If you really want to get into the rabbithole that is VHS capturing (and some other old formats), you should search about the VHS-decode project. It's basically capturing the raw data coming from the VCR (you don't even need a high-end one) and digitally converting it so you can watch it on your PC, not losing any quality in the process. The great thing is that it is cheap compared to any other capture device (no more than $50 I believe), although the process to make it work it's the main problem with it, since an hour and a half of content takes up like 1TB of storage I think and, also, you need to do some soldering to get the best possible quality out of the device.
the problem with RF capture, for example with the more expensive Domesday Duplicator, is that the resulting files are HUEG!!! but beautiful. delicious. BUT MASSIVE. good luck Posy
@superthe Storage concerns will get smaller by the day with larger enterprise HDDs dropping in price. It definitely is something to consider though, but not an impossible barrier.
A tip for preparing PAL/SÉCAM video for UA-cam upload: Deinterlace the video material and DO NOT upload it at original resolution (720x576), as UA-cam downscales it to 480 height! Instead, after deinterlacing, upsample/upscale it to at least 720 height (900x720), as 720p is the lowest resolution on UA-cam that supports 50 fps.
I also recently got into capturing VHS, specifically to archive old family videos but I had to do it on a budget. It seems like real ones (including VWestlife) know that firewire DV converters are one of the best choices for the cost so that's what I went with. There are lots of weird elitist forum people that seem to think its absolutely mandatory to use a $300 used VCR with time base correction and record it at like 100gb per hour bitrate. My experience with DV converters has been great, I highly recommend them to anyone else looking to capture VHS without spending too much. I went with an ADS Pyro AV Link since they are a pretty good price, but look into which hardware revision is the best since it seems the older ones have some issues. I've read a lot of good things about the Canopus ADVC line of DV converters as well, and you can even use a regular miniDV camera if it has video inputs.
e way I've been doing this is as follows: Get a "USB 2.0 Video Capture Card", literally 5 bucks from China. They have the USB-A plug directly attached (no cable) on one end, and an HDMI input on the other. On top it says "HDMI Video Capture". These things are recognized as universal USB webcam and don't need drivers. Connect your old video equipment to one of those analog to HDMI boxes, connect it to the USB dongle, and record the "webcam". Bonus is that the sound gets sent along this route as well.
My preferred method is to use a MiniDV camcorder or deck that has analogue video *input* and have it encode a DV stream out of the FireWire port directly (Yes you can pick up used Pinnacle USB devices that actually have FireWire for DV capture, or use a PCIe FireWire card for desktops). The DV codec is already a reasonable choice for archiving standard definition footage to then process later. Use WinDV on Windows to capture.
if what you were trying to save was on miniDV the absolute best would have been to get a camcorder with a firewire port, so you get absolutely 0 analog degradation
My dad copied all his analog S-Video material over onto DV (Panasonic S-Video camera to Panasonic NV-DV10000 via S-Video cable) and from there via Firewire to the PC. Got great quality out of it.
I had an old Canon camcorder that had a wonderful mode where you could plug in SVideo and it would stream the input via FireWire to my PC. I'd record super high quality footage of me playing the original Halo terribly.
A video camera isn't actually 25 frames per second, if you consider each frame a unique moment in time. The 50 fields shot every second are their own moment in time, not half of a moment where the other half would be magically kept in some kind of framebuffer? No, hence why this kind of video looks a lot better at the original 50hz, using something like bob deinterlacing or perhaps YADIF although it sometimes produces artifacts. Bob can look a little weird for static images like in video games and such but it's overall way better than weave/blend/drop which all try and make a "high res" image by combining fields, which might look ok if there's no or very little movement, but it results in ghosting and having those horizontal bars show up. I think vwestlife also had a video about how to do this, though he was using VirtualDub to capture a raw 60hz interlaced stream and then re-encoding this to a 60fps video with bob deinterlacing using Handbrake. And no this involves no interpolation or AI to get 50/60fps video, analog video was always like this.
0:51 Two years ago I bought that old dongle at a local store, new. The software it came with might have been mostly functional on Windows 10 still. But on my Linux laptop it shows up in OBS as a capture device, so that works better. No need to install a driver, but that thing does have wavy patterns in S-Video mode. OBS should be able to capture while recording, but you have to start a separate installation to avoid file conflicts. I have not tried this myself, but in theory there is no reason it would be unable to function concurrently. It's not ideal for compatible playback, but .mkv is the best video container format for intermediate recordings. It has by far the most flexible tagging and accepts any stream format, the way it tags also keeps files functional if shut down unexpectedly. Which you can later transcode a second time with FFMPEG, frontends for this or a video editor. This to something more efficient like AV1 .webm or compatible like H264 .mp4.
Do you use Linux? The old dongles usually work on Linux. I actually still occasionally use a Hauppauge USB TV card from early 2000s because its quality is VERY GOOD but just needs to be used under Linux, because the drivers were never updated for Vista and 64-bit Windows, because the company who made the chip went out of business.
Another possible way of capturing analog video is using some DVR device for FPV drones. One of the best devices is ImmersionRC DVR with screen. Might be pricey and for some stupid reason takes 18500 batteries instead of standard 18650 (There are 3D printed mods to solve that)
Each of these original 25 are a pair of odd lines and even lines separately, so 50 half-frames. Deinterlacing aligns the lines and it becomes 50 normal frames.
Looking through all this, I just keep getting reminded of a specific set of "advice" I had read. It involved this workflow that involved Time-Base Correctors and specific Capture Cards that can only work with a specifc program inside a computer running Windows XP. Anything less and you were, to paraphrase, "butchering the color" of the capture. And no, Linux is no good. None of the reasonably-priced dongles were good. OBS is not for recording. And that offshoot of the Domesday Decoder Project is a pipe dream that will never be as good as this specific workflow. Granted, this was for high-quality archiving of VHS tapes, and not taking artistic retro-analog footage. Just something I was reminded of.
"And that offshoot of the Domesday Decoder Project is a pipe dream that will never be as good as this specific workflow." Nothing can be better than capturing video directly from video heads. Anyone saying otherwise is saying this either because they have a stake in selling overprised video digitising equiment or because they were fooled by said sellers.
Hey Posy my dear neighbour of country, I really dont know if you have a viedeo abaout it but i have an idea, could you cover Analog Video Feedback Loop / Mandelbrot Patterns? Also i like your style of content and enjoy every of them but at most the more technical ones like Display tech
Shockingly, B&H in the US has this Dazzle doo-dad for sale new. They've added "HD" to the product name since the one that you bought locally. I would be unsurprised if that name change has zero technical significance.
And btw That Opened up VCR Are The Ones I Actually Hate Decent picture Quality But Terrible Electronics And Mechanics I've Had 3 All Of Them Had Broken In A Month Because of A Split Gear Or All The Electronics Stop Working And I'm Now Using A Samsung SV-700X But Before You Put A Tape In This Model Replace The Belt And I Used A Small Wide Rubber Band And It Works Even A Year Later and If You Don't Fix It Chances Are The Belt Slips And Ruins The Tape As The Head Pull The Tape At High Speed Into The Machine I'm Not Surprised You Had Problems With The VCR In The Video As They Are Terrible Nowadays And The Smell Was Like Hot Overloaded Resistors
🤢 what the hell is that AI/robotic French voice audio track 🤮 Please never do this again. At most, put subtitles for people who don’t speak English. But replacing your voice with a robot *by default*, definitely no.
@ really ? This sucks. I hope he has at least a possibility to disable this after the video is published, if not when publishing. First YT started to poorly auto translate the videos titles, which majority of the time turn into a nonsense and forces us to reverse translate word by word to figure out what the video is really about. Now they replace the voice of the narrator…. Next is probably they will alter the images and content of the video to tailor it to what THEY think the audience expects.
you lot keep making it so much more complicated than it needs to be. vcr with a timebase corrector, easiercap, obs. that's it. if you're so resolution-obsessed that what you get from that bothers you then give up right now and go find something else to do. you are going to hate everything about deeper video tape and analog video culture, and we don't want you coming in and gentrifying our space by buying up all the editing monitors and vcrs to play playstation on when the 30" tubes you love from the substitute teacher cart meme are sooooo much better for it, and any old 5 buck mono deck will record your gameplay. and we do not want to pay your crazy people prices for our stuff, either, so stop trying to become unnecessary middlemen by polluting ebay with overpriced untested slop. i suggest you all get over your born-in-the-wrong-generation-ass selves and figure out if you're finally gonna get your dang hands dirty with this stuff so you can actually live in that time you wanna live in, because the more of these internet goober weaves a fantasy about the future things you believe, the more knots you tie yourselves up in that need to be undone before you can actually do anything with it. and yes, you do want to.
that video of the dirt at the end was the best part, i can feel the nostalgia
If you really want to get into the rabbithole that is VHS capturing (and some other old formats), you should search about the VHS-decode project. It's basically capturing the raw data coming from the VCR (you don't even need a high-end one) and digitally converting it so you can watch it on your PC, not losing any quality in the process. The great thing is that it is cheap compared to any other capture device (no more than $50 I believe), although the process to make it work it's the main problem with it, since an hour and a half of content takes up like 1TB of storage I think and, also, you need to do some soldering to get the best possible quality out of the device.
I +1 this. vhsdecode is ultimate VHS preservation. It will NEVER get better than that.
the problem with RF capture, for example with the more expensive Domesday Duplicator, is that the resulting files are HUEG!!! but beautiful. delicious. BUT MASSIVE. good luck Posy
@superthe Storage concerns will get smaller by the day with larger enterprise HDDs dropping in price. It definitely is something to consider though, but not an impossible barrier.
Thanks for zooming in down there!
It was nice to be able to see for myself that there was nothing down there for me to learn.
A tip for preparing PAL/SÉCAM video for UA-cam upload: Deinterlace the video material and DO NOT upload it at original resolution (720x576), as UA-cam downscales it to 480 height! Instead, after deinterlacing, upsample/upscale it to at least 720 height (900x720), as 720p is the lowest resolution on UA-cam that supports 50 fps.
I also recently got into capturing VHS, specifically to archive old family videos but I had to do it on a budget. It seems like real ones (including VWestlife) know that firewire DV converters are one of the best choices for the cost so that's what I went with. There are lots of weird elitist forum people that seem to think its absolutely mandatory to use a $300 used VCR with time base correction and record it at like 100gb per hour bitrate. My experience with DV converters has been great, I highly recommend them to anyone else looking to capture VHS without spending too much. I went with an ADS Pyro AV Link since they are a pretty good price, but look into which hardware revision is the best since it seems the older ones have some issues. I've read a lot of good things about the Canopus ADVC line of DV converters as well, and you can even use a regular miniDV camera if it has video inputs.
Shout-out to obs for being a powerhouse of a capturing program, wouldn't have done the latest Livestream gigs without it
e way I've been doing this is as follows: Get a "USB 2.0 Video Capture Card", literally 5 bucks from China. They have the USB-A plug directly attached (no cable) on one end, and an HDMI input on the other. On top it says "HDMI Video Capture". These things are recognized as universal USB webcam and don't need drivers.
Connect your old video equipment to one of those analog to HDMI boxes, connect it to the USB dongle, and record the "webcam". Bonus is that the sound gets sent along this route as well.
oh I love that you included Reasonably British in the description, truly peak content.
source record is an obs plugin that lets you record multiple sources at once individually from 1 obs instance :]
I've got an ancient PC with a firewire interface and a DV camcorder especially for this.
some camcorders can handily convert Video signals to a DV stream
My preferred method is to use a MiniDV camcorder or deck that has analogue video *input* and have it encode a DV stream out of the FireWire port directly (Yes you can pick up used Pinnacle USB devices that actually have FireWire for DV capture, or use a PCIe FireWire card for desktops). The DV codec is already a reasonable choice for archiving standard definition footage to then process later. Use WinDV on Windows to capture.
Thank you for this! I always wondered how you managed to get such immaculate footage from your old tapes, so this was a real treat
if what you were trying to save was on miniDV the absolute best would have been to get a camcorder with a firewire port, so you get absolutely 0 analog degradation
Considering that some of the footage is from 1992 this can be ruled out. In fact he even metnions it's Hi8.
I thought the cat at 0:21 was a tiny elephant for a moment…. I think I need a nap…
Canada has the House Hippo, the Netherlands has the House Elephant.
Yo I thought exactly the same 🤣 Capturing a baby elephant drinking water like it‘s the most normal thing ever
They should support encoding YUV 4:4:4 to avoid having to deinterlace & record 50fps.
Posey: eschews tripod for *lazy* aesthetic, wears out arm in doing so :D. You are a king among men, sir. Please stay lazy for us.
OBS full screen, and point the camera to the screen !
Let's make some fractals :)
My dad copied all his analog S-Video material over onto DV (Panasonic S-Video camera to Panasonic NV-DV10000 via S-Video cable) and from there via Firewire to the PC. Got great quality out of it.
This is great timing for me
Lazy Posy is here! 🎉
2:36 kringloopwinkel cable hunt footage nice
Loved the last video
Nice video. With a nice cat.
I had an old Canon camcorder that had a wonderful mode where you could plug in SVideo and it would stream the input via FireWire to my PC. I'd record super high quality footage of me playing the original Halo terribly.
A video camera isn't actually 25 frames per second, if you consider each frame a unique moment in time. The 50 fields shot every second are their own moment in time, not half of a moment where the other half would be magically kept in some kind of framebuffer? No, hence why this kind of video looks a lot better at the original 50hz, using something like bob deinterlacing or perhaps YADIF although it sometimes produces artifacts. Bob can look a little weird for static images like in video games and such but it's overall way better than weave/blend/drop which all try and make a "high res" image by combining fields, which might look ok if there's no or very little movement, but it results in ghosting and having those horizontal bars show up. I think vwestlife also had a video about how to do this, though he was using VirtualDub to capture a raw 60hz interlaced stream and then re-encoding this to a 60fps video with bob deinterlacing using Handbrake.
And no this involves no interpolation or AI to get 50/60fps video, analog video was always like this.
Ooh is that a mexican midnight wine satin start at around 1.30ish mark? I have a gunmetal blue one, very nice guitars...
*strat
I came here to hear "Im sorry Im sorry Im sorry" of Lazy Posy
0:51 Two years ago I bought that old dongle at a local store, new.
The software it came with might have been mostly functional on Windows 10 still.
But on my Linux laptop it shows up in OBS as a capture device, so that works better.
No need to install a driver, but that thing does have wavy patterns in S-Video mode.
OBS should be able to capture while recording, but you have to start a separate installation to avoid file conflicts.
I have not tried this myself, but in theory there is no reason it would be unable to function concurrently.
It's not ideal for compatible playback, but .mkv is the best video container format for intermediate recordings.
It has by far the most flexible tagging and accepts any stream format, the way it tags also keeps files functional if shut down unexpectedly.
Which you can later transcode a second time with FFMPEG, frontends for this or a video editor.
This to something more efficient like AV1 .webm or compatible like H264 .mp4.
Oh you silly Posy you ;)
Nice VWestlife shoutout
Instructions unclear: Sand in eyes after throwing.
Hypercam can record your desktop while OBS is doing its thing
Do you use Linux? The old dongles usually work on Linux. I actually still occasionally use a Hauppauge USB TV card from early 2000s because its quality is VERY GOOD but just needs to be used under Linux, because the drivers were never updated for Vista and 64-bit Windows, because the company who made the chip went out of business.
Oh my father got this Canon camera too, it still works !
Another possible way of capturing analog video is using some DVR device for FPV drones. One of the best devices is ImmersionRC DVR with screen. Might be pricey and for some stupid reason takes 18500 batteries instead of standard 18650 (There are 3D printed mods to solve that)
I don't know how I missed this in my subs. Sorry Posy
bye
Im a german. "Eigenschappen" had me rolling xd
I also go full BLBLBLBLBLASDFNJSADLJHF when I turn OBS so nothing to be sorry about 🙃
I still use rca or FireWire
Why 50 fps when the original footage is 25 fps?
Each of these original 25 are a pair of odd lines and even lines separately, so 50 half-frames. Deinterlacing aligns the lines and it becomes 50 normal frames.
@@alexformation Ok, I thought deinterlacing just skipped one of the half-frames. It's good that you can get 50 frames from the 25 interlaced.
Looking through all this, I just keep getting reminded of a specific set of "advice" I had read.
It involved this workflow that involved Time-Base Correctors and specific Capture Cards that can only work with a specifc program inside a computer running Windows XP. Anything less and you were, to paraphrase, "butchering the color" of the capture.
And no, Linux is no good. None of the reasonably-priced dongles were good. OBS is not for recording. And that offshoot of the Domesday Decoder Project is a pipe dream that will never be as good as this specific workflow.
Granted, this was for high-quality archiving of VHS tapes, and not taking artistic retro-analog footage. Just something I was reminded of.
"And that offshoot of the Domesday Decoder Project is a pipe dream that will never be as good as this specific workflow."
Nothing can be better than capturing video directly from video heads. Anyone saying otherwise is saying this either because they have a stake in selling overprised video digitising equiment or because they were fooled by said sellers.
@itogi
That was one of the *_BIGGEST_* cases of cognitive dissonance I've ever experienced when I read that.
Hey Posy my dear neighbour of country, I really dont know if you have a viedeo abaout it but i have an idea, could you cover Analog Video Feedback Loop / Mandelbrot Patterns? Also i like your style of content and enjoy every of them but at most the more technical ones like Display tech
Shockingly, B&H in the US has this Dazzle doo-dad for sale new. They've added "HD" to the product name since the one that you bought locally. I would be unsurprised if that name change has zero technical significance.
And btw That Opened up VCR Are The Ones I Actually Hate Decent picture Quality But Terrible Electronics And Mechanics I've Had 3 All Of Them Had Broken In A Month Because of A Split Gear Or All The Electronics Stop Working And I'm Now Using A Samsung SV-700X But Before You Put A Tape In This Model Replace The Belt And I Used A Small Wide Rubber Band And It Works Even A Year Later and If You Don't Fix It Chances Are The Belt Slips And Ruins The Tape As The Head Pull The Tape At High Speed Into The Machine I'm Not Surprised You Had Problems With The VCR In The Video As They Are Terrible Nowadays And The Smell Was Like Hot Overloaded Resistors
Kiuty!!!!!!
Left handed‽
do you have a cat? and also if your camera has FireWire use that
🤢 what the hell is that AI/robotic French voice audio track 🤮 Please never do this again. At most, put subtitles for people who don’t speak English. But replacing your voice with a robot *by default*, definitely no.
this one's actually not his fault; google is auto generating those audio tracks and forcing them onto users videos by default without asking 🙃
@ really ? This sucks. I hope he has at least a possibility to disable this after the video is published, if not when publishing. First YT started to poorly auto translate the videos titles, which majority of the time turn into a nonsense and forces us to reverse translate word by word to figure out what the video is really about. Now they replace the voice of the narrator…. Next is probably they will alter the images and content of the video to tailor it to what THEY think the audience expects.
you lot keep making it so much more complicated than it needs to be. vcr with a timebase corrector, easiercap, obs. that's it. if you're so resolution-obsessed that what you get from that bothers you then give up right now and go find something else to do. you are going to hate everything about deeper video tape and analog video culture, and we don't want you coming in and gentrifying our space by buying up all the editing monitors and vcrs to play playstation on when the 30" tubes you love from the substitute teacher cart meme are sooooo much better for it, and any old 5 buck mono deck will record your gameplay. and we do not want to pay your crazy people prices for our stuff, either, so stop trying to become unnecessary middlemen by polluting ebay with overpriced untested slop.
i suggest you all get over your born-in-the-wrong-generation-ass selves and figure out if you're finally gonna get your dang hands dirty with this stuff so you can actually live in that time you wanna live in, because the more of these internet goober weaves a fantasy about the future things you believe, the more knots you tie yourselves up in that need to be undone before you can actually do anything with it. and yes, you do want to.
this is weird as hell, dude
Err, what?
wtf is this a vhs hipster?