[iisan7]

Best at capture/preservation, but only theoretically best at playback someday. Currently the best software processing algorithms are imo not on par with video playback quality from the best hardware of the era, especially for damaged tapes. It's hard, although certainly not impossible, to imagine that changing. I'm 100% glad it exists though.

[actionfromafar]

You could always take the best hardware of the era, and capture from that. If you were talking about decks. I'm not sure about playback - the output from vhs-decode looks pretty darn good to me, but I'm not an expert at all in composite video gear.

[iisan7]

Right, my language was sloppy but I meant two things-- the quality will still be dependent on the hardware chain, and I should expect that a 'bit perfect' capture of a VHS tape will usually be inferior to one captured from a vintage pro deck. And then regarding processing, I'm not a professional, but I've done several successful restorations using virtualdub and avisynth, and on some degraded tapes I couldn't do nearly as well as whatever magic was going on in the vhs to dvd section of the JVC SR-MV50.

[xattt]

Even the best VHS decks from the 80s/90s, which would have been used in production environments and thus “well worn”, would have wear-related quality issues.

[Solvency]

I'm not following why would software still be inferior playback to now ancient hardware? Isn't that sort of like suggesting digital can't replay a vinyl record transcoded to digital as well?

[iisan7]

No, I'm thinking of proprietary hardware or software in the decks that perform tbc, noise reduction, filtering of artifacts, etc. If given a choice of a perfect copy of a spotty VHS and all the virtualdub and avisynth filters, or the mpeg2 output from a JVC SR-MV50, my experience has been that the latter is better. However, I grant that a video preservation professional might get better results from treating a direct capture than I.

[actionfromafar]

Sort of correct - except that the software to reliably decode VHS took some time to get right, and there still are regular improvements to the vhs-decode github repo.

For a long time a great S-VHS deck, professional Time-Base-Corrector and so on from a TV studio, was the better option over vhs-decode software, especially on bad tapes. But now, I'd go with vhs-decode any day.