* I borrowed a good quality VHS player with SCART connector because it sends RGB in separate channels, improving quality considerably. Don't use the single channel composite video.
* Then I bought a cheap SCART to HDMI convertor and used a borrowed HDMI capture card.
* I recorded it with OBS studio and the resulting video looks very good.
So my total costs were about 20$ (for the adapter).
From my understanding this is the "bottleneck" in quality for older systems (at least in gaming consoles), converting Analogue to Digital. Which is why "RetroTink" sells different converters from ~$100 up to $750 (RetroTINK-4K Pro). I've seen a few videos comparing cheap generic USB converters with more expensive upscalers and there is a noticeable difference in image quality
This also worked for me. Crucially, the cheap composite capture devices are rubbish and have terrible drivers as well, while the cheap HDMI capture + OBS Just Works.
Me too, but I've used a good VHS player with HDMI output. So it's one transformation step less, and maybe the end quality is the best possible (I hope).
If you have a lot of Video8 or Hi8 tapes to digitise, get a Digital8 camcorder. It will most likely play them back quite happily and emit DV over its Firewire port. Digital8 is just DV on a different tape!
I still use DV/DVCAM tapes because I like shooting with old cameras, and I capture the same way I have for about 25 years when I used a VX2000 to shoot DV for a commercial digital streaming company that did all sorts of training videos.
Cheap crappy PCIe Firewire card (back in the day it was PCI, but no-one has that now), and dvgrab to get a raw DV stream off tape, then ffmpeg -i dvgrab-001.dv -c copy whateveritscalled.avi to rewrap it in something the editing software can read. These days I use DaVinci Resolve on Linux, in the olden days I used Premiere 5 on Windows 2000.
Even back then I used to capture on Linux and then bring it into Windows 2000 because only Linux had reliable Firewire support.
Can vouch for this trick - Digital8 cameras with Firewire is perfect transferring analog Video8 / Hi8. The analog to digital path in the Digital8 cameras is way better than what you can likely scrounge up yourself.
Can be expensive to get but if the camera doesn't break during use you can resell them easily.
I had a similar set of tapes, and ended up collecting a chain of connectors – firewire cable, firewire to thunderbolt2 adapter, thunderbolt2 to usb-c.
Instead of cobbling together an impressive array of tools though, I just got a trial of Final Cut Pro and pulled out everything with that. You can get what I think is a three month trial? Anyway, it was plenty for this one time effort of digitizing old Hi8 tapes.
I think I did end up using Handbrake to take the raws down to a reasonable size to give to family members, but the raw footage and project files I stuck on a couple of 1TB Sandisk drives to keep in physically separate backup locations.
Awesome to see this! I actually wrote PySceneDetect, was great to see it getting some use here. Would you be willing to share what parameters you were using? I'm curious why the accuracy was so low.
PySceneDetect only uses basic heuristic methods right now so it does require some degree of tuning to get things working for certain data sets. Your post inspired me to look into maybe integrating TransNetV2 as a detector in the future!
Nice to see you on here! I used the ContentDetector with a threshold of 27.0 and otherwise default parameters. Realize I could have done a grid sweep to really hone in on a good param range, but because I had only one input video labeled I wanted something that would work well enough out of the box. I imagine this dataset is rather... heterogenous.
If you happen to know a better apriori threshold I would be happy to re-run the analysis and update the chart.
I'm still sitting on some 8mm film that my grandpa shot, and even some of the commercials he worked on. Still trying to find a reasonable way to digitize them.
Also multiple boxes of slides, I know you can buy the scanners (I had one). Wish there was a cheaper automated way hahaha
What is the value for meaning for keeping home photos or videos? Does anyone provide meta tags, detailed information or narration? How is the photo or video meaningful unless you add your detailed memories to it for others to understand?
Most of my tapes did have pretty detailed narration and date overlays written directly to tape. But even without narration I still had luck doing basic event summarization and facial recognition of family members to build the tags.
If the relevant relatives are still around but don't have the ability to play tapes anymore but want to watch them from time to time, you don't need any of that.
Important archival work - much appreciated! However some links on the page are not working. Also, it seems like the author has made a Web app to make conversion easy, but I don't see a repo link or otherwise a way to access it.
Since the webapp is pretty opinionated to my setup (ie. linking against AVFoundation, using MPS for inference, always capturing an image after import) I didn't originally think it would be that useful to open source. Happy to do so - are you looking to get something specific out of it?
VHS is a composite signal on the tape itself. Composite for sake of this thread means black and white detail plus color information. S-VHS has higher bandwidth in the luma (detail) but the same limited color bandwidth. And there are two audio standards. But there is no "RGB out."
At a minimum you want a device with S-Video out (it keeps the two signals on separate wires). You also need a time base corrector. These come in two forms. One is line-based sometimes built into DVD players. This is how Jason Scott at Internet Archive does it and it's wrong.
The other form of corrector requires a separate box and corrects each frame in full. Many boxes claim to be time base correctors but are not. They are "synchronizers" or amps. Don't buy until you understand the differences.
There are two time sources (not really clocks) in a VCR. The first is physical tape wobbling and stretching over a head that's spinning far faster than seems possible. Line TBC is a tiny buffer that reconstructs the sync of the luma on each line.
The other timing source is the overall signal sync. A proper TBC reconstructs this overall sync on a frame by frame basis and presents something sane to the capture card. Without it you'll drop frames silently, audio falls out of sync, and all the other crap that happens when you try to watch video older than an iPhone. Consumer video capture is total crap and you won't see it until you try to encode, edit, or watch it on a different device. And then you'll be very confused working back to the original problem.
But follow this careful path where you actually capture a clean, proper signal and feed it into even the cheapest Blackmagic box and you're good.
ChatGPT will walk you through this and seems to know more about proper ffmpeg settings than the developers themselves or 30,000 conflicting StackOverflow messages on the topic.
I don't think there's going to be a better way than "find high quality player and decent capture device (e.g. Behringer), then press play a lot". It's possible that a truly dedicated process would capture off the tape head and then de-Dolby in software, but ultimately: it's a tape.
Jnr|3 months ago
* I borrowed a good quality VHS player with SCART connector because it sends RGB in separate channels, improving quality considerably. Don't use the single channel composite video.
* Then I bought a cheap SCART to HDMI convertor and used a borrowed HDMI capture card.
* I recorded it with OBS studio and the resulting video looks very good.
So my total costs were about 20$ (for the adapter).
0x00cl|3 months ago
From my understanding this is the "bottleneck" in quality for older systems (at least in gaming consoles), converting Analogue to Digital. Which is why "RetroTink" sells different converters from ~$100 up to $750 (RetroTINK-4K Pro). I've seen a few videos comparing cheap generic USB converters with more expensive upscalers and there is a noticeable difference in image quality
pjc50|3 months ago
There is the ultimate solution https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode , but that requires modifying your VCR.
ErroneousBosh|3 months ago
I'd be surprised at that - normally they'd emit Y/C or at best YUV.
reddalo|3 months ago
ErroneousBosh|3 months ago
I still use DV/DVCAM tapes because I like shooting with old cameras, and I capture the same way I have for about 25 years when I used a VX2000 to shoot DV for a commercial digital streaming company that did all sorts of training videos.
Cheap crappy PCIe Firewire card (back in the day it was PCI, but no-one has that now), and dvgrab to get a raw DV stream off tape, then ffmpeg -i dvgrab-001.dv -c copy whateveritscalled.avi to rewrap it in something the editing software can read. These days I use DaVinci Resolve on Linux, in the olden days I used Premiere 5 on Windows 2000.
Even back then I used to capture on Linux and then bring it into Windows 2000 because only Linux had reliable Firewire support.
actionfromafar|3 months ago
Can be expensive to get but if the camera doesn't break during use you can resell them easily.
duggan|3 months ago
Instead of cobbling together an impressive array of tools though, I just got a trial of Final Cut Pro and pulled out everything with that. You can get what I think is a three month trial? Anyway, it was plenty for this one time effort of digitizing old Hi8 tapes.
I think I did end up using Handbrake to take the raws down to a reasonable size to give to family members, but the raw footage and project files I stuck on a couple of 1TB Sandisk drives to keep in physically separate backup locations.
Clamchop|3 months ago
However, Apple has removed Firewire support entirely from macOS Tahoe so none of these solutions will work on Mac going forward.
Breakthrough|3 months ago
PySceneDetect only uses basic heuristic methods right now so it does require some degree of tuning to get things working for certain data sets. Your post inspired me to look into maybe integrating TransNetV2 as a detector in the future!
icyfox|3 months ago
If you happen to know a better apriori threshold I would be happy to re-run the analysis and update the chart.
rexysmexy|3 months ago
Also multiple boxes of slides, I know you can buy the scanners (I had one). Wish there was a cheaper automated way hahaha
dangus|3 months ago
It wouldn't have been crazy to spend $4,000 to have the professionals do it, so long as they produced a reasonably equivalent high-quality result.
donclark|3 months ago
icyfox|3 months ago
actionfromafar|3 months ago
mentalgear|3 months ago
icyfox|3 months ago
mansandersson|3 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24839848
badlibrarian|3 months ago
VHS is a composite signal on the tape itself. Composite for sake of this thread means black and white detail plus color information. S-VHS has higher bandwidth in the luma (detail) but the same limited color bandwidth. And there are two audio standards. But there is no "RGB out."
At a minimum you want a device with S-Video out (it keeps the two signals on separate wires). You also need a time base corrector. These come in two forms. One is line-based sometimes built into DVD players. This is how Jason Scott at Internet Archive does it and it's wrong.
The other form of corrector requires a separate box and corrects each frame in full. Many boxes claim to be time base correctors but are not. They are "synchronizers" or amps. Don't buy until you understand the differences.
There are two time sources (not really clocks) in a VCR. The first is physical tape wobbling and stretching over a head that's spinning far faster than seems possible. Line TBC is a tiny buffer that reconstructs the sync of the luma on each line.
The other timing source is the overall signal sync. A proper TBC reconstructs this overall sync on a frame by frame basis and presents something sane to the capture card. Without it you'll drop frames silently, audio falls out of sync, and all the other crap that happens when you try to watch video older than an iPhone. Consumer video capture is total crap and you won't see it until you try to encode, edit, or watch it on a different device. And then you'll be very confused working back to the original problem.
But follow this careful path where you actually capture a clean, proper signal and feed it into even the cheapest Blackmagic box and you're good.
ChatGPT will walk you through this and seems to know more about proper ffmpeg settings than the developers themselves or 30,000 conflicting StackOverflow messages on the topic.
skinner927|3 months ago
suchoudh|3 months ago
If someone knows a faster and good way pls share.
thanks
o11c|3 months ago
It turns out that a lot of old tape players have either failed completely or else add excessive background hissing.
Most tapes don't record all the way to the end so you will have to cut it digitally regardless.
pjc50|3 months ago
skinner927|3 months ago