Alright Sup Forums, I need your help. My sister's boyfriend is an autistic hipster trust fund baby who collects VHS tapes of all things. He's only recently learned that VHS tapes fucking degrade over time and now he's scared about losing his collection. The dude has like 200 video tapes and he told me he'd pay me 4 bucks for each one I can convert to a digital format. Easy money, right? I ordered a cheap analog to digital converter cable online, it's just a simple a/v to usb cable. The problem is that I've never done this before and I wouldn't know remotely where to start as far as conversion software goes.
So long story short; What's some good software for VHS to digital conversion?
Also ignore the shitty eeepc. It was just the smallest laptop I had to bring over to his house to fuck around with shit.
Nice trips, faggot. Pity they're wasted on a question that could have easily been solved by using a fucking search engine.
Carson Lopez
Just torrent all the shit movies he wants in 480p, or some shit.
Jaxson Miller
>sister's boyfriend
Stopped there. Why would I answer a failure?
Samuel Nelson
I used VirtualDub back in the day for this exactly. Its a bit bland but very small and fast software. Use the capture feature, encode directly to MPEG4 on the fly (Xvid for example), 5-6Mbit/s and appropriate 30fps. MP3 or AAC for sound at least 192kbps. You'll see like a sharp combing effect on fast movement possibly, then use a deinterlacing filter in VirtualDub. Find a tutorial to help you.
>actually wanting to archive from the worst source possible
There's nothing left there. Apart from the whimsical feeling of the 'good old days' of horrid picture quality. We are in a golden age of seeing film just like it came straight from the print room. What a waste of time. His collection only has value in it's physical form unless there is something rare and unavailable elsewhere - but that is basically impossible.
Matthew Reed
Just download the movies you dummy.
Jace Lewis
I'm bumping OP's thread solely because I found this post obnoxious
Ryan Sanchez
this
Adam Flores
It's very possible. There's tons of B-movies that were only released on VHS. Not saying there's necessarily any value to them, but still.
Isaiah Stewart
480p is well above VHS, its DVD res
Evan Green
>vhs >through composite >to a pic that is barely powerful enough to encode to 144p
YIFY does it again
Gabriel Davis
Like some sperg can tell the difference.
Anthony Carter
Perhaps a few that nobody likely remembers. However it's definitely a thing now for restoration studios to go out, look out for masters of B-movies that quite often had no dvd release and put them on blu-ray. Look at the scores of examples on Caps-a-Holic such as Grindhouse Releasing that do a really fantastic job at restoring these turds.
I mean you guys realize there are plenty of movies that never got a release outside of VHS right?
Brandon Reed
In those cases you can say that the conversion failed.
Aaron Lewis
4 bucks isn't worth it. Tell that faggot to torrent the movies.
Evan Kelly
Like what? Genuinely curious here because you're full of shit.
Zachary Watson
>not reading 4 bucks for a single tape. 200 tapes. That's 800 dollars for appeasing some hipster fuck.
The nigger has shit on tape like "The Lake Tahoe Video Postcard". You try finding that shit on Netflix.
Landon White
>That's 800 dollars for appeasing some hipster fuck. and all you have to do is torrent what some other kind user has already done.
the encoding alone will take fucking forever, let along having to play each individual movie in full length while it happens.
then you have to realize that all the "free" options for video conversion are either dogshit and don't work and ontop of that are viruses stealing your keystrokes and internets, or at worst case fucking your PCs firmware making your hardware inoperable..
Anthony Murphy
800 dollars for that much time does not seem worth it.
David Ortiz
>torrent in 480p >downscale to 240p Wow that was hard
Christopher Harris
I've done this before and you can use VLC to save to a file.
Tyler Rogers
>We are in a golden age of seeing film just like it came straight from the print room We've got quite a way to go before we're viewing full quality film digitally.
Brody Miller
DASTARDLY
Logan Smith
Yeah I checked PTP forums and Virtualdub looks like the way to go.
OP i'd get him to tell you which 10 he wants done the most so that you can bail after that if its shitty work
Cooper Cook
Whatever you do, make sure your shit doesn't react at all to Macrovision. Also I'll just hop on your train: what's some stuff for VHSes that powers through Macrovision?
David Brooks
Hand him a hard drive with videos of you fucking your sister and charge him for it
Jonathan Mitchell
Wanna get around to taking a pic of the tapes? Might be inclined to buy some of them for $6 a tape.
Jackson Peterson
have fun learning about deinterlacing, inverse telecine, and video encoding
i've done some tape transfers before, i use QTGMC for a deinterlacer (haven't had to do inverse telecine though, as my sources have all been home video and PAL, which don't require it)
pic related, clip from a home Hi-8 tape
Kevin Taylor
ps. $4 a tape is pretty low keep in mind standard players will only play back in realtime, meaning a 2 hour video will take 2 hours to transfer, then you need to process and encode it, which will likely take longer again unless you skimp out and use shitty/no filters and an inefficient codec
Isaac Roberts
>Not just playing the tapes and filming the screen with your phone.
Nicholas Morris
>letting your sister get a boyfriend Fucking beta faggot just kill him
Benjamin Butler
just get a vhs to dvd recorder. alot quicker.
Hunter Collins
using that to transfer laser discs too.
Andrew Harris
> plenty of movies that never got a release outside of VHS
> Like what?
All that direct-to-VHS porn your mom did in 1983.
Good times.
Jayden Carter
...
Xavier Phillips
If you've got a spare system you can just let run without interrupting your own usage it could be worth it. But if you account just the playtime for every tape, without even considering the time to encode. You're looking at over 200 hours just to capture the video. 1Mb/s would be overkill for the resolution you're talking about, but for capturing alone you'd want something like 3-5Mb/s before encoding. Encode time would be determined by your cpu and settings, but figure something like 2-5 minutes of encode time for every minute of video on something of similar performance to an 8c/16t 3ghz cpu. Let's just say you get a 1:1 encode time: playtime ratio (you wont) that would put you at well over 400 hours. Half of which will have your cpu at full tilt. That's less than 2$/hr. But hey, I'd you've got nothing better to do with your time. Feel free to spend several months to make what you could working part time for a month.
I'm with the other anons on just downloading the shit. If anything, just rip and encode the stuff you can't find.
Charles Davis
I think adobe premiere has a capture thing,
then just export the file as whatever h.264 for compression
Brandon Hill
>Laserdisc >Auto-Reverse
Man people were dumb in the past
Blake Kelly
>were
James Wilson
Why settle for 4 bucks? 5-6 bucks man.
Luis Bennett
>then you have to realize that all the "free" options for video conversion are either dogshit and don't work and ontop of that are viruses stealing your keystrokes and internets, or at worst case fucking your PCs firmware making your hardware inoperable.. ffmpeg, you know, exists
William Hall
>800 dollars to download a bunch of shitty movies in the worst possible resolution What the fuck is wrong with this cuck? Is this a normie thing?
Samuel White
Don't confuse people with facts. Handbrake does a fine job if you don't know how to use the ffmpeg cli. By the way. It's basically just a simplified ffmpeg gui.
Wyatt Flores
download the dvd, bd version off the internet. keep his money, cuck.
Nicholas Hernandez
>not using avisynth and x264 cli why are you on Sup Forums?
add rainbow and dotcrawl.
Nathan Allen
you do know laser disc is double sided and the auto reverse means you don't have to flip the disc around?
Hudson Morales
YOU ARE FUCKED.
Sooner or later you will realize that syncing and not dropping frames without a hardware time based corrector of professional level IS JUST IMPOSSIBLE.
GOOD LUCK OP. If you are asking yourself how did people before converted theyr VHS without problems: they didn't; their conversion are botched up, and if they have ever spent time just watching the end result, they would have noticed that they are missing sync, frames, and probably both.
FUCK VHS TO DIGITAL CONVERSION. FUCK IT!
Luke Anderson
worst advice in thread, congrats
Connor Diaz
that's some high qual encoding.
Matthew Brooks
>then you have to realize that all the "free" options for video conversion are either dogshit and don't work That's because you're searching for 'free'. Free means 'with viruses' nowadays. If you want software that works, NEVER search for 'free'. Handbrake is the best overall program for video encoding.
Lincoln Edwards
About 5-6 years ago I did a conversion of some old VHS-C tapes my grandpa recorded. Although I'm glad it's archived now (stored on HDD, DVD and some on MiniDV) the process was a pain. I recorded all the footage from the VHS-C onto MiniDV tapes then captured it to the PC with vegas (Wanted to do some editing). The conversion turned out pretty fine quality wise...
Austin Foster
>Don't confuse people with facts. what does that mean? i'm comfortable with the CLI but i'm guessing most normies can't into CLI so handbrake it is granted looking up whatever parameter i need to adjust for quality is a bit annoying since that seems to be different between encoders and i don't use ffmpeg often enough to have them memorized
Alexander Cook
Write all of that shit down.
Pirate 99% of it and record the ones you can't find.
Wyatt King
what's bernie watching?
Jose Mitchell
...
Gabriel Butler
Why would you take up work not knowing what it entails?