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Comment by Jnr | Hacker News Reader

How I digitized my family VHS tapes:

* 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).

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> cheap SCART to HDMI convertor

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.

There is the ultimate solution https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode , but that requires modifying your VCR.

The best solution for "normies" is to get a Panasonic DVD player with HDD recording ability. That thing has a circuit which synchronizes all scanrows, i.e. it completely removes all tearing of the image.

Then proceed with something to digitize the analog output from SCART2.

A couple of models with this feature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XW_-16Vo4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaH73rhBHbk

This was helpful, thanks for sharing. Would you have a specific model recommendation if cost is not a concern and the use case is long term archival?

With these Panasonics, you either get the right model numbers, or. Tearing or no tearing.

The bigger difference is the VCR (you need one of those, too) and the capture device.

The capture device is a whole thing. See for instance Technology Connections on YouTube.

Depending on what you then capture with, you may need to attenuate the video signal with a potentiometer if the image is too bright and washed out.

Thanks, that's a wonderful rabbit hole! When I worked at a video capture card company in the nineties, our competitive advantage was using the raw capture from the same video capture chip that everyone used but bypassing it's decoder and doing that instead with custom assembly coded digital signal decoding. It's cool to see the same general approach that is open and even closer to the analog tape!

> I borrowed a good quality VHS player with SCART connector because it sends RGB in separate channels

I'd be surprised at that - normally they'd emit Y/C or at best YUV.

Scart can carry RGB and Composite. And good VHS players do RGB.

Never seen one which converts to RGB, must be rare. And then what do you use to digitize from RGB? Most SCART to HDMI converters use the composite video in the SCART connector.

SCART carries RGB but that only comes from DVD players, computers, and other digital sources. At no point in a VHS player is the signal in RGB form - generally not even in ones with digital "trick play" modes.

It doesn't make any sense to move the Y/C to RGB conversion into the VHS player.

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).

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