Hiya, pretty much the title. I have a dozen tapes I want to backup before age takes its toll. My basic idea after watching some videos online is to buy a hardware based upscaler that can interface with my vcr then throw that signal to a video capture card and record on my computer. I’ll go with name brands to avoid problems but is that really the best method? I want to avoid sending them to a service since it will cost more than just buying the hardware in the first place and I got time to kill.
A lot of places like local libraries sometimes have events for this purpose. You bring your stuff and they help you digitize it. Could look into that locally.
Some name brands still just rebrand white label products. Look if the same form factor appears on Ebay or has been reviwed by a YouTuber. Most will internally deinterlace the video with a terrible algorithm.
I bought a little cable from china (I think aliexpress) It was cheap, like 10 dolars, and had a very simple software attached. That was it. Did a perfect job. It’s a very simple process
I did this last year for a bunch of family videos.
I bought an used VHS/HDD/DVD combo, recorded the VHS to HDD to DVD, then used my PC to rip those DVD to MKV and chucked them on my NAS for access/backup.
Quality is fine compared to the originals.
Are there any VHS decks that will allow digital transfer without writing a DVD?
Edit: Found it! There are MiniDV / SVHS combo decks with digital out via firewire. Pricey though.
Was the HDD -> DVD absolutely necessary? Seems like one extra transcoding for no reason.
Did the HDD have it’s own partition type or video format directly unreadable by PC? Then it’s understandable that one wouldn’t wanna go through all that hassle of making it directly work on PC just for better video quality.
Mate I can’t remember if it was a limitation of the old Sony combo or not, it’s likely it was or I wouldn’t have done it that way.
I do remember looking into putting the HDD into my PC, since I didn’t do it, I’m going to assume it was a proprietary format and couldn’t be read.
This was a set and forget process for 90’s quality home videos.
Many manufacturers made them deliberately uncompatible with PC to dodge probable copyright problems.
However they usually didn’t reinvent the wheel and those formats were common, but “sabotaged” by small alterations. Analysing them on a code level would reveal how they were altered and possibilities to fix them.
…but it’s too much hassle for few VHS tapes.
I found this repo interesting just for the sake of centralizing a lot of useful info around VHS. Even if you don’t follow this path, the knowledge might help: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode
