not play everywhere. Womble apps or Cuttermaran work for trimming without re-encoding, or create the DVD layout on HDD & use DVD Shrink or Recode to trim, or if your DVD authoring software allows it, simply set the start & end points. A few DVDRs will record Closed Captioning [& I assume the EU equivilent] -- if you want there are tools to write a CC stream to a separate file you can turn into subtitles. If you're transferring old TV shows & want to skip the commercials, make sure the audio's in .wav format & there are editors [e.g. Womble or Vegas 9 & earlier] that will write the new file without re-encoding. Or with the right software you can simply create a chapter [a cell really] at the beginning & end of each commercial, then have the DVD skip those chapters.
For longevity I prefer DVDs for old video -- they're cheap, & there are so many millions & millions out there I doubt the format will be forgotten any time soon... you can't say the same about most other formats. DVDs are also higher resolution than SVHS, so you won't lose quality that way, though you will unavoidably lose a little bit transferring the signal over cables to the DVDR or whatever capture device. You can buy amps & such to try & improve the signal, though they're most often used to get by DRM on retail VHS tapes [personally I think you're better off just getting the same movie on DVD, but that's me].
DV cameras have been quite popular for a long time, & the format's already digital, so as long as you can still transfer all the 1s & 0s you're good to go. The best way to preserve all the original quality is to store the files as-is, perhaps burning to Blu-Ray as data, though be careful if you do choose Blu-Ray since there are reports of the cheapest discs degrading in a matter of months.
RE: video formats... DV includes full picture information for every frame making it highly editable, but to keep file size down as well as help camera electronics deal with the video stream, it limits how much data can be stored per frame -- scenes with more detail use more compression equals less quality. DV also stores color data a bit differently -- if you do re-encode or convert it some methods, apps, & output formats do better than others, so if you're trying to do it with freeware or really cheap software do a bit of research 1st on the best methods &/or codecs, e.g. there are ways to do it in VirtualDub where everything happens in the original YUV colorspace rather than getting converted to RGB & losing more quality.
Mjpeg [Motion JPEG], like DV & codecs like HUFFYUV & Lagarith are intended more for editing than final distribution -- they include full frame info for editing but because of that files are large & playback can be limited -- not every system can move that amount of data fast enough, & in fact it's somewhat common with HD to use proxies for editing, where you work with a lower rez picture, then when you're done, the system performs the same edits on the original footage while you're somewhere else, e.g. sleeping. It's possible to run into the same sort of problem, moving enough data fast enough, with normal rez video too, particularly during capture. If you want to hold onto the original, un-edited files for possible future use that's up to you -- most pros do -- but assuming someone wants to watch your video, the final encode will be to a distribution format, whether AVC/H.264, WinMedia, Xvid/DivX, mpg2 etc.
That said, it is possible to have WinMedia at high bit rates with all key frames [every frame has full picture data], & the same with mpg2 -- both can have comparable quality to most any other format if the bit rate's high enough, while resulting in smaller files & lower throughput requirements. Windows Media however has much higher processor requirements than mpg2, so mpg2 is vastly more popular. Be Careful with AVC/H.264 -- it too has high processing requirements, but more importantly, quality varies from beautiful to dog doo doo. Don't assume a codec or app or device is going to produce good looking AVC -- check it yourself. Frankly I've never seen any video that looks as nasty as some of the AVC stuff I've come across.
AVC/H.264 is also trickier to edit, re-encode etc. It often has to be stuck in a container [.mkv, .avi, .m2ts etc.], can have little or no timing info [many apps will shorten it throwing audio out of sync], & there don't seem to be any great Windows AVC decoders outside of Blu-Ray players, so you'll often have problems getting AVC into video apps. As a final format it can be great, but until you get to that point it's often a PITA.
A Very common mistake made by folks new to video is using Windows uncompressed video format [codec] -- it is after all perfectly reasonable to assume no compression is better. Only the uncompressed part is a lie. If quality is important, Do Not Use It.
That all said, if you want to capture analog video on the cheap, there are capture cards & USB dongles that'll do the job starting at less than $20 on sale. If your system will do it & you want full sized video, capture to a fast mjpeg like PicVideo or use HUFFYUV -- if not use mpg2 at as high a bit rate as possible, all keyframes [I frames] if possible. Avisynth &/or VirtualDub will do the best job filtering if you want to improve appearance a bit, & they'll also do well deinterlacing or performing IVT if you like. I haven't seen or heard of any software that could capture DVD-spec mpg2 at the same level of quality as capturing video 1st, then encoding to DVD-spec mpg2, though that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If your end goal is small frame video OTOH, if your source quality isn't great [e.g. VHS], try capturing directly to your final size & format -- the results can be better than capturing full size, then re-sizing & re-encoding. You can do limited editing with WinMedia & Real Video for example, & while a bit more hassle, the improved quality may be worth it to you.
Finally, a quick work on DV hardware for analog capture... It can work well if/when the source is high quality D1, i.e. full sized, standard video. If your source is a good quality analog broadcast signal [OTA, Sat, Cable etc.] great. If your source is HD it may not be up to the task, & if your source is [S]VHS it's overkill. It's like taking a picture of an old, faded & scratched photo with a pro digital camera -- you'll get a great, top quality picture of an old, faded & scratched photo. The advantage of DV is its fairly high bit rate, requiring less image compression, but using DV hardware for [S]VHS capture is like converting a low quality mp3 to 96/24 .wav -- you won't lose much but it's way more than you need. IOW if you've got it, use it -- if you want to capture high quality analog, use it -- but if you want to convert your [S]VHS tapes, there are cheaper solutions that'll get the same results if/when cost is important.
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