UKC

Anybody done this? Would be keen to hear experiences so I can find the easiest way to do it.

Ask in your local large facebook group, there's bound to be someone on there who does it. I've no personal experience of this, although my Dad did have some cine film put on DVD about 15 years ago quite successfully by someone.

'although my Dad did have some cine film put on DVD about 15 years ago quite successfully by someone.'

Great line - it's true, you can find anything you want on t'internet!

I’m not convinced. I find sarcasm quite difficult to source. It only seems to be available from special interest sites.

Did it a few years ago before the VHS player gave up the ghost - turned out fine though video quality is evidently not HD

Can't remember the details but seem to remember that I had to solder a cable myself that allowed connecting the VHS player output directly to the PC

Sorry, can't remember more than that

Thanks. Contrary to the two replies above, I’m well aware of the range of services who can do this for me. Albeit pretty expensive.  There’s also the option of buying hardware and associated software and doing it myself. Whilst that looks cheaper, it obviously involves investing significant time. Just trying to balance whether spending the extra is worth it, or whether doing it my self makes more sense. And if I do, is there a particular product which anyone has experience of.

Video digitisers are dirt cheap, provided you just want to capture video, and not record to DVD. But most computers with a DVD writer can run DVD creation/writing software.

Example digitiser, plucked from google:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/REDGO-Updated-Digital-Converter-Recorder/dp/B07MCT...

It's about 5.9, isn't it?

Yeah I did it a couple of weeks ago with an old VHS of me on my 16th birthday doing some bridge jumping. 

I first had to get a Scart to HDMI Converter from amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TS1D55H/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o...

Then realizing I no longer had a HDMI in port on my graphics card had to buy an HDMI to USB video capture device

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B088FTBRFR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o...

You then download some free software called OBS studio and it seemed to do it fine. Mean it's not by any means a professional setup but it worked for what I needed. You can also get similar adapters for non Scart VHS players such as this https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087RMXVNK/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_KSJZ8VSDPQA02V4... 

I did exactly this.  The vids were a bit crappy because the video player was.  If you have a good video player it should be fine. I used VLC media player to capture the stream from the device and stream to a file, though the device may come with some software.  The number of pixels high and wide is pretty poor, but then so was the TV screen.  I can't imagine how we watched such cr*p quality images.

Some Tips:

1. If your video has an S-Video output use that, not the composite red yellow white. (Make sure your usb thingy does s-video if so.)
2. Stream direct to a file without altering anything at first (VLC allows you to stream and convert. Don't.)  Just do a straight output of images and sound to say an MP4 wrapper with no changes.  This prevents glitches.  Do any adjustments later.  Later on you can convert files directly - such as the sound to mp3 (Lame) as a minimum.  You can resize, despeckle/noise etc if you wish.
3. Start the recording on the PC before you start the video then crop the beginning and end later.
4. Do the whole video tape at once then slice into sub videos with software.
   • I used ffmpeg - a command line tool - to slice videos into useful sections using a frame start and end e.g "Spain Holiday" "Christening" etc..  Google it.  It took a while to find the command line that worked for me, but with a lot of videos proved quicker as I just had to change file names, but VLC and other tools can do this too.
5. The files are huge so you need a big disk before compressing etc.  Editing also eats memory so don't try to edit the videos and work at the same time.

For long term storage forget DVDs they are the next dead technology.  Get a decent sized USB stick or five.

Thanks. Sounds pretty straightforward, as long as I have the right set up (cables etc).

Thanks. That’s all really helpful.

Then you must have a pitifully weak imagination. 

Don't forget, back in the "good old days", we were watching on cathode ray tube televisions very often no larger than 21" across the diagonal. The whole analog process "smoothed" things out. Look up persistence of vision, and visual acuity etc. Finally, outside of the cinema, it was all that we knew. We were just so used to it, that we made allowances and probably even managed to make corrections. 
Less than a year ago I watched some stuff on a 14" CRT and it was not so much the overall image quality, but the curvature, that struck me. It felt like watching a goldfish bowl. Hence my comment about "we made corrections" (through my early adolescence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I watched plenty on a 14" CRT and don't recall thinking "this is like watching a goldfish bowl, it's so ROUND"). 

I think most CRT units were 625 lines but not all lines were used, especially by VHS which used about 400. So on a typical VHS recording with an aspect ration of 4:3, the width would effectively be 600 pixels. Does that equate with "The number of pixels high and wide is pretty poor" that you experienced on digitising? 

I read more books back then.  Maybe good quality screens is why reading is dropping amongst the young?  ... or is it computer games are more fun, and someone else has done the work of imagining the landscape, characters etc?

Precisely.  I just didn't want to get too technical.  Resizing and smoothing can work well, without too much noticeable loss.  Only resize after you have despeckled etc.  Resize a clean image.

If you decide to buy your own digitizing doohickeys, then make sure you get one that handles the tapes you want to convert.  I wanted to do this with a couple of old, impossible to get on DVD (or online, or basically anywhere) climbing tapes I had, and after a bit of research selected something suitably cheap (bearing in mind I only wanted to do 2 vids) but with good reviews.  Unfortunately, nothing in the reviews or sales blurbs said it only converted PAL (European) videos, and the two I wanted to convert were NTSC (i.e. from US).  Doh.  

21" - luxury!  Pretty sure that's positively cinematic compared to the old Marconi set we used to have when I was growing up - hours of fun to had adjusting the horizontal and vertical hold and getting dad onto the roof to hold the aerial still, and laughing when he fell off.  Still, was good enough to get scared when "the big monkey" got hold of Fay Wray and tried to use her as a club to swat planes away. Jumpers for goalposts. Isn't it? Mmmmm. Marvellous.

We have a flat screen TV that is probably about 6 or 7 years old.  We stayed with a CRT yor years as whenever we went round a large showroom it was quite evident that only the most expensive flat screens didn't have loads of wavy artefacts and smear on fast movement so we stuck with the CRT driven from a digibox until it went bang.   The TV we had is not large by modern standards (28"?) and the quality had moved on a lot in the shops from what I described but I still don't rate the colour reproduction and quality on movement as highly as a really good CRT.  I think there was  big element of Emperor's New clothes about flat screens unless you pay rather more than we can afford for a TV, certainly till comparatively recently.

VHS for Europe used the PAL standard 625 lines.

The best way we found to digitise VHS was to use a dedicated VHS/DVS recorder (a pioneer) which were plentiful a few years back and the quality of the DVDs produced was as good as the original VHS playback could be from any given tape. Very easy process with a box like that.

In some ways, analogue TV was better; especially for gently graded colour variation (think sunset), or low light moving images. Terrestrial DTV can be very poor at the latter, rendering it as amorphous blobs moving only loosely connected to the actual scene. Probably to do with the difficulty of detecting (and therefore predicting) inter-frame movement correctly in dark scenes (the I-frame/P-frame stuff).

Thanks. Hadn’t thought of that. Also need to consider that I’m saving to iMac. We’ve loads of tapes; VHS, VHS-C and DVC.  Been meaning to do this for years 😢

I held on (combination of being stubborn, and nostalgia/pride, and economising, and bewilderment and distrust at all the new choices) to my 26” Ferguson CRT from 1996 to approximately 2011 or 2012 when I finally couldn’t repair its third breakdown. This was in part due to seeing what you describe. I was given a hand-me-down, a “humble” 32” Panasonic Viera, possibly a 2007 model, by a friend of a friend who had upgraded their main television and just wanted the old one to go to a good home. I still have it and it seems fine but then 99% of my viewing is DVDs. I wonder if the glitching that you’ve seen, is related to the transmission of “live” broadcasts (I include streaming in this, hence the inverted commas)

I also still watch a bit of VHS but I noticed that on the Panasonic, the quality when connecting SCART-SCART was appalling to the point of being unwatchable. This was from a high quality player that had always looked good on my old CRT. Eventually after trying a few Frankenstein’s-monster cable bodges and combinations, it seemed that a SCART-composite (do I mean composite? Just the red and white cables that look like audio phono connectors) cable adaptor from the VCR output, through female-female adaptor and then just a straight red-white composite into the television input, improved things marvellously. 

Been a long time since I converted VHS to digital.

Its quite straightforward. You need a working VHS player, tapes that still work and USB TV card or similar PCIE TV card.

Install the software that comes with the USB card, plug the VHS player into the USB card or PCIE card. Press play on the VHS player and press capture/record on your computer.

It's a slow process as it captures in real time.

Next, get stuck in the weeds about how you are going to edit and enhance the footage that you have digitised.

In my youth (before 1963) TVs were 405 lines. I remember 625 as being a huge increase in quality. The introduction of PAL colour was then another gigantic step forward.

No-one seems to have mentioned the method I use, so I will throw it into the mix. I replaced my VHS recorder with a hard drive/DVD recorder many years ago, but it is relatively easy to get the HD/DVD recorder to record an input from a VHS recorder rather than from a TV signal. No need to use a computer: just attached the VHS scart to the HD/DVD recorder and changed the input. Record onto the hard drive, then write to DVD or USB.

I’ll check that out. Ta

We still have a 24" widescreen Philips CRT TV sitting in the lounge but it's not been used for well over a year because the latest digibox went phut and we've not bothered to replace it because we just weren't watching any TV.

I suppose I ought to take it down the tip but there's actually nothing wrong with it apart from being obsolete.

Does anybody collect old CRT TVs? This one's actually not too heavy being 24" rather than 28".

Also, my parents have got a dual VHS/DVD player. I must check whether it records on DVD in which case transferring some old VHS tapes (which I never get round to) will be a doddle, not so sure about the 8mm(?) tapes from old Sony video camera though.

There is a market for old CRT especially smaller ones.

Retro console collectors.

Look up “retro gaming monitor” on famous auction website and I expect you will see a number of old 14” tellies at around £70-80. 

I don’t know if 24” is considered “too big” as it’s not my world. 

Was going to suggest this.  HDD/DVD recorders were ridiculously expensive when they first came out but I suspect they are cheap now.   I have one sitting on top of my MD player; neither have been switched on for years and years.

Graeme, I assume these VHS are one offs that you cannot get anywhere else?  If they're commercially available then by far the easiest (and best quality) solution is to buy used DVDs!

Careful now! My viewing of Carry On Up The Jungle on DVD was ruined by the DVD omitting a particularly crude (and not even a truly functioning pun/innuendo) from Frankie Howerd, so I am glad I’ve kept my VHS of it 😃

They’re family. Kids, holidays, wedding etc. Hours and hours of it too!! 

Which is why I had considered paying someone else to do it. It’ll take me weeks.

If folk are interested in converting some VHS tapes to digital (MP4) then I've got an S-video/video/scart dongle to USB with cables and software that will do the job. Boxed, instructions, CD, etc... for PC.

We used this to transfer a bundle of old home movies and VHS tapes..

Yours for £9 + postage if interested?

Already PM'd Graeme directly but looks like he's on a Mac.

Simon...

P.S. Apologies if this comes across as spam

I’ll have it if it is no good to Graeme. I’ll send you a PM