VHS tapes are technology. How are you backing up those old family tapes /g/?
>>109738484My dad threw out all our tapes when we got our first NTFS formatted external hard disk.
>>109738484oh no i'm not going down that particular rabbit hole
>>109738509God damn just hook a Goodwill VCR up to a Dazzle and call it a day. It's a lossy format.
>>109738509I just want to see the videos again...
>>109738484Do you think it's possible to use them like casette tapes on the c64, but on an FPGA?Hmm. That'd be cool
>>109739159fuck that's cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUS0Zv2APjU
I understand CDs, DVDs etc. but VHS and casette tapes are shit technology that deserved to be replaced
Are upscalers like the retrotink actually good for vhs captures?Deinterlacing, TBC-like buffering to prevent audio desync, HD capture to reduce compression artifacts.It sounds like good stuff. But then I found a lordsmurf post shitting on them because they're only good for videogames with no further explanation.
>>109738484I looked online what kind of setup I would need to extract data from old tapes and it's absolutely not worth it, some shop near me can rip vhs for me for 25.95€ so that's what I did.they have a professional sony setup that is better than whatever hardware I could buy on my own so it was a no brainer.they can also do "blind" rip if you don't want them to look at your data, they'll just give you the raw signal file that you can progess with FOSS tools yourself.>>109738569pay people with the right setup to do it, you'll save money.tapes lose data over time and the reader matters A LOT in what you can save or not, don't listen to retards like >>109738525 the fact that it's lossy does not matter, it was never the issue, check on youtube the differences between a good and a bad rip, it's nights and days and literally the difference between videos you can watch and random artifacts shitfest.
>>109738484I'm planning to try out a little H.264 capture box thingy I salvaged when the workplace got rid of a bunch of old stuff. Need to check if the integrated TV+VCR I kept has workable output ports though. I kinda wish I had kept one of the standalone VCRs now too.
>>109739419VHS should be replaced but the technology is so good it turned into super dense tapes used in enterprise
>>109738484
>>109738484Its almost impossible to back up VHS without ruining the quality so much it would be better off just letting them go to the void.You need specialized custom hardware to back up VHS properly. Using a shitty capture card is absolutely not the way to back up VHS.
>>109738484Literally just a (good) VCR, GV-USB2 capture card, and a windows PC with OBS. Not hard to get decent quality. I also have an SV2000 (for TBC) to fix the flagging. The gamma ain't quite right, but some tweaks in OBS gets it "close enough"
>>109738509Isn't all of this deprecated by the Domesday Duplicator?
put tape input blank dvdr inpress big silver buttontape -> dvdr -> rip on windows pc
>>109740743drawbacks?
>>109738484My family send our tapes to be digitized then promptly lost the flash card and dvd of the digitized copy. GenX are basically boomers.
>>109738484I used a DVC100 capture device on a windows xp machine I have, digitized in virtualdub 2 into lagarith lossless. They then get moved to a different computer. For processing I changed the resolution to 4:3 (720x540), de-interlaced using yadifmod, doubled the framerate to 59.94, used flac audio, and converted them all to mp4 using a constant rate factor of 16.Yadifmod is the least harsh method to de-interlace which is why I used it. Yea you can use fancier processing methods but it's all fake.
>>109740563Not true.A cheap capture card CAN do a good job but the biggest thing it needs to do is capture true interlaced video at 480i and do it in an accurate color space. I opted for the DVC100 and the end result is very close to what they look like straight out of the vcr. The DVC100 is a really good capture device but the problem is that it will not work well on newer versions of windows. I had an xp machine I could use, a windows 7 machine could work too.My method was >>109740977I grew a collection of vcrs and it was a rabbit hole though. In total I have had about a dozen vcrs in the endeavor and I have held onto four, three being panisonic omnivisions. The panisonic omnivision is a fantastic vcr and they were made in great abundance. You need to keep the heads really clean using the printer paper and rubbing alcohol method for best results. Use q-tips and rubbing alcohol for the tracking head and linear audio head too for when a tape has no hi-fi audio track or the hi-fi audio track is crackling a lot. A clean tracking head obviously helps it track better.
>>109740977>lagarithNow there's a word I've not heard in a long time...
>>109738484vhs-decode
>>109740752shit quality especially for degraded vhs
>>109738509>QTGMC Deinterlacer6 months later it might be done encoding if you have a 9950X.
>>109738484I take it to HB Media (a local old man and his wife). they have tons of VCRs, camcorders, etc. and will rip to digital + put it on usb.
>>109738484Complete waste of time. Everything was released digital. Those releases stem from best available quality source ever. Your VHS tape is trash in comparison. You are backing up trash.It's entirely different if you had a digital collection and thought of time capsule consisting of a couple of VHS players and your tape collection. It may be considered a backup of a digital backup, a backup of M-disk DVD and such. But it would require taking care of oxygen and humidity, otherwise you're creating a pile of junk.
>>109740743you are converting the analog image to shitty low bitrate and badly encoded mpeg-2.ideally you should find a way to losslessly capture that analog signal and then either store it in ffv1/lossless x264 or lossly transcode it but to an efficient, widely supported and modern format (x264 veryslow preset @ crf 19 is a decent option already considering how low res VHS is, I'd only bother with av1 because i have autism).
>>109742276so you're gonna provide the high quality digital versions to op in place of the shitty tapes?
>>109738484OBS and a VHS-recorder-to-USB medium, tinker the settings to record the right size and framerate and using davinci resolve to get rid of the weird interlaces and sound-volums
>>109742385Seeding as we speak.
>>109742276>old family tapes were released dgital???why can't anybody on this site fucking read
>>109739419you should get replaced.I remember the good ol times when the family rented movies on the weekend and we had a good family time, especially on christmas days with the Gremlins.
>>109742467Between things like video rentals and network blocks like TGIF, the 90s to early 00s seem like the last time of great family time together.
>>109738501Is your father a beautiful man?
>>109738509Where's VHSDecode on that iceberg?Speaking of, they've recently released an experimental decoder written in rust (though the older one was written in python, probably the reason it was so slow) that can decode videos faster than real time. So no need to wait half a day per decode anymore.
>>109742649It's not even worth having a family anymore. I tried and it sucked ass.
>>109738509>>109742254I used QTGMC for all my VHS captures and it looks great. Smooth 60fps deinterlaced
>>109738484>mid 2000s DV Camcorder>AVtoDV>Windows XP or later machine with IEEE 1394 iLink DV InterfaceAnnnnd you're good! 2hr is 25GB I believe.
>>109744118I see the date and 5G tower but this is still fucking with my head
>>109744118It's an absolute powerhouse, don't get me wrong. For a long time it was a bit of dependency hell with getting all the required scripts and filters, but that has been solved. It still takes a tremendous amount of processing power like few others.
>>109739817>so good it turned into super dense tapes used in enterpriseaka where it started out you dipshit? mag tape was used in computers long before audio casettes and vhs came about
>>109738484this is my current setup and I configure shit depending on what I'm saving.sometimes is just audio so video is just for easier editing.I can mod the LG VCR to output raw RF for vhsdecode but I don't have the way to use it yet. I think there's linux drivers for my pci card to use vhsdecode without modifying it. I don't need to save anything "important" in awesome quality at the moment so I don't need to hurry.>>109739419As someone that backup shit all the time. I can say VHS sucks ass. zoomers into it have no idea what they are dealing with. the format is trash for today standards and no amount of nostalgia is going to save it. dealing with mold, speed issues, tracking and all sorts of problem is a nightmare. even getting some tapes to play can be a pain.
>>109738484>family tapesno one watches these they just collect dust in the basement or atticmy aunt has some in a box and she doesn't even own a vhs . she gave it away
>>109746398she doesn't own a vcr*
>>109744118It looks "good" but you are losing the actual data with such a heavy layer of processing. Stick to basic yadifmod for fidelity. I've experimented with all of them. VHS tapes are grainy and sometimes they shake, trying to "fix" that is artificial.
>>109746398I thought so to, but I have to say, seeing family members who've been dead for 20 years in motion is something special
>>109746398It's so cool to see a video of myself from 37 years ago as a toddler and for it to actually awaken a memory that would have been otherwise buried. Zoomers probably have no idea how cool it actually is for them that they will have so much digital video of themselves to look back at decades from now.
>>109738484For MiniDV: firewire with WinDV. The raw video is kinda ugly though you'll probably want to add color/saturation back afterwards if you want them to have that nostalgic look you remember so fondly.for VHS: virtualdub, direct stream copy lagarith, edit from there.Hope you have several terabytes of space laying around. You're gonna need it.
>>109746398I converted our home movies and put them on jellyfin. My parents watch them more now than they ever did on tape because it's effortless.
>>109747082I think home videos are valuable because they're limited. Zoomers will have every video they've taken since birth on their phone and they won't care because it's just a given that it's there. Also there'll be an absolute shitload of meaningless data. Imagine trudging through 1000 dumb videos and stupid memes to find one 30 second clip that's a good memory. Compared to home videos that are by default a collection of valuable memories since tapes were inconvenient/expensive so you limited what you filmed to the most important events.
>>109739674h264 is 30 year old outdated garbageat least use a modern codec
>>109747630nta but I need shit to work on my parents hardware.264 works on every device unlike 265 or av1there's no downside other than wasting a couple of more GBs on bitrate so who cares.and no, i'm not making them to learn or buy anything else. even DVD is fine for them.
>>109746598Vhs is at 29.97 interlaced. Any medium orginally filmed tape should be smooth when you watch it.can you tell me more about yadifmod? I have about 16 hours of VHS home movies, i have all the raw files captured with amarectv with the LAGS codec in AVI format so I can experiment every few years with new encodings
>>109740563>>109738484shame the "vinyl" of the movie format doesn't hold up
Also, is there anyway to bypass macrovision on pre-taped movies without using a TBC? I've held off on getting once since they're still over $1000 if not more, but im slowly giving in
>>109747746Yadifmod is one of the oldest (if not THE oldest) de-interlacing algorithms. It doesn't try to enhance anything, it's just simple and lightweight de-interlacing with as little post processing as possible. Everyone is raging for QTGMC right now because it is impressive as far as making something look enhanced and better, but it's at the expensive of accuracy. As far as a de-interlacer looking as close to the source as possible (fidelity), yadifmod does it best. That includes the grain, shakiness, and softness VHS can suffer from. Yadifmod is also conveniently built into virtualdub 2 so if you choose to go that path you're in luck. Virtualdub 2 just werks.Keep your lossless captures regardless which method you choose.
>>109747845I use Vdub2 as well, do you mean its in the Filters>Deinterlace? Or somewhere elseMy personal preference is to have less grain visible on tape sources (like camcorders) because grain is a byproduct and not a part of the picture. I've done video out direcly from my camcorder and the picture is soft/smooth and slightly grainy which is to expected with a CCD sensor, but its not as "grainy" as it looks when it's run through a tape if that makes sense
>>109747803This is why I pirate movies. Remux versions are always the best.best video, best audio mix. and maybe Openmate
>>109747827do not cave in to the ebay jew and get a betacam recorder instead, these have an internal TBC. you can then use it as a passthrough device.any RECORDER model should be fine (UVW, PVW, BVW). preferably PVW, UVW machines were the cheapest in line (should be fine for VHS passthrough tho) and BVW will almost always require a complete replacement of electrolytic capacitors on all boards.
>>109748100I wasnt aware of that. Are they any different than the pseudo ones built into the panasonic DMR-ES15? Thats what I have now, and it does help a bit with picture stability.
>>109747952Here you go. Make sure the filters are in this order and not the other way around. This is assuming you captured at 720x480 for the resize settings.
We made no family tapes. The 90's weren't a "happening" time for us.
>>109748178Oh, don't bother to de-interlace at all if your capture device didn't actually capture 480i. A lot of them capture 480p at 30 fps.
>>109748100I have digitized well over 100 tapes now and I have not needed a tbc. At least not for a dvc100 and various panisonic omnivision vcrs.
>>109748174they decode s-video/composite into component automatically (that's what betacam writes on the tape) and relay that onto the VTR's outputs (component, re-encoded svideo and composite).video levels (gain, setup, chroma/phase etc) can all be adjusted, unlike whatever usual single channel TBC boxes can offer.
>>109748204>>109748178It is at 480i dont worry, I used the USBlive2 adaptor. Thanks for the settings, I'll give it a try>>109748228oh shit. I'm gonna do some research
>>109739419>casette tapes are shit technology>professional beta existsdoubtwould you like videotape instead?
>>109741054The proper way to back up VHS is directly from the read head. Needs about 40MB/S for proper full quality capture.
>>109744118Most of the image has been lost. VHS absolutely must not be subject to lossy video compression, it destroys the noise which critical part of the quality.
>>109751243>>109751226There is no reason to make archival grade digital copies of VHS tapes at home unless you have OCD
>>109752406The thing is, the quality of lossy compressed VHS is so bad that you may as well not bother. Its better to go to the void whole than continue to exist in some half-state.
>>109752496OCD confirmed
>>109752406>quality doesn't mattercome on now?
>>109746398Yes well you're right but the thing is my aunt is selling the 100-something year old house that has been with the family since then and when I went there to look for stuff, I found a bunch of VHS tapes that surprisingly didn't have any mold, so why not digitize and archive all that shit? I don't even know what most of them are since only a few are labeled, maybe I'll find the porn stack of my late uncle, idk, I'm just curious at this point.
>>109755090To even entertain the notion that old vhs recordings should be discarded because the quality is not as good as more modern stuff is so soulless I don't even know where to start or how to address it. Someone seriously saying that might as well be an animal.
>>109739419Modern tapes like LTO are fine, but old analogue tapes are cancer
>>109752851Its not OCD. The image quality of VHS is excellent when viewed in its original form. Whilst it looks almost unwatchable after digitization. VHS is incredibly noisy. This noise causes lossy video codecs to completely fail. And further more, useful image detail is buried inside that noise which does not survive lossy compression.
>>109738484I was going to backup my old collection but after buying some cheap chinese capture card that didn't work along with the learning curve on video conversion, I gave up or at least put that idea on hold. Its been.....shit, 10 years now since I tried and still haven't bothered. Just sort of piled up other hobbies and have no time nor storage space for.
>>109757911>Whilst it looks almost unwatchable after digitizationThis isn't true. Maybe your digitizations look this bad but mine do not. I have a/b tested, it's very close.The way to make VHS look VERY noticeable better is on a crt tv though, but I can't do anything about that. But source on an lcd first digitized on an lcd? Very close.
>>109758481Watching VHS on anything other than a CRT is such an alien concept to me that I had never even considered it as something anyone would do.
>>109748178what a difference. left is the method you suggested, right is with QTGMC.
>>109760457however the video still shows at 29.97 fps despite telling the deinterlacer to double the FF. what did I do wrong?
>>109758564Anyone watching vhs movie/tv rips by choice on an lcd is insane if you ask meI mainly rip weird old commercials that i find on prerecorded tapes. I've got a ~200 tape movie collection and i've never even considered digitizing any of them.
>>109757911I don't know what you're doing but even low bitrate encodes of vhs still look decent to me.Just look at>>109760457How is this unwatchable?
>>109760531disregard, the filters disappeared because I loaded a preset for output files lol. Now its better.
>>109761291I hope is 23.976 now, is a movie after all.You can only get high framerate from homemovies or tv cotntent. The deinterlacer cannot create what is not there.
>>109738484All gone. The time to back them up was last decade.
>>109747082>Zoomers probably have no idea how cool it actually is for them that they will have so much digital video of themselves to look back at decades from now.zoomers never make backups or manage their data in any way, it's very unlikely they'll still have videos from wen they were born properly archived, it's all getting lost as soon as their current phone breaks or iCloud/google account gets hacked/banned/lost/whatever
>>109738501>things that never happened: schizo spam edition>>109748178>output: 720x480what are you? retarded? what garbage capture shit is this? capture at TWICE the resolution, retard. 480.. in 2026. you're sampling from an analog medium! fuck me dead you cunts here are insane. this is the reason why so much low quality vhs captures exist on youtube.
>>109762950Most USB capture cards dont go below that unless you use a Windows XP system with a PCI capture card
>>109762986you're supposed to go higher. higher is better. and this retard has set the new output to 720x540?! this like the crap guides i would find on the internet back in 2001 when i was ripping dvds. faggots are treating VHS tapes, an analog medium, like it's digital. there's always going to be loss when capturing a vhs tape but you don't want your output size to contribute to more loss.
>>109763072Not sure what youre saying. vhs is roughly 320x240. Capture cards dont go below 480i but youre already getting the signal at 2x resolution
>>109763409don't listen to that retard. analog doesnt even have resolution. as long you capture get the interlaced information right, and you don't miss frames, 480i is perfect. that's the fucking standards.remember you're recording a fucking VHS not a retro console.with fixed resolution.
>>109744079What happened to them?
>>109738484I bought this device to convert vhs and video8 tapes. don't recommend it as the output is darker than the source
>>109748100Like a PWV-2800? Those are going for $300+ around here if i could find one locally
Thanks for reminding me, I really need to do it soon since the tapes are from like 95-03, fuck some of them might be dust by now cause they have just been in a closet for the last 20 years. I think I'll just pay for a service, this seems like a deep rabbit hole that I don't want to get lost in.
>>109751243Uhh isnt noise per definition NOT part of the quality?
>>109765171It's not that hard to get decent quality, the annoying part is buying the random crap you need and dealing with analog fiddliness. Plus you have to set it all up somewhere and get a PC hooked up. I've got a dedicated rack by my desk with all my old gear.
Digital tape exists, great for backups and long term storage.Problem is it's linear, this is why cd/dvds are vastly superior from a music/video archive medium
>>109762950720x480 captures all of the data... That's the full frame. You give it square pixels later by resizing to 720x540. My captures look great. If you're doing the snake oil upscaling qtgmc post processing nonsense then maybe you capture more for some reason but to anyone looking to capture what's there then 720x480 is the exact resolution to capture at and this is settled and not even a debate.
>>109765280You have a fundamental misunderstanding. It's not that noise is good per say, it's that the noise is present on the tape and if you remove it you are replacing it with something else. You are removing the original data and filling in the gaps thus making it artificial. The only processing you should be doing is de-interlacing so it plays properly on a modern screen and compressing the huge lossless files into smaller reasonable sizes without going too small with a "better safe than sorry" mindset before it's done. Digitizing a vhs tape should be about preservation. If someone wants to "enhance" a vhs tape they are free to do it but they are straying further away from the source that is the vhs tape.
>>109747803I get using de noising and especially back when they were using H.264, but man... that predator bluray was too much.
>>109765280In an analog medium (digital too now that I think about it) such as tape you can't distinguish between the noise and the signal and they just kind of become one. Like ^above said, you could denoise with various methods algorithmic or otherwise, but you're going to be fundamentally altering the original signal.
>>109765280The human brain is capable of integrating noise spatially and temporally to recover detail buried under the noise. Lossy video compression erases that noise and with it the information buried under it.
>>109765514Is there a different between resizing the 720x540 vs encoding something like x264 using an DAR/PAR set to 4:3 so the video displays properly while still being 720x480?
>>109765115yeah2800 would actually be perfect, you also get to digitize BetaSP (not betamax) tapes as a bonus
>>109770059Good to know. I have no betamax tapes and probably never will. I do however have a quasar VX machine that I've been trying to digitize. The picture plays fine through a TV but gets fucked up when sending the signal through to a capture card. maybe the passthrough to a betacam unit could stabilize it
>>109739419nooooooooo!!you should worship things that I feel nostalgic about! t. millenial
