Don’t laugh. VCR recording

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matt167

[H]ard|Gawd
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My mother in law owns several hundred vhs tapes ( could be thousands for all I know. It’s a lot. Some of them are out of print as far as DVD goes. She hinted that for Christmas she wanted me to figure out how to turn them into DVDs. And I kind of know how. I used to have an old dazzle ( or was it Razzle ) and a video stabilizer but it didn’t work well, but I made some copies back in the day. I did a small amount of research and what I’m finding is a Grex image stabilizer is the go to for this, but also that using a composite to HDMI adapter with an HDMI capture device should also work.

I’m really thinking I just may find her a nice used 4 head VCR to play the tapes as her vcr quit, leading to wanting digitization. I need to find a usable VCR to even think about ripping movies
 
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ebay, $30-60 for a working unit
 
matt167 said:
My mother in law owns several hundred vhs tapes ( could be thousands for all I know. It’s a lot. Some of them are out of print as far as DVD goes. She hinted that for Christmas she wanted me to figure out how to turn them into DVDs. And I kind of know how. I used to have an old dazzle ( or was it Razzle ) and a video stabilizer but it didn’t work well, but I made some copies back in the day. I did a small amount of research and what I’m finding is a Grex image stabilizer is the go to for this, but also that using a composite to HDMI adapter with an HDMI capture device should also work.

I’m really thinking I just may find her a nice used 4 head VCR to play the tapes as her vcr quit, leading to wanting digitization. I need to find a usable VCR to even think about ripping movies
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There are services that will do all of this for you for a fee. They typically offer bulk pricing.

I'd consider finding a service that does like, a 20-, 50-, or 100-video batch and also buy the ripping hardware. Ask her for her favorite/top 20/50/100 tapes, get them done professionally, then learn how to use the hardware for the rest of the tapes. You can do 2-4 every weekend or lazy weeknight.

You could even do date night with your wife once a week and watch and rip one of her mom's movies and do it together.
 
So you want to convert your vhs tapes...

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I recommend a high quality vcr. If possible, an svhs player will give you svideo output which splits Luma and chroma into two parts instead of just one like composite. There are some hdmi converters that actually work OK and then you would just need an hdmi capture device. I've tried that as well as analog captures and honestly if you don't plan on doing any enhancing in post, you can probably get away with the analog to digital route. That being said, some all in one type devices have absolutely awful bitrate and quality will suffer.
 
Yea I would highly recommend finding a service to do that for you. Also vhs tapes don't hold their integrity forever so it would be best to find and pick her favorites and then view them to see if they are even viable.
 
I think some service even send you the box pre-stamped, costco can be a place to look if you are a member:
https://www.costcodvd.com/services-and-pricing/videotape-transfer

or

https://kodakdigitizing.com/products/vhs-conversion

That said that could be more appropriate for the 50 or less more prized items, many hundreds would start to be a lot even for a service like that I feel like (how big of a box you need to ship 250 vhs ?) or doing it by hands without an big operation, say you only have 1 vhs and the max conversion speed is 1:1, 500-700 hours of material become just a giant amount of work, even if you achieve to do 1 or 2 a day everday... talking 3-4-6-7 month ?

a mix of the favorite being transfered + an vhs for the rest seem the best one could do, if it is a 200-500 vhs collection type, I doubt a transfert could be much less than $12 by VHS when you take the shipping into account.
 
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Have you considered just going full digital for them vs going to DVD? Or thinking just ease?

Are any of these VHS's content something that you could get in digital form already?
 
MrGuvernment said:
Have you considered just going full digital for them vs going to DVD? Or thinking just ease?

Are any of these VHS's content something that you could get in digital form already?
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Anything that could be gotten via DVD would be gotten dvd. But there is a lot of out of print stuff that might be cost prohibitive to get DVD.

I’d probably throw together an old laptop that I have and create a library and run Plex rather than create DVDs.. but that’s after I get it going.. my wife basically thinks her mom is nuts for wanting it fwiw.
 
Is it true that by going from analog to HDMI it bypasses macro vision?


When I did this a decade ago one of the movies I ripped was Steel Chariots and it was off an old recording I made of the movie. It’s a forgotten Days of thunder rip off from 1997.
 
The way to do it, is to buy one of the short lived VHS/DVD player combo devices. Because they usually can output the VHS over HDMI, as well as upscaling.
 
I finally got around to doing this. I used a composite to HDMI adapter, and a HDMI capture card originally. It bypasses the macro vision without an issue. I actually bought a Sima Go DVD in case but it’s still NIB. The only issue I had was, the sound was wayy out of sync by the end of a video. I fixed this by getting a so called audio capture card, setting the sample rate to 44.1 and it’s just about dead on. Picture quality is okay. Passes the mother in law test. I’m processing with NVENC using OBS. The vcr I ended up with is a Panasonic that everyone had under their tv in the 90s
 
I just got the cards from China to do the rf doomsday decoder method right from the vcr head bypassing the video outputs altogether. Will be a little project to get that operational I'm sure. Will keep you guys posted.
 
chameleoneel said:
The way to do it, is to buy one of the short lived VHS/DVD player combo devices. Because they usually can output the VHS over HDMI, as well as upscaling.
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The couple of these that I've dealt with, had separate outputs for DVD and VHS, not just a single output. And VHS did not output over HDMI. This could obviously vary between brands and models.
 
Krispy Kritter said:
The couple of these that I've dealt with, had separate outputs for DVD and VHS, not just a single output. And VHS did not output over HDMI. This could obviously vary between brands and models.
Click to expand...
I have one from a brand called funai that outputs over hdmi. You give up control of a lot when you let the machine do the analog to digital conversion for you, but it is the simplest method.
 
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