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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Do you have any advice for digitizing VHS tapes? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have a bunch of old VHS tapes that I want to digitize. I have never digitized VHS tapes before. I picked up a generic HDMI capture card, and a generic composite to HDMI converter. Using both of those, I was planning on hooking a VCR up to a computer running OBS. Overall, I'm rather ignorant of the process. The main questions that I currently have are as follows:

What are the best practices for reducing the risk of damaging the tapes?
Are there any good steps to take to maximize video quality?
Is a TBC required (can it be done in software after digitization)?
Should I clean the VCR after every tape?
Should I clean every tape before digitization?
Should I have a separate VCR for the specific purpose of cleaning tapes?

Please let me know if you have any extra advice or recommendations at all beyond what I have mentioned. Any information at all is a big help.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't expect newer VCRs to be made, there's a lot of precise mechanical engineering and the R&D that would need to go into making a professional-grade VCR today does not make financial sense. However, there is an option to refurbish existing ones and capture the magnetic signal as directly as possible. On media such as VHS or LaserDisc, the signal is not quite composite video, as that would require some 6 MHz of bandwidth. Instead, the color subcarrier is remodulated to a way lower frequency and then back to normal for playback. The folks behind ld-decode (a project that takes raw signal from a LaserDisc's laser pickup and translates it into composite video) and its fork vhs-decode have made software that captures everything the head picks up into a raw file, and then does TBC and chroma decoding to create the best possible video. They also documented what hardware can be used for the capture (usually a firmware-modded Conexant video capture card or a beefy FPGA) and how to connect it to some VCRs' circuitry.

Of course, this is quite an over-the-top effort for home tapes, I'd just go with a generic composite capture card that does not deinterlace nor upscale and not bother with TBC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

vhs-decode

This is a very cool project! Thank you for sharing it!