Talk about VCRs!

Let there be the nostalgia of eaten tapes, rewinding at the end of each movie and those annoying DVD advertisements that were completely pointless!

Oh, and lets not forget the advertisements. Oh those wonderful, fastforwardable advertisements.

Sadly, my VCR died a few months ago, the player pretty much died and a few days later the composite output just died. We threw it to the dump.

SHARP VCR - RIP, 1995-2009. You served us well. Mindlessly playing various movies such as 'El Dorado' or 'Pokemon: The First Movie'. May your relatively good composite output be good in VCR heaven.

I still have 2 VCR's although their use is now reserved for recording the Mega Drive games at our tournaments.

I still have some classic TV clips recorded onto VHS, some really cool 80's advert breaks in between various films and softcore smut that was shown on TV when I was 14.

DVD's are far better, but there is a great nostalgia with tapes.

The best thing with DVDs is that they finally allow to watch the originals instead of the German dubs.

I still got loads of tapes that I am gradually phasing out. Most I got left are British PAL VHS, but also many recorded tapes with what my parents recorded for us kids and some documentaries. Sometimes I wish I had simply thrown them away like my friends did.

VCRs are almost completely gone from my life now. There's just this one VHS tape that I'd like to digitize, but during my previous attempts to do so I've had rotten luck with the VCR. Maybe someday I'll get it right.

First off, Great thread!

Ahhh, VCR's. After 10 years of DVD's they seem like ancient technology. Funny thing is that I was just at Best Buy the other day (ironically to pick up a DVD player) and they are selling brand new DVD / VCR unit. So I assume they are still in somewhat a demand.

We still have tons of VHS in my house. I don't know if my family still uses them but we do have a large supply.

I still have a few Anime classics on VHS. A few City Hunter movies, Ninja Scroll, Appleseed.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with them. I'm hoping I can sell them to a Museum to make an exhibit for old technology :)

The first VCR in our familiy was some Salora from 198x, it got thrown out some 4 years ago since we got a DVD+VCR combo that did much much nicer image.

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Originally Posted by Mr Smith

softcore smut that was shown on TV when I was 14.

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You should YouTube this, unless it isn't really worth it.

VCRs...yuck! If I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll reach for a pizza pan sized laserdisc. Of all the things from my childhood, I think the VCR is my least favorite. All you did was pray to the VHS gods your tape wouldn't be broken/eaten when you rewound it. Also, you were lucky if you got through 2 plays before the quality went to shit. To conclude: Genesis=great, VHS=suck.

Its true that vcr degrades, but i still got a wall of the stuff and i still play manga on my vcr machine that i have not yet bothered to replace with dvd. I have never had to pray it wont get destroyed on rewind. only thing that bothers me is you will take a quality hit if you pause, stop, or rewind / fast forward while a tape is playing. However my copy of ghost in the shell still looks loveley. i think a lot of it is to do with the initial quality of the tape?

VHS is sweet. I loved it, tracking to make sure it looked right, cleaning the heads... we eventually had hundreds of movies on VHS when I was a kid. It was cheap and easy and really helped to make me forget how bad times were. No cable, couldn't afford DVD or Laserdisc... VHS was my gateway to a taste of something other people took for granted. At least when the power was on!

I still have my entire VHS Jackie Chan collection. That really helped me through some hard times. Sure the video isn't perfect and the sound isn't great, and there is just one audio track... but it's magic. Then when they started to release movies with bonus featurettes at the end of the movie, and widescreen... I remember Bullitt had them, Enter the Dragon... when I was like 11 it was absolutely amazing.

There was a LOT of bad tape released by Chinese companies. They were so bad they would get eaten within a couple plays, and the oxide would gum up the heads from a single play. Video magazines were all advising people to check the "Made in ..." stamp and avoid the ones from China. Apparently, it was all recycled from tape Chinese companies had thrown out as too old to be used anymore.

I mostly used Memorex or 3M tapes. I lose tapes every time I move. I figure, another couple moves and I won't have any tapes to worry about. :D

I still have my Zenith VRA424 4-head Hifi, it works like a champ. Bought it for $10 at a Pawnshop back in 2004.

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Originally Posted by Chilly Willy

There was a LOT of bad tape released by Chinese companies. They were so bad they would get eaten within a couple plays, and the oxide would gum up the heads from a single play. Video magazines were all advising people to check the "Made in ..." stamp and avoid the ones from China. Apparently, it was all recycled from tape Chinese companies had thrown out as too old to be used anymore.

I mostly used Memorex or 3M tapes. I lose tapes every time I move. I figure, another couple moves and I won't have any tapes to worry about. :D

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that's why I just torrent movies. None of the hassles of VHS and all the convenience of a digital file. Convert em to MP4 and throw em on your PSP with a video out cable and you're good to go.

I have been using one and only one VCR my whole life. I have used others as experiments and professional use, but for my TV, only one EVER.

An old Panasonic my parents bought brand new and gave to me when I was a little kid. This sucker NEVER failed. Eaten a couple of bad damaged tapes, and only recently needed new belts and idler wheel, but it's never failed.

http://fc00.deviantart.com/fs25/i/20...weredragon.jpg

Hell, it still has the advertising sticker on the top.

Guess I'm the only one that still has VHS as a part of my daily life. My family's got hundreds of VHS tapes it seems, and they're not going anywhere. My brother tape trades online and stuff, copies tapes, and records off of TV still.

Eh, I like VHS. The only time I had tapes break was with a shitty VHS/DVD Combo player. It broke two tapes, one was Darkwing Duck another Super Mario Bros. 3. Luckily we got both on DVD box sets along with a new DVD/VHS combo. Also have a TV with VHS and DVD both built in.

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Originally Posted by evildragon

I have been using one and only one VCR my whole life. I have used others as experiments and professional use, but for my TV, only one EVER.

An old Panasonic my parents bought brand new and gave to me when I was a little kid. This sucker NEVER failed. Eaten a couple of bad damaged tapes, and only recently needed new belts and idler wheel, but it's never failed.

http://fc00.deviantart.com/fs25/i/20...weredragon.jpg

Hell, it still has the advertising sticker on the top.

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Yes, those old Panasonic VCRs were incredibly reliable. I've still got one virtually identical to that one that my brother gave me when he got a newer VCR with more features. I eventually bought a newer VCR with more features myself, but that old Panasonic is still going strong. The newer the VCR, the more often it needs to be replaced, and at shorter intervals as well.

Another great thing about VCRs that old - they ignore MacroVision complelely. :cool:

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Originally Posted by Baloo

Guess I'm the only one that still has VHS as a part of my daily life.

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naa man not at all. i got an old matsui thats still going strong, probably not on a par with panasonic, but it dont seem to degrade tape none. i got a wall of vhs that i go through stages of raiding. and scince vhs is so cheap now, i still buy it from thrift stores. generally star treks n things, actually i think paramount have some fetish for high quality tape as they still look really nice.
The odd one is manga video. Most of those have noticabley degraded but
my copy of ghost in the shell is incredible. i played it many times and it still looks proper sharp. Maybe they used higher quality tape for that movie.
A mate of mine has a major vhs fetish. he got 4 walls of the stuff. He could make a house out of it.

Last summer I bought a refurbished JVC VCR that was manufactured sometime around 2002-2004ish. It's honkin' big yet weighs almost nothing, which should've given away its crapiness. When I tried playing some of my circa-1995 TV recordings on it, it played them oh-so-crappily, and it was a ***** getting the tracking just right. The LG VCR/DVD combo that I had owned months later played them MUCH better.

Later I borrowed an Optimus deck from one of my cousins, so far despite the lack of remote it has played the tapes fine. All signs point to this deck being a rebranded, late '90's Panasonic VCR, is that a good thing? If only I could find a remote to mess with the menu.

So, I'm looking for the best method to pass VHS footage to my PC and/or to DVD. My laptop has a capture card, but I'm having trouble finding an app that'll record things just right (without skipping, dropped frames and tons o' artifacts), and then compress them to a YouTube-friendly size. HELP?

I also have a 90's era Sony VHS deck that has guide+ and all that crap, along with a good tool, jog wheel. I use that jog wheel to death on some tapes to analyze old football tapes and call out on the bad calls some refs made. Even plays tapes backwards. :p

The key to video capture is to not try to compress it (much) while capturing. I normally capture it to plain constant bitrate divx, but at a very high bitrate. Any decent computer can encode TV resolution to constant bitrate divx without dropping frames. The high bitrate keeps the quality high. After you've captured the video, go back and do 2 or 3 pass x264 variable bitrate encoding on it. I use VirtualDub to capture. On a 1.4 GHz AMD K7, I saw one dropped frame in almost two hours when capturing at 704x480 to divx with cbr of 4000 kbps.

I capture to DV files on my stuff then encode to H.264, or MPEG2 (if for a DVD).

These are my specs:

Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP3
Pentium 4 w/Hyper Threading @ 3.2 Ghz
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
256 MB ATi Mobility Radeon X800
Realtek ALC880 Sound
74.5 GB Hard Drive

(Think I'm capable of capturing at high quality with these?)

In the two programs that I tried (AverTV and DScaler), I've attempted to record uncompressed, but the recording chokes after just a couple of seconds. (Only encoder that produced good results with AverTV was this one called "DV Video Encoder", which produced a large file.) I've attempted to use the much-recommended huffyyuv with both and the results were horrible. Dunno what I'm doing wrong: am I configuring the settings too high on the apps, are my specs not capable enough or do I lack RAM?

Do you know which type of Pentium 4 you use? The northwood is not good, but the Prescott is.

Use CPU-Z to find out what core you have. If you have a core I didn't mention, let me know and i'll find out for you. there are newer and older..

Holy shit, you have one of those Panasonic tanks! Those things were absolute beasts, and they last forever.

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Originally Posted by evildragon

Do you know which type of Pentium 4 you use? The northwood is not good, but the Prescott is.

Use CPU-Z to find out what core you have. If you have a core I didn't mention, let me know and i'll find out for you. there are newer and older..

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I checked with EVEREST, it appears to be a Prescott, CPU Stepping E0.


(My Dell Dimension 4400 from late 2001, which I was using up until a couple of months ago, has a 1.6 Ghz P4 "Willamette", tell me, how bad is that one? :) To say I maxed out that poor PC is an understatement)

Willamette was the FIRST Pentium 4 generation. Not an optimized model.

Heh, I figured. I got that Dell in February 2002, and it was a mid-range model BACK THEN.

16 MB ATi Rage 128 Ultra anyone? (I was working with THIS up until a few months ago)

Also, integrated sound and no DVD drive. I'm SERIOUSLY hoping that this hand-me-down laptop I'm working from right now (a CLEVO D900T, a circa-2005 model which is known for mobos which crap out) DOESN'T crap out on me. After getting a taste of what real power is, I can't go back to that Dell.

Try VirtualDub for capturing.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

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Originally Posted by evildragon

Try VirtualDub for capturing.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

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http://www.sega-16.com/forum/images/...O'Shea.jpg


O'Shea: "Say what?" :p

I used VirtualDub a long time ago, but it wasn't for capturing. Don't remember for what it was though......


Also, apart from Windows Movie Maker, any other video editing apps that let me fool around and re-arrange clips, add titles and what not? I hate the encoding part of WMM (very bad with AVI's), other than that I like it just fine.

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Originally Posted by Aarzak

Also, apart from Windows Movie Maker, any other video editing apps that let me fool around and re-arrange clips, add titles and what not? I hate the encoding part of WMM (very bad with AVI's), other than that I like it just fine.

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Video editing and PC don't really go in the same sentence well.

Yeah, so I've heard, but I'm dead broke so I have no other choice!

So WMM is the best bet when it comes to Windows?

Adobe Premier, if it still exists.

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Originally Posted by Aarzak

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/images/...O'Shea.jpg


O'Shea: "Say what?" :p

I used VirtualDub a long time ago, but it wasn't for capturing. Don't remember for what it was though......

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VirtualDub DID capture... it was GREAT for capturing. Just set the source to be a capture device, then set the output to some fast encoding format like I mentioned earlier. I never used anything but VD for capture.

By the way, capturing in DV can take 20 MB/sec, which can result in drop outs as many PCs are lousy about sustained throughput to the hard drive at that high a rate. That's why I capture to high bitrate divx/xvid. Even with a high bitrate, it's FAR less data than a straight DV capture.

Say what? My DV captures are 852x480 16-bit stereo audio and are only 6.9MB/s..

Mbp/s is 57.96

Here's one example.

Click for full size

Then it's clearly doing some kind of compression. Calculate it yourself: 720x480x2x30 = 20,736,000 bytes per second. So I'd have to say that whatever compression it's using is what is causing your dropouts.

Note that the x2 is for yuv data, which is normally y1,u1,y2,v1, encoding 2 pixels in four bytes, with the color at half resolution.

DV is compression. It is 25mbps (for the video). Adding the uncompressed 48khz 16-bit stereo PCM it brings it to about 35mbps or so. I don't know why evilragon is getting 56+mbps (16:9 has nothing to do with it because ALL NTSC DV is 720x480).

DV is a pretty bad compression if you enjoy the color red. Especially solid reds. It destroys them. But it is a good format to capture standard definition video with. It is a good acquisition format due to being intraframe (every frame being discrete unlike flavors of MPEG (ie: DIVX) and that makes for much more solid editing. Just stay away from solid reds, especially in titles or whatnot. Only a very pussified PC would dropout capturing DV. Any PC except maybe a laptop should be able to do that nowadays. I can capture 100Mbps from my Panasonic HVX200 without any problem.

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Originally Posted by Joe Redifer

DV is compression. It is 25mbps (for the video). Adding the uncompressed 48khz 16-bit stereo PCM it brings it to about 35mbps or so. I don't know why evilragon is getting 56+mbps (16:9 has nothing to do with it because ALL NTSC DV is 720x480).

DV is a pretty bad compression if you enjoy the color red. Especially solid reds. It destroys them. But it is a good format to capture standard definition video with. It is a good acquisition format due to being intraframe (every frame being discrete unlike flavors of MPEG (ie: DIVX) and that makes for much more solid editing. Just stay away from solid reds, especially in titles or whatnot. Only a very pussified PC would dropout capturing DV. Any PC except maybe a laptop should be able to do that nowadays. I can capture 100Mbps from my Panasonic HVX200 without any problem.

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I think the datarate on Quicktimes info window is combined for both audio AND video.

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Originally Posted by evildragon

Adobe Premier, if it still exists.

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CS4 is doing notoriously badly on PCs. At least it runs like shit on Vista. In any case Premiere and Final Cut Pro aren't exactly "consumer" software. If you are just putting titles and making vacation photo montages the WMM and virtualdub should do the trick and do most of what you want without getting overly complicated.

Just don't install codecs or WMM will crash every three seconds.

I still use a VCR, primarily for the av output. A new TV is on my list, this one's a bit busted up and old. I have a 100 or so taped tapes, some others, and the occasional buy I watch somewhat regularly

I rarely use it but my old Magnavox Stereo Hi-HI still works. I never have had a problem with it. Back in the day it was awesome. I remember being blown away by the ProLogic in Akira. Now days it almost seem laughable but that was awesome stuff back then. I was lucky to have all that stuff. Does any one here have any idea how hard it is convince your mother on surround sound when she is half deaf? :(

I also used to use it for master tapes when I made demos my 4-track( that's another piece of near dead technology) HIFI sounded damn good.