I run a video transfer business in the UK. I never use any of these simple USB converter devices, they all produce small video files of limited quality. For most domestic formats I use DV capture equipment, the DV codec looks much better than these compressed files and is much better suited to editing. For miniDV and Digital8, the DV-AVI file format is not only a lossless bit for bit copy of the tape contents, it also retains the original time/date metadata which some software can display. Then for Video8/Hi8, most Digital8 players will output the same video file format from analogue tapes. For other domestic formats, a DVCAM deck or a Canopus AD-VC55 is used to generate it. Typically I additionally generate smaller de-interlaced MPEG4 files as well. For professional formats such as Digital Betacam, SDI video capture equipment can generate huge files for broadcast use. I appreciate that your DVD recorder gave better results than the USB capture device, but there are issues with that route too. MPEG2 files are not very well suited to editing, and to get the highest bitrate you are limited to about an hour on a single layer DVD. Another key component, and the reason you saw that wobble, is requiring a Digital Timebase Corrector (TBC as you have in the Hi8 player). Some high end SVHS players have this built in, and I also use external standalone TBCs on all of my video capture systems.
@@estusflask982 "For miniDV and Digital8, the DV-AVI file format is not only a lossless bit for bit copy of the tape contents" These are digital formats and bit for bit copies are possible.
Some people might be rightly upset about owning one of these to archive their memories. Just remember the first rule of archiving is to archive. If you’ve captured using one these and now safely backed up a digital copy, excellent, it can no longer be completely lost forever. It’s better than no backup at all. If you can manage to archive it later with a better capture device, even better.
THANK YOU! I've been staring down the barrel of a $10,000+ purchase to archive some family tapes. I should just bite the bullet and grab an archive with the stuff I have now.
I think, this is correct. Also understand that all of these things are very much follow the law of diminishing returns. Really a reasonable 6 head vcr, a line tbc dvd recorder, and this card is all you need. ESPECIALLY if your stuff is shot in long play.
@@AnalogSins I have an alt channel that has uploaded a bunch of obscure documentaries. The setup was a high end LG VCR with HDMI and a miserable $10 HDMI capture dongle. The dongle can’t do 1080p60 like it says on the box, but did 576p just fine. The captures are more than good enough. The struggle was syncing audio. It turns out investing in a better capture device gave negligible video improvements and audio syncing still sucked. Diminishing returns indeed, the good quality VCR is the real star of the setup.
also remember that keeping a digital copy is not a backup if you throw away the tapes. the tapes and the digital files have to BOTH be available to be a complete backup.
@@JessicaFEREM, I would imagine that that becomes a pure transfer at that point. Especially if the tape being thrown out is already degrading too much to be backed up more than the once.
But the manufacture date said 2021. It seems haven’t bothered updating the software and probably the hardware in more than a decade, despite still selling them new. For $80…
The software has a copyright date of 2018, you can see it on the splash screen when it is launched... That's not spank new, but it's still quite recent (and of course I mean the date, not the code). They couldn't be bothered to change that logo, though 🤣
I bought one back in 2014 and it looks exactly like this one. They did update the software somewhat recently to add an Arm version for MacOS that didn't exist when I first got my M1 Mac.
I purchased an Elgato Video Capture new two-ish years ago and after watching all my LaserDisc transfers back (they're on my channel if you're curious) I grew to hate that thing more and more. At first I didn't spot all the compression and frame dropping but it's impossible to ignore once you finally notice it. Found a Panasonic DMR-ES30V VCR/DVD recorder at the thrift store last week and from there I rip the DVDs via HandBrake, and it's a night and day difference.
@@namesurname4666 well speaking of this, I use my BMD Intensity Shuttle or Matrox MX02 Mini to record only interlaced format and if I need to de-interlaced it I use Handbrake too.
Quite a lot of the Panasonics have good reputations and an HDMI output so you could connect that into an HDMI capture device. Back in the noughties, after spending £100s on capture cards and video editing software I ended up plugging my camcorder into a Panasonic EX75 DVD recorder and burning discs,
I use a similar method with a Sony HDD/DVD recorder. It has analog inputs and HDMI output. I first record onto the HDD, then i record the HDMI output from the recorder to my HTPC, which has an HDMI input PCIe card and it works fine. Digital to digital video capture is easy. It isn't expensive either. These HDD/DVD combo units are often found on eBay for the same price as the elgato rubbish. I know the brand elgato mostly for their toy products targeted towards children which want to become streamers or simp cash farm girls on sites like twitch. These products are not meant to be good.
Judging by how all the old people that bought these don’t even listen to their doctors anymore; I can guarantee they will care and say you are wrong somehow 😂
I noticed it too, because when I was looking for a capture card I looked at many products and many reviews. The Elgato prices are not justified at all. They are like RAZER - mediocre quality with premium pricing and devoted cult following that will always buy and praise them. Just open your eyes and you'll find better products at a lower price. Or don't - the money is yours at the end of the day, you can spend it on what you like.
I've been holding off on buying any capture device, including this one due to its high cost, and am glad to see you do this deep dive into a clearly inferior product. I'm still at square one.
Sony has a converter that takes in composite and outputs a DV signal over firewire. I had great luck with it. Need a firewire card with a chipset from Texas Instruments though (StarTech sells one)
If you think this is high cost for the video capture and analog to digital conversion hardware, you don't even want to see how much good-quality stuff costs that actually does the job flawlessly and then some.
It'd be awesome if you (or somebody with the time and hardware to do so) did a video comparing the various chips inside these converters, I have a pretty strong feeling there's only truly a handful out there that are branded under many different names
There is some data on the linuxtv wiki but it's not really been kept up to date. Several ones including the elgato, diamond vc500 and I think similar hauppage one as well are based on this conexant polaris design and chip, generic versions also exist. Another design that used to be very popular but I think is discontinued now was based around a chip from Empia. The really cheap ones use some different IC. It's really just generic designs that they put their brand on and barely do any changes to. Even the I-O data GV usb may generic design for all I know though it's based on different hardware, I've seen someone link a generic variant of it but can't remember the name of it - though at least it uses different hardware to other stuff out there (e.g renesas/techwell video chip) that's a fair bit better. The fancier devices from blackmagic, magewell etc typically use video decoders from analog devices instead though even these aren't don't typically set up with capture from videotapes in mind (e.g the blagmagic intensity cards choke even worse on videotapes than most cheap usb dongles...) - analog devices actually make some video decoder ICs like the ADV7842 that come with a built in time base corrector feature if provided with memory but no capture device afaik is using it so we're stuck with having to use devices from the mid 00s and older instead to do this properly. The latest retrotink seem to maybe finally have added some features that could help but don't feel like shelling out a bunch of money for one just for testing it as I don't need it for anything else.
@@analogvideochannel4612 The Empia chip is a bus interface if I recall. The actual ADC is a separate chip in those USB sticks (ex: ATI TV Wonder 600 USB).
you did a great job with the comparisons. people who have never watched a VHS tend to think they all are extremely grainy and low quality because of bad captures.
@@CorruptedDogg that's a really solid point. I can spot those filters from a mile away but I can see how someone who didn't grow up watching VHS tapes can be tricked by them.
it's the 78 rpm record syndrome. everyone thinks that 78 rpm records always sounded awful because nobody can remember when 78 rpm records were new. now it has moved down to VHS, lol.
I use the Elgato to capture old VHS tapes. I find the quality is much improved if you run the signal from the VCR through a DVD recorder first before it goes to the Elgato. You don't need to burn a DVD or anything; it's just there to stabilise the signal. I'm also in a PAL region, so maybe it works better/worse with NTSC sources.
Same here using a Panasonic DVD recorder for stabilizing the VHS signal, i am not using the Elgato, but any capture device will benefit greatly from the recorder pass-trough.
Elgato cannot issue Pal, only accept it. The CX23103 chip converts PAL into NTSC, which is why for me in Hamburg it is 100% electronic waste even with TBC.
I burn the analog output as dvd video and recode in pc. These simple deinterlacers built in usb grabbers destroy details and framerate and are best to avoid. Also PAL.
I remember I was saving for this very one capture card because I kept seeing it everywhere, until I got my Sony DSR-250 camcorder, which also works as a DVCAM vcr, and can also convert analog footage with a built-in TBC, and because it's DVCAM I can just directly capture footage through firewire to my computer and have pristine quality captures.
How does your setup work? Do you record the analog signal on digital tape first? And then play back the digital tape and record on the pc the digital signal? Or is no tape needed? I looked into the manual but it wasn’t clear to me.
@@JohnSmith-iu8cj at first I recorded onto tape and then transferred it, but I soon realized I could just record directly onto the PC when enabling the 'A/V->DV OUT' option in the 'VTR SET' menu
I bought this recently and have spent some 3 weeks digitalizing our old VHSC tapes. My father, who doesn't really care about technology at all, complained that it looked "odd" but acceptable. The purpose was to have our media in a format which will not decay with time, and to that end it does it's job. However, it's only after watching this I realize how our memories have been effectively corrupted from this device. Comparing the digital version with the direct output of our camcorder revealed how truly bad it was. I thought it looked OK but oh boy was I wrong. My parents are happy I could save our memories at all, but there are details which will never be recoverable. Thanks for bringing awareness to the awful quality if the thing. I wouldn't have known otherwise.
It might be a time nightmare but if you still have your tapes, you can buy better equipment and get better captures. That detail isn't necessarily lost forever!
@@SayakaMaizonoo Yes. Always keep the originals. You can stack them away in a box somewhere but nothing will match their quality (as poor as VHS is) due to losses during transfer.
@@cblakemusic My setup is an S-VHS player (Panasonic NV-HS950) with TBC ON. I'm using S-Video output to a Retrotink 5X which scales the image up to 1080p, I leave Deinterlacing on Weave because it's better to do it later. Then from the Retrotink it goes out by HDMI to a Capture card, mine is an Avermedia GC553G2 (Which is probably overkill), and then from there it goes by USB 3.0 to my computer and I capture in AmaRecTV with the Lagarith lossless codec. TLDR: I can't really summarise it in a TH-cam comment. Maybe I could write a more detailed guide elsewhere and link to it, but in summary - S-VHS player with a TBC - S-Video output - Highly recommend a Retrotink 5X or 4K - Decent Capture Card - AmaRecTV recording with a lossless codec
Buy a secondhand DVD recorder and record them direct to DVD±R media in 'HQ' mode. Make sure the DVD recorder comes with its remote control. Decent ones come from Philips, Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer and LiteOn. You can then play the recordings in a decent Blu-ray player on a TV or rip the discs to a computer for file playback.
This video actually stopped me from making a big mistake for exactly the project I'm about to undertake, exactly the tech reasons you mention in the vid. Kevin, it's happening everywhere now with 'honest reviews' being penalized or even threats made - speaking your mind, forget it, a thing of the past. I weep for the future...
BRAVO! VWestlife for posting this video about the suspect quality I've noticed about those VHS to digital capture apps/devices; as years ago I spent dollars on a couple of them, and after noticing the lackluster quality results of those capture apps versus the process of 'VHS to DVD-R recording to digital ripping,' I've stayed with the 'DVD-R to digital ripping.' Thanks, VWestlife, for confirming my impressions about the inferior video transfer quality of those widely marketed VHS to digital capture devices/apps.
They are super over-priced! They once were pretty much the only company to go to when you wanted to video capture or stream in real time, because their products had very small lag. That's why they are highly looked after by gamers. So, they became a "gaming" company first and foremost and as such prices are through the roof. I recently bought a video capture card by NZXT which supports capturing in 4K, 60 FPS and 0 lag pass-through for 4K, 120FPS with HDR10 and it costs half the price of the same spec product from Elgato. Not only that, the NZXT has a bit more features so it's even a better option than the Elgato. Elgato are relying mainly on their well known name rather than the actual quality and features of their products, but if more companies enter this market, maybe the prices will go down and the quality may actually go up.
I use an AJA Kona LHE for all types of analog capture. It can capture in uncompressed 10-bit format and in many other formats. I also use an HD Storm and a DV Storm. The key is to use formats that are true video formats, maintaining interlacing in PAL 50i and NTSC 60i video formats, so as to have a digital file that can be played back on a CRT monitor while preserving the quality of the analog image. Later, appropriate deinterlacing can be performed, or not performed at all on video signals that contain, for example, film footage, which in PAL format are usually progressive (meaning the two fields belong to the same frame but each contains half of the total lines of the PAL system with different information). These capture cards are not very expensive; the only issue is getting them to work using specific computers.
I went down this rabbit hole a while back and ended up building a PC to run Windows XP with an old ATI capture card. Barely cost more than buying an Elgato since I had most of the components laying around already. I'm very glad I went this route. There is quite a learning curve, not recommended for the average person, but the end result is well worth the time and effort. It's a shame that so many people are digitizing their priceless tapes without any regard for the capture quality.
I desperately need to digitise some old Hi8 cassette tapes, I only want the absolute best quality but understand almost none of this stuff, what would you recommend I get?
@@Mr.Goodkat That's a hard question to answer. There are so many different options, many of them requiring old used components that may be difficult to acquire, and I'm still a beginner myself with no experience with Hi8. My suggestion is to join the digitalfaq and videohelp forums and ask there. Lots of helpful folks with tons of experience. That's how I learned what I needed to get started capturing VHS. Best of luck to you.
SCART is a genius solution for an easy to use universal connector. It can carry Composite, S-Video, Component or RGB. Together with stereo(maybe more) audio and also has extra pins for sending small amounts of data between devices or signalling standby status. It also allows chaining devices and connecting all of them into one single input on the TV.(example: a DTV box chained with a DVD or some kind of media source connected to a hi-fi audio amplifier which passes all the signals through itself into the TV for the picture, all just one connector, no mess of tons of unlabeled RCA cables that get all tangled.) The chaining feature is the main reason most devices with SCART have two SCART connectors. One carries the output of the device. The other is an input for the signal from another device. The input gets added to the output connector. No external connectors needed either.
4:28 I'm willing to bet that the TH-cam upload button hasn't worked for several years, due to TH-cam occasionally changing their APIs and breaking older software that uses them :)
Hello. Thank you very much for a very solid chunk of knowledge about ripping analog media to digital - I was just finding my way in, not necessarily to archive old tapes, but rather to purposefully record stuff just for that analog vibe and it's quirkiness and artifacts. I was skeptic about Elgato from very beginning, so thank you very much for confirming my suspicion. But most of all, thank you for an epilepsy warning. As a person suffering from seizures on regular basis, I appreciate your concern. You're a real MVP.
The problem is the current generation of I.T people didn't grow up in the era of standard definition interlaced video and don't really know much about it. To be fair it's pretty esoteric stuff and took me years to understand how it works. Interlaced, progressive, field cadences, inverse telecine, double rate deinterlacing, Rec601 colours, nonsquare pixels, 704/720 width discrepancy for analogue/digital. It's kind of a nightmare to be frank. Even the big online streaming services don't know how to properly deinterlace and/or detelecine older TV shows. As a random example NBC's streaming service have Alfred Hitchcock Presents but they've just replaced every second field with a copy of the first field, rendering it as effectively 240p24 inside a 480p30 container with a 1:1:1:2 cadence (1 repeat frame every 5 frames...stuttery). This they then upscaled to 1080p30 and called it a day. They have no clue what 30i is or anything about field cadences. Another another random example, in the video I can see the Elgato unnecessarily downscales it horizontally to 640x480 because they don't know anything about nonsquare pixel formats. If they wanted 4:3 square pixels while preserving all resolution they would have scaled it to 704x528, or alternatively, left it as native 704x480 and flagged the metadata in the mp4 file as having an aspect ratio of 4:3 so the media player scales it to 4:3 at playback. If they didn't do that then I'm pretty confident they didn't flag the colour matrix and gamut as 601 either and the skin tones are almost certainly more orange than they should be, unless your media player is smart and guesses correctly based on the vertical resolution and/or framerate (I use MadVR and that has very good guessing logic, for example it sees vertical height < 576 therefore not PAL, and 24/30fps therefore definitely not PAL, therefore probably NTSC, therefore assume 601 matrix and SMPTE-C primaries).
For NTSC video there were two types of resolution I just figured last December. One is the older NTSC TV broadcast 720x486 while the other was the typical 720x480 for NTSC DV, DVD, LD, and VHS.
@@卡拉永遠OK唱不完 Yeah and there's also 704x480 for analogue and 720x480 for digital. Both are supposed to be 4:3 but they're not always treated that way for example if you see 8 pixel thick black bars down the sides then it means they assumed the analogue source was 2.2% narrower than 4:3, which may or may not be a correct assumption. A lot of third party Nintendo Gamecube and Wii games are horizontally squished by around 10% due to game devs thinking 480p is 640x480 and just pillarboxing the game's internal framebuffer directly inside the 720x480 (NTSC) output buffer not realising NTSC pixels are nonsquare.
The Elgato software actually does have a "preserve source format" option which gives you 720x480 video flagged as 4:3, but it also leaves it interlaced, resulting in _extremely bad_ compression artifacts because the interlacing completely overwhelms the 1.5 Mbps H.264 codec they're using and totally destroys the video quality as soon as there is any movement!
@@vwestlife Interesting, if I had to guess what's happening based on your description I'd say the software is perhaps neglecting to tell the encoder -- probably ffmpeg/libav -- that the source is interlaced. For interlaced encodings to work it needs to encode each field separately as if each field is a separate image, otherwise the field structure will be corrupted in compression artefacts.
@@vwestlife If the Elgato encoded it correctly in interlaced format that would not be so bad, TV/Players then can properly de-interlace the video. But with the unstable VHS signal and noise the bitrate is much too low for any bit of decent quality.
That Sony DVD recorder does such a good job, even at MPEG-2 compression. It may take an extra step to put it on your computer but at least you end up with a backup physical, non-volatile copy
@@stevethepocket Yes. I went through and started archiving all my burned stuff recently and there were a lot of failures. Nothing precious, fortunately but definitely concerning.
@@interstat2222 I've seen DVD movies where scenes shot in dimly lit areas have visible banding from the compression artifacts; those wouldn't be present on a tape.
@@stevethepocket On commercial DVDs, that could've been avoided by the producers in most cases by using a higher bitrate encoding method, although a lot of pixellation issues on a DVD were never visible (on SD/HD-Ready CRT or Plasma TVs, or smaller LCDs, as were around at the time). Good TVs/Blu-ray players are still pretty good at showing DVDs, provided you don't sit too close. VHS copies well to DVD with standalone recorders in HQ or SP DVD mode. I used to encode DVDs professionally in the '00s (for commercial DVD releases) and before that worked with VHS duplication.
the unfortunate thing is a lot of people actually LIKE the way this capture looks. they actively want a worse capture because they want their video to look old if anything they'd look at the sony dvd recording as worse cuz it's too good
I used a few different routes for my transfers - 1. Hi8 played on a Sony digital 8 player via firewall to a Mac, 2. MiniDV from the camera via FireWire, 3. VHS tapes to a Sony HD/DVD recorder hard disc then to DVD and ripped with Handbrake. The best advice I can give is DON’T DELAY. Your tapes are deteriorating and that decay will dominate any quality issues.
Yes so true, not wait digitizing your valuable memories! It is not so much the tapes itself but specially the (working!) playback equipment is becoming more and more scarce.
Hi 8 in a D8 player via FireWire is about as good as it gets and dead easy too… except maybe trying a pro deck… but given the consumer purpose of the Hi8, not sure a pro deck would help.
I know we're not naming names, but I'm pretty sure the channel you're talking about is the one that convinced me to buy one of these in the first place. Knowing that these were used in a professional setting was enough to convince me of their quality. Sucks to be the sucker I guess
For VHS capture, I still use a Canopus AVDC-100 I bought 19 years ago. Results are pretty good. I keep an old FireWire card installed in one of my PCs for such use. Software is WinDV 1.2.3 (free) feeding the Vegas NLE. I don't need to capture old video formats often, but when I do, the solution I used in 2005 still works today. Well, how 'bout that
2 Thank-Yous: 1) Thanks for the flashing lights warning. As a new epilepsy patient, I actually need to be aware of those. And 2) Thanks for doing this work. I'm not currently upconverting or transferring old videos, but I've done conversions in the past, and this will save people a lot of trial-and-error time, so this is a huge gift for fellow video fans/nerds!
By your surprise it might be the case you've never seen it demonstrated. If so, note that a dedicated video on that device came up very recently on the channel, just weeks ago.
@@hyperturbotechnomike At the time nobody wanted USB media recording in that way and the format it encodes the video in (as per the DVD spec) would've been incompatible with the very few devices that could play USB media. It's not Sony's fault, it was designed for what was a different era.
This particular Elgato device always struck me as a device they should've stopped selling years ago but for some reason keep stock of it despite knowing that its not part of their priority devices, and likely hasn't been for a good number of years by now. Its a shame, because their 'Game Capture' lineup of capture cards are often excellent devices (albeit sadly overpriced in most scenarios, when you consider that devices from the likes of EVGA and NZXT can deliver the same performance at a cheaper price), but it seems like that's where their priorities are because its where they make all the large sum of their profits nowadays. Those who are looking for a more simple straightforward recording device (that keeps focus on these older connectors like Composite, S-Video, SCART, etc.) deserve something better, and this particular Video Capture device just doesn't cut it anymore. Especially when you compared it to that Sony DVD recorder (the quality on that looked fantastic!).
Dude you are quite the guardian angel here. i was just now looking for a capture device and was thinking elgato was the way to go and no way i need dvd recorder in my life... Turns out i do! Thanks a bunch for this. Also... I must admit i am quite plesed with "having to get" a DVD-R ;)
That came out in true stereo! the right and left channels were very close. the right channel was echoed a bit to center, but that is what 4 track does to a stereo mix!
In late 2016, I bought one of these, and it was the worst decision i could've made. I didn't have a time-base corrector like I do now so whenever a tape is having tracking problems, the video goes blank with white dot-crawling. Audio would occasionally skip if you have even a blip of another application taking up a little more resources than usual. Video and audio would desync really easily, which means capturing an entire 6 hour tape isn't feasible. I would only get to transfer a tape in chunks of 30-50 minutes. They may have good HD capture devices, but I think they should focus all their energy into that instead of a really crappy SD device. Also that response email is so cringey to read, lol. They need to discontinue this damn thing.
None of these USB sticks have inbuilt TBCs. They all need a stable, clean video source. It's not the Elgato's fault your tape is bad enough to require a TBC. I'll bet if you used the Elgato now with your TBC you'd get a good stable picture. @VWestlife obviously hasn't connected the dots between the Sony DVD Recorder and the quality; had he put the DVD recorder in the workflow as a TBC, he'd have a good, stable Elgato capture.
I use the Diamond VC-500. In my opinion it's great, but you have to use it correctly. You want to run everything through at least a Line-TBC like you find on older Pro-sumer S-VHS VCRs or many (pretty cheap) panasonic DVD recorders. And you need to capture in a lossless format with software that allows it. Personally I prefer AmaRecTV.
"Ride only on designated trails" ... which peeps around here would do that, rather than destroying everything. Aaaaaanyway! Ye, the difference is visible :D
Yeah, he talks about - omg The Horror! - having to ride a horse instead of an ATV if he doesn’t stick to the designated trail. To me it sounds like the best reason ever to go off the designated trail, not to mention the best method. Horses often don’t have to stick to the trail. I never did when I was young and riding my horse. Nowadays I guess it’d be a lot safer than it was then to wander off trail riding a horse, since you’d have your phone and its GPS guidance. When I had a horse, you had to navigate by the sun, or if it was cloudy you’d use a compass. I guess an ATV is a good alternative for less fortunate people who don’t know how to ride a horse.
I still have ADAPTEC AVC-2010 Video PCI Kit VideOh! from year 2000 something, works on Win XP only. The results were pretty good. Captures MPEG2 for DVD and MPEG1 for VCD. I also have Pioneer DVD recorder and very good and expensive (back in a days) ADS PYRO Av-Link from 2004 which converts DV to video and video to DV. So I'm pretty much covered.
Over the years, I’ve seen these praised time and time again as the best quality budget capture device but I honestly questioned those claims, as it’s difficult to accurately judge something’s quality without testing it yourself. I’ve seen my fair share of video capture device reviews that gave glowing accolades, only to see the test footage and wonder if the source footage looked that bad to begin with, or if the methods and settings used along the way caused that, so I really wanted to get one and judge it myself. The price was always what kept me from taking the plunge; after having seen this video, I’m glad I didn’t.
I've seen the videos of that particular "professional" services. I got really shocked when he treated all the media like crap, and had 0 inventory management. It might be a step up above legacybox, but still... I hope the people who send their old media to get converted with them thinks it twice! I even think their "un-mold" machine is really crude, and their skills to "cut the tape" where it might be mangled was completely unacceptable.
They can be cringeworthy to watch. Particularly the tape splicing! 😮 Just goes to show how terrible legacybox is. Analog to digital transfer workflows don't scale very well. Its hard to maintain any sort of quality once you go above a certain volume.
@@NJRoadfan I think you're right, it's going to wear down your equipment and you'd need to have a lot of maintenence on them. Preventive maintenance on so many analog and mechanical vintage devices would be a lot of burden to begin with, but imagine having to deal with them breaking? It's hard enough and takes time even for trained people. Not only that, but also sum the fact that spare parts are close to non-existant. If I were living off that, yeah I can take time to fix the stuff for myself, and even create replacement parts, but I don't see them doing that. So, as a result, the media conversion services they offer are just plain bad. Not want to bash this guy in particular, but legacybox is far worse.
I’ve given up with all these converters! A few months ago I went ahead and bought some BlackMagic recording equipment, and I’ve never looked back! I use component from my VCR to an analogue to SDI converter, then a Video Capture 3G from black magic also to record to the Media Express recording software. The analogue to SDI converter can detect what resolution and frame rate the video is playing back at, and will send data back to the PC running, Media Express, and it will automatically adjust the video settings as necessary.
I’ve been transferring videotapes to digital for quite a while now for extended family and people around my local area, and luckily I’ve always been aware of the limitations and poor quality of these cheap converters with all the same chips from China, even before I started this little freelance operation. For VHS transfers it starts from my prosumer spec Sony SLV-R1000 VCR, passes through my AV Toolbox AVT-8710 external Time Base Corrector, and then arrives to my Retrotink 5X Pro via S-Video. The Retrotink then takes that clean analog separate chrome and lume video feed that’s now free of any timebase errors, de-interlaces it via FPGA Motion Adaptive, then digitizes and upscales it to 1080p using bicubic interpolation as I’ve set, and finally sends that to my Elgato HD60X for recording and encoding in OBS via HDMI 2.0. Now I know many purists would be against the upscaling, but to be honest it’s always come out great and has been what everyone I’ve converted for has always preferred.
Thank you so much for the review. I thought their products are on a bit higher standard, but I was wrong. (I've never used their product though.) My method for VHS digitizing is to use my DV camcorder (mine has analog input) and use it as AV converter unit. DV camcorder is connected to Mac via FireWire. I use QuickTime.
I run a local digitization service and I agree. The elgato is what I got started on but I found it frustrating to use for these reasons. I believe why the pro services use it is because the software is one click, stops by itself, and allows them to fulfill bulk orders quickly. For the price, I’ve found that the IO-Data capture card works great. It passes through the direct signal so you can apply whatever interlacing algorithm on the footage. These days, though I’m using black magic stuff…
The elgato is not compatible with 240p sources like the NES. It tries to deinterlace the image as if it were 240i. This causes straight vertical lines to be jagged and text to be hard to read The similarly priced Japanese capture dongle from IO data also has the same problem, as do the cheap dongles, as do the rca to hdmi adapters. Most of the few new tvs with rca also have this problem. I bought a Chinese RetroTink 2x knockoff "retro scaler" that specifically promises 240p compatibility, yet it still has the exact same problem (plus several other problems) Turns out it's pretty hard to find a reasonable way to capture Nintendo footage from retro hardware, right now. But what's gross about the elgato being incompatible, is that Elgato is the first console capture card brand that retro gamers know about. I'm not sure why. Maybe their PCI cards used to be good?
Nice analysis. In the past, i have used a PCI digital tv card which also has analog input. I believe its also a connexant chip. I captured it to lossless HuffYUV using menvoder or ffmpeg. From there it can be deinterlaced, cleaned up (to an extent) and encoded to the bitrate of your choosing. I think it looks ok but is probably missing the TBC stage in the DVD device you demonstrated.
Aaaaaand thats why i use dvd recorders. I still use one routinely to record live tv too. I have an SVHS deck with a TBC and hook it to the recorder using SCART and svideo. Sure ripping the disc to the pc is an extra step but I frequently just don't rip! I just keep the DVD.
I was stunned by that price tag. $88??! I paid $20 for this near-identical unit a decade ago. It never left the box since I had a Dazzle that did just fine, and was trying to move to HDMI capture anyway. Now working on a retro television project that will require capturing and transcoding tapes soon, it's going to be fun having a critical eye on my and others' VHS rips now.
I'm so glad you made this video, as I was stuck between purchasing two transfer devices a couple of years back. The Elgato and a ClearClick HD Video Capture Box Ultimate. I sprung for the ClearClick. And it looks like that was a wise choice. I've been very happy with it thus far. Might be a device you would like to review at some point. Great video as always!
Recently saw this on a forum, a message from Elgato re the "low" bitrate for capture, which apparently can be increased: "The value used by the Elgato Video Capture software is the default that is useful in most situations. That said, it can be changed by doing the following: 1) Quit the Video Capture software if it's running, via the tray icon. 2) Start File Explorer and enter the following path in the address bar: %appdata%\Elgato\VideoCapture 3) Edit the Settings.xml file with Windows Notepad or other text editing software. 4) Replace .075 with a higher value, up to 3.5 maximum. 5) Save the Settings.xml file. 6) Relaunch the Video Capture software. Please note the recording file sizes will be larger after doing this."
The only somewhat decent usb capture dongle of these you can get nowadays afaik is the I-O data GV-USB 2 - though even that one isn't optimal but it's much better than the ones based on the conexant chip and the cheap easycap things. Also idk if the bundled software is any good, most of these bundled apps are crap like the one that comes with the elgato thing, using crappy codecs with low bitrate, deinterlacing to 25/29.97p instead of 50/59.94p etc. I wish one of these companies actually put in the effort and made a capture card with a decent video decoder with a tbc (like e.g a ADV7842) in it that could handle video directly from a vcr in it but no one are - not even fancy ones from like blackmagic do... A lot of the standalone recorders that have come out more recently seem to suffer from the same problems, using crappy video decoder ics and crappy codecs, resulting in similarly wobbly video, that's cropped to hell with low bitrate and deinterlaced badly to half framerate... My general suggestion is to use one of the better usb dongles or a fancier capture device, ditch the bundled app and use virtualdub, amarectv or ffmpeg (unless you have a blackmagic or aja or something fancy), and use certain models of dvd recorders as a "tbc" for stabilizing the video. Just passing the video through them and recording the output directly rather than actually recording to DVD. Panasonic ones from 2005/2006 sans the DMR-ES20 (or any newer Pannasonic outside of north america), pioneer from 2005 or newer, or sony from 2007 or newer work well for this.
Yes, I've been using the Hauppauge USB Live-2 connected through a Panasonic ES-10 and AmarecTV to capture losslessly using the Lagarith codec and got much better results than some of the other USB dongles for sure.
I used to use virtualdub and audacity to do my old VHS rips in 2009 but not since! I need easier less time consuming ways to get that quality today! I did a LOT of rare AF VHS tapes and put onto the internet in the argh argh realm (nudge nudge wink wink!) But that was the best I could do back then, still got that capture card but it is so dated today, I got the Japanese language I-O Data one now, not used it yet, got a whole LOAD of VHS tapes to rip that I want to start another YT channel with its content. Dude these tapes are not golden they are beyond that they are PALADIUM from what I have watched!!! It is like a tv series!!!
Fantastic and detailed review. A extreme reminder about being 'buyer beware'. Sadly there are too many stories of items on Amazon that are dressed up rubbish set at a rip off price.
The El Gato might be more useful if it were possible to disable the built-in de-interlacer. I currently use a Digital8 Handycam w/ TBC enable, and use Selur Hybrid's deinterlace filter on the "VerySlow" preset. Clicking the "Bob" checkbox yield an output output of 60fps for those who might prefer it. P.S.- In any case, I appreciate your detailed overview and comparison.
I had the same exact experience you did with this product when digitizing my VHS collection. Tapes that were more worn out were very jittery. Using a Macro Vision removal box in line helped some. The best solution was using an older PCI WinTV capture card in an XP workstation running an ancient version of Pinnacle Studio that came bundled with a Dazzle 150 box I bought years ago. I used the DV codec for capture in Pinnacle and then used Handbrake on a modern PC to re-encode the video to H.265 for smaller file sizes. The end result is very close to playback on a VCR. However, the above did not go so well with my Laserdiscs. The outcome seemed like the resolution was very reduced. I'm going to give the Elgato with OBS another try with my Laserdiscs as they shouldn't have any jitters on capture like tape does. I'm finding that video capture is more of an art then a science. I have been digitizing all my media onto my Plex server and so I have a good back up of my media as tapes ware out and DVDs as well as Laserdiscs can suffer from bit rot. I never bought into streaming services and kept decades worth of media.
The other reason why those devices are crap for retro video game capture is because they capture at 30FPS, so when there's sprite flickering on screen it will either come out as not flickering at all or the sprites will disappear.
You’d really have to do a comparison using typical amateur camcorder footage to get a sense of whether the Elgato is sufficient for that type of material. Video transfer services are mostly dealing with that type of stuff, not Hollywood movies.
Back in the day, when the first tabletop VHS/DVD burner combos came out. I converted all of my cassettes to DVD. It took about a year of doing it, but having them as DVDs and being able to rip as digital files made it worthwhile. I tried capture cards, but would get issues with humming noises and artifacts. I miss the Lite-ON VHS DVD combos.
Thank you for your review I just found your channel because I was going to purchase Sony NSC-GC1 and review convinced me not too loll and decided to check your channel! Amazing content unfortunately I have elgato I purchased years back and I did noticed it loook very off but never thought of using dvd to record vhs tapes! So thanks for that tip!!!
Interesting video! I have had really good luck with the Clear Click brand standalone units that input HDMI, S-Video, composite, etc. and record directly to SD card or USB.
12:53 I guessed it since the very beginning of the video. They answered worse than a primordial A.I. system. I do agree with your conclusions. I hope you were able to throw it back on they hands and have your 90 bucks back in your pocket.
Thanks for making this. I was considering trying an Elgato device but after watching this, I will steer clear! I'm getting good results with my Magnavox DVD recorder I got at the thrift store for $10, In the future, could you possibly do a video about different TBC options? A lot of them seem prohibitively expensive for the amateur hobbyist.
for DVD capture device, just use something like handbrake to rip but if you're talking about DVD recorder then watch his video regarding the Sony VRD-MC5.
I have seen the YT channel by the same "pro" VHS conversion guy as you included a clip from, and despite his best intention and seeming like a nice guy, his toolchain makes me cringe. I wonder how many of his customers threw out their priced family memories because he claimed their tapes were in too bad a shape to be recoverable. He should never claim that with his bottom tier capture hardware and no TBC. Poor customers.
This Video couldn't have come at a better time! I was browsing for an analog capture device a couple days ago, and since I've owned two elgato HDMI Capture devices, I was thinking that this would work out great too. But now I'm glad I didn't. I didn't purchase one at the time because of the price, but now I'm won't because of the quality issues I'll be stuck with. I'll be removing it from the online cart. Thank you for the video.
For PAL, to this day, the absolute best method I have discovered to transfer analog video to digital, is with a VCR (VHS player), connected to a DVD recorder with TBC (Time Base Corrector) through S-video or regular AV, and then connect that (S-video or regular AV) to a DV camera with video passthrough and the DV camera connected to a PC or Mac via firewire, and record the damn thing in DV. Then you NEED to deinterlace the footage with QTGMC. I know it's a long list, but this recipe is hard to beat, both when it comes to quality, file size and effectiveness.
so i can use a dv camera as a captue card 😲, i usually just recorded with dvd recorder itself with an hard drive but i understand why would do you do that (no mpeg2)
@@namesurname4666 If you have a DV camera (or a Sony Digital 8) with an S-Video (or AV) that is both an input and output, you can send the analog signal from the VHS player into the camera, and then the camera converts it do a digital DV signal, and you can then connect the camera to a PC or MAC with firewire and record that DV signal as DV footage. BUT, you have to use a DVD recorder (With TBC) between the VHS player and the camera. I would strongly recommend this method for PAL video, not so much NTSC.
If I remember correctly there is an Open Source project that captures analog video in RAW, it doesn't do any conversion or adjustments on the device itself and you have to process the raw captured data later with a Software. That way you can do multiple adjustments, but I forget the name of the project sadly...
Will soon be tested in Hamburg (PAL) with Pioneer DVR-560H via HDMI (4:4:4) to the Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder HD. Blackmagic support was kind enough not to reveal straight away that Windows 7 doesn't work. Windows 10 (🙄) should work.
The Pioneer deck I had was extremely durable for over 15 years, recording thousands of hours of materials for various projects. Video quality was first-rate; and the finalization process for the disc was quick, too. It finally malfunctioned, probably due to a faulty capacitor or resistor.
Watching this convinced me to keep using my HDMI converter + capture card for my video captures. Colors look better, works fine with OBS and I can use the capture card with my gaming consoles too. I've seen this capture card get recommended over and over on Reddit and the quality doesn't seem to reflect the price tag.
@5:56 - HA! That's my family's old Quasar, that i still have! I also still have the original big ole camera. Bulky is an understatement for that setup lol
Another good capture option (if your PC has an IEE-1394 port) is the Sony DVMC-AV2 Media converter, it takes composite or S-Video and converts it into a DV stream, it will also convert a DV stream to S-Vido and composite with stereo audio. We used them in college on editing systems to fight Panasonic's brain damaged DVCPRO decks, which did not include a digital video I/O option.
I've been using the analog inputs on my WinTV ATSC tuner card for years with the WinTV software. It works great. Wouldn't mind to hear your technical breakdown on one of those.
There are flat screens with VGA for over 20 years now. VGA is fully analog. A flat screen "converts" this analog signals to a perfect digital image before it gets displayed. Why isn't this quality possible with this capture devices? freakin sucks.
One reason is that VGA is pretty much as perfect a component video signal as one could hope for: separate signal lines for each color (and no color space conversion), as well as individual vertical and horizontal sync signal lines. And later, with a digital signal for identification, which can tell the display the desired mode. This makes synchronizing to it comparatively simple, aided by the fact that because it’s a computer-generated image, there are discrete pixels whose boundaries can be identified to fine-tune the timing. (As opposed to the truly analog signal within a TV line.) And of course VGA is practically never interlaced. I’m not excusing the Elgato doodad’s poor performance, just explaining why syncing to VGA is quite a bit easier, despite its higher resolutions.
It's kind of sad that my DVD recorder from 2007 converts VHS to digital at a much better quality than any direct VHS-to-PC option I've ever tried, including this Elgato device. (Of course, the DVD recorder option means I need to rip the disc again using Handbrake, but the resulting video quality is well worth it.)
I got one of those EzCap USB devices back in 2013 to capture two commercially bought VHS tapes, which my existing capture card could not handle, but I made sure to get a version that was not a cutdown clone, an EzCAP116 (EzCAP DC60+). I needed one that could capture a specific NTSC variant that would not capture with every other card or device I had tried. It did a good job and the included software capture at to MPEG2 at 720 x 480, 4:3 ratio, 8-bit depth colour, Chroma 4:2:0, YUV, interlaced and max bitrate 7 500 kb/s. The audio was done at 224 kb/s / 48 kHz. My favourite capture device I have owned is the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150MCE, which gives smooth, flawless captures and good audio quality in MPEG2 direct on the card. I use Womble - MPEG-VCR to edit the files, in much the same way as Virtual Dub does, e.g. it does not throw the video and audio out of sync when splicing and joining files, and its blazing fast to edit.
In elgato software you need to CALIBRATE the picture control, so i set the Brightness to 30 and contrast to -11 using the 240p test suite and S-Video using a PlayStation 1 connected to my VCR its a Super VHS Panasonic NV-FS200 with TBC, adjusting the video settings in preferences gave a great picture quality to my VHS captures. if you go to this path for Windows Users: %appdata%\Elgato\VideoCapture you can edit the Settings.xml and change bitrate and resolutions to what ever you want, force YUY2, Quality from 1 to 10, cropping and other stuff. If you want a good product, just get a Retrotink4K and an HDMI video capture like i did, that is in another level! and it even has TBC biult-in (emulated)
I bought the same brand of Easy Cap digital converter from eBay. I was having trouble with it detecting the video feed from my VCR. It turned out the extension USB cable was defective. I didn’t have anymore problems with it afterwards.
Another thing noticable about the DVD recorder vs the Elgato is the framerate. The DVD recorder appears to be capturing the 60 interlaced fields per second as 60 progressive frames per second, unless you were doing that conversion while resizing the video for TH-cam. In any case, you're getting the original motion of the VHS instead of having the interlaced fields merged into a 30 FPS video, creating the aforementioned motion blurring in fast action scenes. I've seen a lot of analog to digital converted videos, some of official TV broadcasts that do this 60i to 30p conversion and even if they do a good job at de-interlacing the video, the loss of motion is noticeable if you remember the original broadcast or even have a recording of it yourself!
The bundled software generates 640x480 @ 30p, this is a known fact. But when used with third-party software it can AFAIK generate proper 720x480 @ 30i, so just don't use the bundled junk. Regarding the wobbling, it does not have built-in TBC, so this is normal. Your DVD recorder does have a TBC of sorts. The VC500 would be an ok dongle if it did not shift levels sporadically; something with its AGC that makes it change levels from time to time, and this makes it unusable. Price-wise, yeah, the Elgato is overpriced. The I-O Data USB2 is probably the best bang for the buck in the $50 range.
Yes, it would be interesting to see what this Elgato device really can do with better software (e.g. Virtualdub/AmaRecTV) and a stabilized video source.
What software would you recommend? I have access to both Mac and Linux in my house, but can pinch one of my kids' Windows laptops if absolutely necessary.
VHS and other old formats can look excellent! I always use a CRT to watch something like a VHS movie and when it’s on a huge CRT, it has that feeling of a high end setup from back when they were new. Especially with a good VCR, it can look just like a DVD on those TVs. I’ve got a stand-alone digitizer that can save to SD cards or USB, and it looks better than this. No interlacing at all, which helps a lot. It works well, but the ultimate setup for me would be to use an old Mac and have some Sony Handycams and other similar equipment, FireWire all the way! Combined with an older version of Final Cut and the final DV video will be excellent. I’d rather use a PowerPC Mac with old Final Cut than the software they provided for this, at least those were made for the Pro market. Great video!
I got very lucky with my VHS video capture. I found a Samsung HDMI VCR/DVD player at Goodwill for maybe $12. Then I bought a $20 Vivitar (I think) HDMI capture card at Walmart. I’m not sure if it’s as good or bad as other capture cards, but I’ve been beyond thankful for it, as I’ve saved several home movies.
I recently ordered a composite to HDMI device and an HDMI capture device. Theoretically this should produce terrible quality as the signal will be de-interlaced and at 60 fps. However, the result is surprisingly good! I capture using virtualdub at 720x576 (PAL resolution)
These devices can't handle non-standard signals like that Tandy you showed. That system relies on several things that can only feasibly be done on a CRT. Many DVD recorders (and VHS decks!) are equipped to handle non-standard signals and stabilize them. Heck, I recorded some Sega Genesis video with another device and I couldn't get it to be stable until I passed it through a VHS deck. (The video is in my channel.) And budget capture devices will only get worse since most TVs nowadays only support the very bare minimum to get old composite video displayed on the screen. ElGato just coasts by on goodwill from their earlier products. The quality isn't that great and hasn't been for a long time. Edit: I'm not sure if this is the case these days, but for years, this was the only "decent" video capture solution available for Mac users, IIRC. Easy to install and get capturing. Of course, Mac users also had the benefit of built-in Firewire when this came out so I'm not sure what the point of this was.
@@mistermariio Yes, but it's working solution. It was not deteriorating anything. I didn't find myself good plug and play solution and I searched it long time.
Thanks for this video. I was really close to buying one of these a while back and I remember seeing your video come up on my feed a few days afterwards. I thought "Elgato can't be that bad, can it?" and I ignored the video at first. Soon afterwards I decided against buying the Elgato because of how expensive it was (It was around £90 brand new and £60 used). Now that I knew I didn't want one, I watched this video to see if they were actually as bad as you said they were and thank god I did because jesus it looks terrible.
10:52 - Prompting for the Jim Leonard link for others; I found it, but I'm subscribed to his channel (I've met him in person, as well) and knew where to look.
If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Most of this eras cameras do have analogue tape but also a FireWire interface to access the media via PC. Instead of encoding / decoding the signal multiple times and losing quality, i would prefer to use the camera built in converter and save the stream "as it is" on the PC.
I had my eyes on this thing when i started digitizing old tapes but I found the JIm Leonard tutorial and got the Startech device. Great stuff. What's even better (if you want to spend the money and/or already own the hardware) is a good HDMI solution. I happen to own a RetroTink 5x Pro for gaming and the current software version is great for capturing video. Time base correction, motion adaptive deinterlacing for 50/60 fps stuff and 2:2/3:2 detelecine for everything shot on film. It's really awesome
Excellent excellent video!!! It's astonishing that one of the "professional" guys you're talking about...with all that equipment...has any business at all, very very strange attitude to his customers that are paying his wages for low quality transfers. Just how it is these days, I suppose...
Good video and advice. I've been noticing this in a lot of different electronic devices, it's something that clashes between established brand names and no name stuff all the time. The way I imagine without internal knowledge that this went, which is also the case for lots of different types of electronics, goes like this. At the time it was designed and created, Elgato probably had very good components there in comparison to the competition. Problem is, this product is only profitable if it can sell long term. So they invested a lot on brand recognition, marketing, etc. But this strategy is incompatible with the product itself. Since it's all chip and software based, in probably less than a year better tech was already available, and it was also cheaper. But it's not worth for the brand to go back to the table and redesign the whole thing again with newer tech and software in mind. Given enough time and production, it's easy enough for a no name business to churn out something that works way better than their original product. See, this also happened with HDMI capture stuff, with USB C chargers, it's happening with keyboards and mouse, with docking stations, with all sorts of electronics metering systems, with power banks, it could happen with portable projectors, it's mostly happened with audio stuff like Bluetooth speakers, portable microphones, and some others. The HDMI capture in particular, I remember a time when generic brands worked so badly that I wouldn't recommend anyone to risk getting the white label stuff. They mostly worked very poorly or not at all, and even though they were cheap, you'd just be wasting money. Nowadays? I think most of the generic stuff works reasonably well. Unless you want something very specific to high end brands, a white label HDMI USB dongle will do. There are lots of areas in the electronics and hobbist categories where something similar happened. Portable soldering irons, motorized screw drivers, CCTV camera testers, USB testers, power supply, devboards, several types of tools, vacuum cleaners, hair trimmers... the list goes on and on. Most people don't notice this because they are not dealing with this huge range of products at the same time I guess. Branded stuff might still have the very top of the high end because it's a company that is not only in product development but also research, but those are kind the exception, not the rule. For the mundane stuff that not everyone has an interest in, you start seeing the generic stuff taking over expensive branded stuff - until the generic stuff coalesce into a brand themselves, that is. xD Personally, I think Elgato is kinda on the way out. It's just that their competition still didn't coalesce under a brand with a consistent product line, looks and marketing strategy just yet. But most of the company's products have some generic competition that might not look as cool or well finished, but they are also a fraction of the price. Elgato branded itself around streaming and vlogging market. So, capture cards, microphones, webcams, lighting, etc. They are not for super high quality per se, they are for whatever is considered "good enough" for streamers. I guess because it's such a nebulous concept and new-ish, you still don't have much of a competition there... but it'll eventually happen. Anyways, this doesn't always work, but just to leave a tip - if you are going for the generic stuff, try getting something that has new tech in something parallel to the product. Some stuff you can just add up the current year in search term. In the case of VHS capture, the only thing I can think of is it having an USB-C port instead of regular USB. Or perhaps something that takes video from S-Video or SCART instead of RCA if you have a way to export the signal. Sometimes you get better electronic components on those. Also try looking at the description and specs of the product if they list a bunch of details on the internal components. This is kinda rare, but when it happens it's another layer of guarantee that whoever is doing those actually care. But it's never a guarantee... Oh, another recent purchase I got was an HDMI Splitter. I had a decade old thing lying around that had all sorts of random problems and glitches. Got a new generic one... working perfectly.
$90 is expensive in 2024? Way back in the early 2000’s I tried all kinds of devices from $150 and lower… none worked well. Finally, I found the Canopus 300 which used Firewire instead of USB and that worked ok. It was also $300+ twenty years ago! It was worth it because it worked. Actually, it still does…
I have a number of DVD recorders I use for transfers. The two I use the most are a Panasonic DMR-EZ485V, and a Pioneer DVR-520H-S. Although the Pioneer is an older machine (from 2004), I tend to use it more than the others. Produces nice stable results. It has a built in HDD that allows you to break up videos and do minor editing. It'll be a shame when the HDD or disc drive in it finally fails. I've looked into making a clone of the HDD so a replacement could be had when needed, but from what I've read, one will need the Pioneer service remote and specific setup disk to initialize the unit even if you were to ever disconnect the original HDD (and or disc drive) and just simply reconnect it.
I run a video transfer business in the UK. I never use any of these simple USB converter devices, they all produce small video files of limited quality. For most domestic formats I use DV capture equipment, the DV codec looks much better than these compressed files and is much better suited to editing. For miniDV and Digital8, the DV-AVI file format is not only a lossless bit for bit copy of the tape contents, it also retains the original time/date metadata which some software can display. Then for Video8/Hi8, most Digital8 players will output the same video file format from analogue tapes. For other domestic formats, a DVCAM deck or a Canopus AD-VC55 is used to generate it. Typically I additionally generate smaller de-interlaced MPEG4 files as well. For professional formats such as Digital Betacam, SDI video capture equipment can generate huge files for broadcast use.
I appreciate that your DVD recorder gave better results than the USB capture device, but there are issues with that route too. MPEG2 files are not very well suited to editing, and to get the highest bitrate you are limited to about an hour on a single layer DVD.
Another key component, and the reason you saw that wobble, is requiring a Digital Timebase Corrector (TBC as you have in the Hi8 player). Some high end SVHS players have this built in, and I also use external standalone TBCs on all of my video capture systems.
DV conversion does do weird things with the picture (artifacts, incorrect colors, blocky video…) but it is definitely better that Easycrap, Elcrapo
There's no such thing as a "lossless bit for bit copy" of VHS. VHS is analog, it's not made of bits.
@@estusflask982 "For miniDV and Digital8, the DV-AVI file format is not only a lossless bit for bit copy of the tape contents" These are digital formats and bit for bit copies are possible.
@@estusflask982he was explicitly writing about minidv which is digital in the first place, something totally different from VHS
@@estusflask982 You can nowadays get somewhat direct VHS to PC transfer with modified VHS-player and vhs-decode software.
Some people might be rightly upset about owning one of these to archive their memories. Just remember the first rule of archiving is to archive. If you’ve captured using one these and now safely backed up a digital copy, excellent, it can no longer be completely lost forever. It’s better than no backup at all. If you can manage to archive it later with a better capture device, even better.
THANK YOU!
I've been staring down the barrel of a $10,000+ purchase to archive some family tapes. I should just bite the bullet and grab an archive with the stuff I have now.
I think, this is correct. Also understand that all of these things are very much follow the law of diminishing returns. Really a reasonable 6 head vcr, a line tbc dvd recorder, and this card is all you need. ESPECIALLY if your stuff is shot in long play.
@@AnalogSins I have an alt channel that has uploaded a bunch of obscure documentaries. The setup was a high end LG VCR with HDMI and a miserable $10 HDMI capture dongle. The dongle can’t do 1080p60 like it says on the box, but did 576p just fine. The captures are more than good enough. The struggle was syncing audio. It turns out investing in a better capture device gave negligible video improvements and audio syncing still sucked. Diminishing returns indeed, the good quality VCR is the real star of the setup.
also remember that keeping a digital copy is not a backup if you throw away the tapes. the tapes and the digital files have to BOTH be available to be a complete backup.
@@JessicaFEREM, I would imagine that that becomes a pure transfer at that point. Especially if the tape being thrown out is already degrading too much to be backed up more than the once.
You can tell how old the device is by the TH-cam logo in the software.
But the manufacture date said 2021. It seems haven’t bothered updating the software and probably the hardware in more than a decade, despite still selling them new. For $80…
The software has a copyright date of 2018, you can see it on the splash screen when it is launched... That's not spank new, but it's still quite recent (and of course I mean the date, not the code). They couldn't be bothered to change that logo, though 🤣
I think it's just using the old TH-cam logo that makes us think it's ancient software even though it's probably updated recently.
I bought one back in 2014 and it looks exactly like this one. They did update the software somewhat recently to add an Arm version for MacOS that didn't exist when I first got my M1 Mac.
And this is selling for over $130 in my country's Amazon. Ridiculous.
I purchased an Elgato Video Capture new two-ish years ago and after watching all my LaserDisc transfers back (they're on my channel if you're curious) I grew to hate that thing more and more. At first I didn't spot all the compression and frame dropping but it's impossible to ignore once you finally notice it. Found a Panasonic DMR-ES30V VCR/DVD recorder at the thrift store last week and from there I rip the DVDs via HandBrake, and it's a night and day difference.
you should keep the interlaced video or you lose half of the frames (60/50 vs 30/25)
@@namesurname4666 well speaking of this, I use my BMD Intensity Shuttle or Matrox MX02 Mini to record only interlaced format and if I need to de-interlaced it I use Handbrake too.
Quite a lot of the Panasonics have good reputations and an HDMI output so you could connect that into an HDMI capture device.
Back in the noughties, after spending £100s on capture cards and video editing software I ended up plugging my camcorder into a Panasonic EX75 DVD recorder and burning discs,
How do you strip the protection?
I use a similar method with a Sony HDD/DVD recorder. It has analog inputs and HDMI output. I first record onto the HDD, then i record the HDMI output from the recorder to my HTPC, which has an HDMI input PCIe card and it works fine. Digital to digital video capture is easy. It isn't expensive either. These HDD/DVD combo units are often found on eBay for the same price as the elgato rubbish.
I know the brand elgato mostly for their toy products targeted towards children which want to become streamers or simp cash farm girls on sites like twitch. These products are not meant to be good.
12:55 someone at Elgato figured they could save a bunch of money and nobody would notice. Wonder if you're the first to figure this out?
Judging by how all the old people that bought these don’t even listen to their doctors anymore; I can guarantee they will care and say you are wrong somehow 😂
Nope, I've known these devices are hot garbo for decades.
I noticed it too, because when I was looking for a capture card I looked at many products and many reviews. The Elgato prices are not justified at all. They are like RAZER - mediocre quality with premium pricing and devoted cult following that will always buy and praise them. Just open your eyes and you'll find better products at a lower price. Or don't - the money is yours at the end of the day, you can spend it on what you like.
I've been holding off on buying any capture device, including this one due to its high cost, and am glad to see you do this deep dive into a clearly inferior product. I'm still at square one.
Sony has a converter that takes in composite and outputs a DV signal over firewire. I had great luck with it. Need a firewire card with a chipset from Texas Instruments though (StarTech sells one)
I wish I'd waited until I saw this and NOT bought mine!
I'm trying to figure out out too. I've good quality coming in but getting a pink haze at the top of my hd vhs scans, but only sometimes
If you think this is high cost for the video capture and analog to digital conversion hardware, you don't even want to see how much good-quality stuff costs that actually does the job flawlessly and then some.
It'd be awesome if you (or somebody with the time and hardware to do so) did a video comparing the various chips inside these converters, I have a pretty strong feeling there's only truly a handful out there that are branded under many different names
There are a lot of videos, this is one of them: th-cam.com/video/eCK-6rVp3m0/w-d-xo.html
There is some data on the linuxtv wiki but it's not really been kept up to date. Several ones including the elgato, diamond vc500 and I think similar hauppage one as well are based on this conexant polaris design and chip, generic versions also exist. Another design that used to be very popular but I think is discontinued now was based around a chip from Empia. The really cheap ones use some different IC. It's really just generic designs that they put their brand on and barely do any changes to. Even the I-O data GV usb may generic design for all I know though it's based on different hardware, I've seen someone link a generic variant of it but can't remember the name of it - though at least it uses different hardware to other stuff out there (e.g renesas/techwell video chip) that's a fair bit better.
The fancier devices from blackmagic, magewell etc typically use video decoders from analog devices instead though even these aren't don't typically set up with capture from videotapes in mind (e.g the blagmagic intensity cards choke even worse on videotapes than most cheap usb dongles...) - analog devices actually make some video decoder ICs like the ADV7842 that come with a built in time base corrector feature if provided with memory but no capture device afaik is using it so we're stuck with having to use devices from the mid 00s and older instead to do this properly. The latest retrotink seem to maybe finally have added some features that could help but don't feel like shelling out a bunch of money for one just for testing it as I don't need it for anything else.
@@analogvideochannel4612 The Empia chip is a bus interface if I recall. The actual ADC is a separate chip in those USB sticks (ex: ATI TV Wonder 600 USB).
There is a video, forgot the creator, that compared alot of these usb video recorders. The elgato rated very poorly in his video.
As others have mentioned, they exist. Just search for them.
Of course, I'd love to see our good buddy TH-camr do it too
you did a great job with the comparisons. people who have never watched a VHS tend to think they all are extremely grainy and low quality because of bad captures.
@@CorruptedDogg that's a really solid point. I can spot those filters from a mile away but I can see how someone who didn't grow up watching VHS tapes can be tricked by them.
it's the 78 rpm record syndrome. everyone thinks that 78 rpm records always sounded awful because nobody can remember when 78 rpm records were new. now it has moved down to VHS, lol.
I use the Elgato to capture old VHS tapes. I find the quality is much improved if you run the signal from the VCR through a DVD recorder first before it goes to the Elgato. You don't need to burn a DVD or anything; it's just there to stabilise the signal. I'm also in a PAL region, so maybe it works better/worse with NTSC sources.
Some of the low end Panasonic DVD recorders have a great reputation as a time base corrector.
Same here using a Panasonic DVD recorder for stabilizing the VHS signal, i am not using the Elgato, but any capture device will benefit greatly from the recorder pass-trough.
Elgato cannot issue Pal, only accept it. The CX23103 chip converts PAL into NTSC, which is why for me in Hamburg it is 100% electronic waste even with TBC.
I burn the analog output as dvd video and recode in pc. These simple deinterlacers built in usb grabbers destroy details and framerate and are best to avoid. Also PAL.
I remember I was saving for this very one capture card because I kept seeing it everywhere, until I got my Sony DSR-250 camcorder, which also works as a DVCAM vcr, and can also convert analog footage with a built-in TBC, and because it's DVCAM I can just directly capture footage through firewire to my computer and have pristine quality captures.
How does your setup work? Do you record the analog signal on digital tape first? And then play back the digital tape and record on the pc the digital signal? Or is no tape needed? I looked into the manual but it wasn’t clear to me.
@@JohnSmith-iu8cj at first I recorded onto tape and then transferred it, but I soon realized I could just record directly onto the PC when enabling the 'A/V->DV OUT' option in the 'VTR SET' menu
I bought this recently and have spent some 3 weeks digitalizing our old VHSC tapes. My father, who doesn't really care about technology at all, complained that it looked "odd" but acceptable. The purpose was to have our media in a format which will not decay with time, and to that end it does it's job.
However, it's only after watching this I realize how our memories have been effectively corrupted from this device. Comparing the digital version with the direct output of our camcorder revealed how truly bad it was. I thought it looked OK but oh boy was I wrong.
My parents are happy I could save our memories at all, but there are details which will never be recoverable.
Thanks for bringing awareness to the awful quality if the thing. I wouldn't have known otherwise.
It might be a time nightmare but if you still have your tapes, you can buy better equipment and get better captures. That detail isn't necessarily lost forever!
@@SayakaMaizonoo Yes. Always keep the originals. You can stack them away in a box somewhere but nothing will match their quality (as poor as VHS is) due to losses during transfer.
Which equpiment for better quality would you recommend for vhs to iMac or windows? Or could you point me to a source? Thanks@@SayakaMaizonoo
@@cblakemusic My setup is an S-VHS player (Panasonic NV-HS950) with TBC ON. I'm using S-Video output to a Retrotink 5X which scales the image up to 1080p, I leave Deinterlacing on Weave because it's better to do it later. Then from the Retrotink it goes out by HDMI to a Capture card, mine is an Avermedia GC553G2 (Which is probably overkill), and then from there it goes by USB 3.0 to my computer and I capture in AmaRecTV with the Lagarith lossless codec. TLDR: I can't really summarise it in a TH-cam comment. Maybe I could write a more detailed guide elsewhere and link to it, but in summary - S-VHS player with a TBC - S-Video output - Highly recommend a Retrotink 5X or 4K - Decent Capture Card - AmaRecTV recording with a lossless codec
Buy a secondhand DVD recorder and record them direct to DVD±R media in 'HQ' mode. Make sure the DVD recorder comes with its remote control. Decent ones come from Philips, Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer and LiteOn. You can then play the recordings in a decent Blu-ray player on a TV or rip the discs to a computer for file playback.
This video actually stopped me from making a big mistake for exactly the project I'm about to undertake, exactly the tech reasons you mention in the vid. Kevin, it's happening everywhere now with 'honest reviews' being penalized or even threats made - speaking your mind, forget it, a thing of the past. I weep for the future...
same here I was also considering this one, well definitely not worth that price! money saved
Sadly, some of the best analog video capture hardware is pushing 20 years old now.
BRAVO! VWestlife for posting this video about the suspect quality I've noticed about those VHS to digital capture apps/devices; as years ago I spent dollars on a couple of them, and after noticing the lackluster quality results of those capture apps versus the process of 'VHS to DVD-R recording to digital ripping,' I've stayed with the 'DVD-R to digital ripping.'
Thanks, VWestlife, for confirming my impressions about the inferior video transfer quality of those widely marketed VHS to digital capture devices/apps.
The most outrageous part as you pointed out, is Elgato charges almost $100 for this device, on-par with the $10 ones.
They are super over-priced! They once were pretty much the only company to go to when you wanted to video capture or stream in real time, because their products had very small lag. That's why they are highly looked after by gamers. So, they became a "gaming" company first and foremost and as such prices are through the roof. I recently bought a video capture card by NZXT which supports capturing in 4K, 60 FPS and 0 lag pass-through for 4K, 120FPS with HDR10 and it costs half the price of the same spec product from Elgato. Not only that, the NZXT has a bit more features so it's even a better option than the Elgato. Elgato are relying mainly on their well known name rather than the actual quality and features of their products, but if more companies enter this market, maybe the prices will go down and the quality may actually go up.
A used Canopus ADVC100 is around $100 used on ebay. Much better than these Elgato junk.
@@rickyc4905 That's what I had a decade or more ago. It was very nice and I captured my home movies.
Selling for over $130 here on Amazon India. Yes, it's $130+.
It has really good software
I use an AJA Kona LHE for all types of analog capture. It can capture in uncompressed 10-bit format and in many other formats. I also use an HD Storm and a DV Storm. The key is to use formats that are true video formats, maintaining interlacing in PAL 50i and NTSC 60i video formats, so as to have a digital file that can be played back on a CRT monitor while preserving the quality of the analog image. Later, appropriate deinterlacing can be performed, or not performed at all on video signals that contain, for example, film footage, which in PAL format are usually progressive (meaning the two fields belong to the same frame but each contains half of the total lines of the PAL system with different information). These capture cards are not very expensive; the only issue is getting them to work using specific computers.
Can AJA make a good TBC obsolete? “All Types” means without SECAM
That thing is listed at over 1k$ on Amazon
I went down this rabbit hole a while back and ended up building a PC to run Windows XP with an old ATI capture card. Barely cost more than buying an Elgato since I had most of the components laying around already. I'm very glad I went this route. There is quite a learning curve, not recommended for the average person, but the end result is well worth the time and effort. It's a shame that so many people are digitizing their priceless tapes without any regard for the capture quality.
I desperately need to digitise some old Hi8 cassette tapes, I only want the absolute best quality but understand almost none of this stuff, what would you recommend I get?
@@Mr.Goodkat That's a hard question to answer. There are so many different options, many of them requiring old used components that may be difficult to acquire, and I'm still a beginner myself with no experience with Hi8. My suggestion is to join the digitalfaq and videohelp forums and ask there. Lots of helpful folks with tons of experience. That's how I learned what I needed to get started capturing VHS. Best of luck to you.
SCART is a genius solution for an easy to use universal connector. It can carry Composite, S-Video, Component or RGB. Together with stereo(maybe more) audio and also has extra pins for sending small amounts of data between devices or signalling standby status. It also allows chaining devices and connecting all of them into one single input on the TV.(example: a DTV box chained with a DVD or some kind of media source connected to a hi-fi audio amplifier which passes all the signals through itself into the TV for the picture, all just one connector, no mess of tons of unlabeled RCA cables that get all tangled.)
The chaining feature is the main reason most devices with SCART have two SCART connectors. One carries the output of the device. The other is an input for the signal from another device. The input gets added to the output connector. No external connectors needed either.
4:28 I'm willing to bet that the TH-cam upload button hasn't worked for several years, due to TH-cam occasionally changing their APIs and breaking older software that uses them :)
I have an Elganto solution for that: the button could just open a browser window of youtube!
Hello. Thank you very much for a very solid chunk of knowledge about ripping analog media to digital - I was just finding my way in, not necessarily to archive old tapes, but rather to purposefully record stuff just for that analog vibe and it's quirkiness and artifacts. I was skeptic about Elgato from very beginning, so thank you very much for confirming my suspicion.
But most of all, thank you for an epilepsy warning. As a person suffering from seizures on regular basis, I appreciate your concern. You're a real MVP.
The problem is the current generation of I.T people didn't grow up in the era of standard definition interlaced video and don't really know much about it. To be fair it's pretty esoteric stuff and took me years to understand how it works. Interlaced, progressive, field cadences, inverse telecine, double rate deinterlacing, Rec601 colours, nonsquare pixels, 704/720 width discrepancy for analogue/digital. It's kind of a nightmare to be frank.
Even the big online streaming services don't know how to properly deinterlace and/or detelecine older TV shows. As a random example NBC's streaming service have Alfred Hitchcock Presents but they've just replaced every second field with a copy of the first field, rendering it as effectively 240p24 inside a 480p30 container with a 1:1:1:2 cadence (1 repeat frame every 5 frames...stuttery). This they then upscaled to 1080p30 and called it a day. They have no clue what 30i is or anything about field cadences.
Another another random example, in the video I can see the Elgato unnecessarily downscales it horizontally to 640x480 because they don't know anything about nonsquare pixel formats. If they wanted 4:3 square pixels while preserving all resolution they would have scaled it to 704x528, or alternatively, left it as native 704x480 and flagged the metadata in the mp4 file as having an aspect ratio of 4:3 so the media player scales it to 4:3 at playback. If they didn't do that then I'm pretty confident they didn't flag the colour matrix and gamut as 601 either and the skin tones are almost certainly more orange than they should be, unless your media player is smart and guesses correctly based on the vertical resolution and/or framerate (I use MadVR and that has very good guessing logic, for example it sees vertical height < 576 therefore not PAL, and 24/30fps therefore definitely not PAL, therefore probably NTSC, therefore assume 601 matrix and SMPTE-C primaries).
For NTSC video there were two types of resolution I just figured last December. One is the older NTSC TV broadcast 720x486 while the other was the typical 720x480 for NTSC DV, DVD, LD, and VHS.
@@卡拉永遠OK唱不完
Yeah and there's also 704x480 for analogue and 720x480 for digital. Both are supposed to be 4:3 but they're not always treated that way for example if you see 8 pixel thick black bars down the sides then it means they assumed the analogue source was 2.2% narrower than 4:3, which may or may not be a correct assumption. A lot of third party Nintendo Gamecube and Wii games are horizontally squished by around 10% due to game devs thinking 480p is 640x480 and just pillarboxing the game's internal framebuffer directly inside the 720x480 (NTSC) output buffer not realising NTSC pixels are nonsquare.
The Elgato software actually does have a "preserve source format" option which gives you 720x480 video flagged as 4:3, but it also leaves it interlaced, resulting in _extremely bad_ compression artifacts because the interlacing completely overwhelms the 1.5 Mbps H.264 codec they're using and totally destroys the video quality as soon as there is any movement!
@@vwestlife
Interesting, if I had to guess what's happening based on your description I'd say the software is perhaps neglecting to tell the encoder -- probably ffmpeg/libav -- that the source is interlaced. For interlaced encodings to work it needs to encode each field separately as if each field is a separate image, otherwise the field structure will be corrupted in compression artefacts.
@@vwestlife If the Elgato encoded it correctly in interlaced format that would not be so bad, TV/Players then can properly de-interlace the video. But with the unstable VHS signal and noise the bitrate is much too low for any bit of decent quality.
That Sony DVD recorder does such a good job, even at MPEG-2 compression. It may take an extra step to put it on your computer but at least you end up with a backup physical, non-volatile copy
Well, non-volatile until disc rot sets in, which will happen much sooner for a burned DVD than a professionally pressed one.
@@stevethepocket Yes. I went through and started archiving all my burned stuff recently and there were a lot of failures. Nothing precious, fortunately but definitely concerning.
MPEG2 is perfectly adequate/already overkill for VHS. VHS is not a decent format to start with!
@@interstat2222 I've seen DVD movies where scenes shot in dimly lit areas have visible banding from the compression artifacts; those wouldn't be present on a tape.
@@stevethepocket On commercial DVDs, that could've been avoided by the producers in most cases by using a higher bitrate encoding method, although a lot of pixellation issues on a DVD were never visible (on SD/HD-Ready CRT or Plasma TVs, or smaller LCDs, as were around at the time).
Good TVs/Blu-ray players are still pretty good at showing DVDs, provided you don't sit too close.
VHS copies well to DVD with standalone recorders in HQ or SP DVD mode.
I used to encode DVDs professionally in the '00s (for commercial DVD releases) and before that worked with VHS duplication.
the unfortunate thing is a lot of people actually LIKE the way this capture looks. they actively want a worse capture because they want their video to look old if anything they'd look at the sony dvd recording as worse cuz it's too good
That is unfortunate. True, but unfortunate.
They like them as a stylistic choice for recording new footage. This video is more concerned with archival of VHS tapes.
I used a few different routes for my transfers - 1. Hi8 played on a Sony digital 8 player via firewall to a Mac, 2. MiniDV from the camera via FireWire, 3. VHS tapes to a Sony HD/DVD recorder hard disc then to DVD and ripped with Handbrake.
The best advice I can give is DON’T DELAY. Your tapes are deteriorating and that decay will dominate any quality issues.
Yes so true, not wait digitizing your valuable memories!
It is not so much the tapes itself but specially the (working!) playback equipment is becoming more and more scarce.
Hi 8 in a D8 player via FireWire is about as good as it gets and dead easy too… except maybe trying a pro deck… but given the consumer purpose of the Hi8, not sure a pro deck would help.
I know we're not naming names, but I'm pretty sure the channel you're talking about is the one that convinced me to buy one of these in the first place. Knowing that these were used in a professional setting was enough to convince me of their quality. Sucks to be the sucker I guess
It's appalling that such video conversation companies use equipment that is worse than if they were not converted at all.
We all know it’s LegacyBox.
@VictoryHighway it's not legacybox, in fact the channel I was referring to explicitly called out legacy box for their low quality
@@myyoutubeaccountgotsuspend8666it’s got memories aka Phil.
I'm glad people are talking more about these types of issue now
For VHS capture, I still use a Canopus AVDC-100 I bought 19 years ago. Results are pretty good. I keep an old FireWire card installed in one of my PCs for such use. Software is WinDV 1.2.3 (free) feeding the Vegas NLE. I don't need to capture old video formats often, but when I do, the solution I used in 2005 still works today. Well, how 'bout that
2 Thank-Yous: 1) Thanks for the flashing lights warning. As a new epilepsy patient, I actually need to be aware of those. And 2) Thanks for doing this work. I'm not currently upconverting or transferring old videos, but I've done conversions in the past, and this will save people a lot of trial-and-error time, so this is a huge gift for fellow video fans/nerds!
How did you end up with epilepsy? What happened??
that Sony DVD recorder does a fantastic job !
But like all sony devices, they were just one step close of making it perfect by allowing video recording through USB.
By your surprise it might be the case you've never seen it demonstrated. If so, note that a dedicated video on that device came up very recently on the channel, just weeks ago.
@@hyperturbotechnomike At the time nobody wanted USB media recording in that way and the format it encodes the video in (as per the DVD spec) would've been incompatible with the very few devices that could play USB media. It's not Sony's fault, it was designed for what was a different era.
This particular Elgato device always struck me as a device they should've stopped selling years ago but for some reason keep stock of it despite knowing that its not part of their priority devices, and likely hasn't been for a good number of years by now.
Its a shame, because their 'Game Capture' lineup of capture cards are often excellent devices (albeit sadly overpriced in most scenarios, when you consider that devices from the likes of EVGA and NZXT can deliver the same performance at a cheaper price), but it seems like that's where their priorities are because its where they make all the large sum of their profits nowadays.
Those who are looking for a more simple straightforward recording device (that keeps focus on these older connectors like Composite, S-Video, SCART, etc.) deserve something better, and this particular Video Capture device just doesn't cut it anymore. Especially when you compared it to that Sony DVD recorder (the quality on that looked fantastic!).
Dude you are quite the guardian angel here. i was just now looking for a capture device and was thinking elgato was the way to go and no way i need dvd recorder in my life... Turns out i do! Thanks a bunch for this. Also... I must admit i am quite plesed with "having to get" a DVD-R ;)
Any clue as to the best one? I really need a dvd recorder to but it's overwhelming.
That came out in true stereo! the right and left channels were very close. the right channel was echoed a bit to center, but that is what 4 track does to a stereo mix!
In late 2016, I bought one of these, and it was the worst decision i could've made. I didn't have a time-base corrector like I do now so whenever a tape is having tracking problems, the video goes blank with white dot-crawling. Audio would occasionally skip if you have even a blip of another application taking up a little more resources than usual. Video and audio would desync really easily, which means capturing an entire 6 hour tape isn't feasible. I would only get to transfer a tape in chunks of 30-50 minutes. They may have good HD capture devices, but I think they should focus all their energy into that instead of a really crappy SD device.
Also that response email is so cringey to read, lol.
They need to discontinue this damn thing.
None of these USB sticks have inbuilt TBCs. They all need a stable, clean video source. It's not the Elgato's fault your tape is bad enough to require a TBC. I'll bet if you used the Elgato now with your TBC you'd get a good stable picture. @VWestlife obviously hasn't connected the dots between the Sony DVD Recorder and the quality; had he put the DVD recorder in the workflow as a TBC, he'd have a good, stable Elgato capture.
@@aaprods that still wouldn't stop it forcing it to 24fps and extremely low bit rate
I use the Diamond VC-500. In my opinion it's great, but you have to use it correctly. You want to run everything through at least a Line-TBC like you find on older Pro-sumer S-VHS VCRs or many (pretty cheap) panasonic DVD recorders. And you need to capture in a lossless format with software that allows it. Personally I prefer AmaRecTV.
"Ride only on designated trails" ... which peeps around here would do that, rather than destroying everything. Aaaaaanyway! Ye, the difference is visible :D
Yeah, he talks about - omg The Horror! - having to ride a horse instead of an ATV if he doesn’t stick to the designated trail. To me it sounds like the best reason ever to go off the designated trail, not to mention the best method. Horses often don’t have to stick to the trail. I never did when I was young and riding my horse. Nowadays I guess it’d be a lot safer than it was then to wander off trail riding a horse, since you’d have your phone and its GPS guidance. When I had a horse, you had to navigate by the sun, or if it was cloudy you’d use a compass.
I guess an ATV is a good alternative for less fortunate people who don’t know how to ride a horse.
I still have ADAPTEC AVC-2010 Video PCI Kit VideOh! from year 2000 something, works on Win XP only. The results were pretty good. Captures MPEG2 for DVD and MPEG1 for VCD. I also have Pioneer DVD recorder and very good and expensive (back in a days) ADS PYRO Av-Link from 2004 which converts DV to video and video to DV. So I'm pretty much covered.
Reminds me of the Technology Connections video where he was exploring many ways to get a VHS cature in the best quality.
*capture
He was exploring some pretty bad ways.
@@wright96d He didn’t do a Elgato device.
Sure, those white block are very basic, but they give better results.
@@OM19_MO79 That’s true. The bitrate was fairly high as well if I remember correctly. Let’s just say he was exploring some imperfect ways then.
Over the years, I’ve seen these praised time and time again as the best quality budget capture device but I honestly questioned those claims, as it’s difficult to accurately judge something’s quality without testing it yourself. I’ve seen my fair share of video capture device reviews that gave glowing accolades, only to see the test footage and wonder if the source footage looked that bad to begin with, or if the methods and settings used along the way caused that, so I really wanted to get one and judge it myself.
The price was always what kept me from taking the plunge; after having seen this video, I’m glad I didn’t.
I've seen the videos of that particular "professional" services. I got really shocked when he treated all the media like crap, and had 0 inventory management. It might be a step up above legacybox, but still... I hope the people who send their old media to get converted with them thinks it twice! I even think their "un-mold" machine is really crude, and their skills to "cut the tape" where it might be mangled was completely unacceptable.
I guess you’re referring to Gotmemories right?
@@卡拉永遠OK唱不完 Yes, and Kevin (vwestlife) as well
@@cocusar well at least Vwestlife did research on how to properly convert them. Other companies just wanna invest on cheap crap.
They can be cringeworthy to watch. Particularly the tape splicing! 😮 Just goes to show how terrible legacybox is. Analog to digital transfer workflows don't scale very well. Its hard to maintain any sort of quality once you go above a certain volume.
@@NJRoadfan I think you're right, it's going to wear down your equipment and you'd need to have a lot of maintenence on them. Preventive maintenance on so many analog and mechanical vintage devices would be a lot of burden to begin with, but imagine having to deal with them breaking? It's hard enough and takes time even for trained people. Not only that, but also sum the fact that spare parts are close to non-existant. If I were living off that, yeah I can take time to fix the stuff for myself, and even create replacement parts, but I don't see them doing that. So, as a result, the media conversion services they offer are just plain bad. Not want to bash this guy in particular, but legacybox is far worse.
I’ve given up with all these converters! A few months ago I went ahead and bought some BlackMagic recording equipment, and I’ve never looked back! I use component from my VCR to an analogue to SDI converter, then a Video Capture 3G from black magic also to record to the Media Express recording software. The analogue to SDI converter can detect what resolution and frame rate the video is playing back at, and will send data back to the PC running, Media Express, and it will automatically adjust the video settings as necessary.
I use MediaExpress as well, Pretty good software, no setting to mess around except the output format.
I’ve been transferring videotapes to digital for quite a while now for extended family and people around my local area, and luckily I’ve always been aware of the limitations and poor quality of these cheap converters with all the same chips from China, even before I started this little freelance operation. For VHS transfers it starts from my prosumer spec Sony SLV-R1000 VCR, passes through my AV Toolbox AVT-8710 external Time Base Corrector, and then arrives to my Retrotink 5X Pro via S-Video. The Retrotink then takes that clean analog separate chrome and lume video feed that’s now free of any timebase errors, de-interlaces it via FPGA Motion Adaptive, then digitizes and upscales it to 1080p using bicubic interpolation as I’ve set, and finally sends that to my Elgato HD60X for recording and encoding in OBS via HDMI 2.0. Now I know many purists would be against the upscaling, but to be honest it’s always come out great and has been what everyone I’ve converted for has always preferred.
I haven't used RetroTink 5X-Pro, only older (and much cheaper, although still somewhat expensive) RetroTink 2X-Pro. Great little device.
Thank you so much for the review. I thought their products are on a bit higher standard, but I was wrong. (I've never used their product though.) My method for VHS digitizing is to use my DV camcorder (mine has analog input) and use it as AV converter unit. DV camcorder is connected to Mac via FireWire. I use QuickTime.
I see VWestlife, I'm watching. No matter what the topic. He has this rare knack of making everything interesting.
I run a local digitization service and I agree. The elgato is what I got started on but I found it frustrating to use for these reasons. I believe why the pro services use it is because the software is one click, stops by itself, and allows them to fulfill bulk orders quickly.
For the price, I’ve found that the IO-Data capture card works great. It passes through the direct signal so you can apply whatever interlacing algorithm on the footage. These days, though I’m using black magic stuff…
The elgato is not compatible with 240p sources like the NES. It tries to deinterlace the image as if it were 240i. This causes straight vertical lines to be jagged and text to be hard to read
The similarly priced Japanese capture dongle from IO data also has the same problem, as do the cheap dongles, as do the rca to hdmi adapters. Most of the few new tvs with rca also have this problem.
I bought a Chinese RetroTink 2x knockoff "retro scaler" that specifically promises 240p compatibility, yet it still has the exact same problem (plus several other problems)
Turns out it's pretty hard to find a reasonable way to capture Nintendo footage from retro hardware, right now.
But what's gross about the elgato being incompatible, is that Elgato is the first console capture card brand that retro gamers know about. I'm not sure why. Maybe their PCI cards used to be good?
Low quality sources like VHS etc. needs to be captured uncompressed, otherwise you will get horrible results.
And have Super VHS VCR (AG-1980P) with both internal TBC (from VCR) and external TBC like AVT-8710.
Nice analysis. In the past, i have used a PCI digital tv card which also has analog input. I believe its also a connexant chip. I captured it to lossless HuffYUV using menvoder or ffmpeg. From there it can be deinterlaced, cleaned up (to an extent) and encoded to the bitrate of your choosing. I think it looks ok but is probably missing the TBC stage in the DVD device you demonstrated.
Aaaaaand thats why i use dvd recorders. I still use one routinely to record live tv too. I have an SVHS deck with a TBC and hook it to the recorder using SCART and svideo.
Sure ripping the disc to the pc is an extra step but I frequently just don't rip! I just keep the DVD.
I was stunned by that price tag. $88??! I paid $20 for this near-identical unit a decade ago. It never left the box since I had a Dazzle that did just fine, and was trying to move to HDMI capture anyway. Now working on a retro television project that will require capturing and transcoding tapes soon, it's going to be fun having a critical eye on my and others' VHS rips now.
My old PAL result. Not perfect, but much better than most home solutions: th-cam.com/video/M5kYTCwYVy8/w-d-xo.html
I'm so glad you made this video, as I was stuck between purchasing two transfer devices a couple of years back. The Elgato and a ClearClick HD Video Capture Box Ultimate. I sprung for the ClearClick. And it looks like that was a wise choice. I've been very happy with it thus far. Might be a device you would like to review at some point. Great video as always!
Sorry to disappoint you, but the clearclick is just as bad if not worse.
@@robbi-blechdoseclearclick is trash. I have the 2.0. Lowers quality and stretches it out.
Recently saw this on a forum, a message from Elgato re the "low" bitrate for capture, which apparently can be increased:
"The value used by the Elgato Video Capture software is the default that is useful in most situations. That said, it can be changed by doing the following:
1) Quit the Video Capture software if it's running, via the tray icon.
2) Start File Explorer and enter the following path in the address bar: %appdata%\Elgato\VideoCapture
3) Edit the Settings.xml file with Windows Notepad or other text editing software.
4) Replace .075 with a higher value, up to 3.5 maximum.
5) Save the Settings.xml file.
6) Relaunch the Video Capture software.
Please note the recording file sizes will be larger after doing this."
The only somewhat decent usb capture dongle of these you can get nowadays afaik is the I-O data GV-USB 2 - though even that one isn't optimal but it's much better than the ones based on the conexant chip and the cheap easycap things. Also idk if the bundled software is any good, most of these bundled apps are crap like the one that comes with the elgato thing, using crappy codecs with low bitrate, deinterlacing to 25/29.97p instead of 50/59.94p etc. I wish one of these companies actually put in the effort and made a capture card with a decent video decoder with a tbc (like e.g a ADV7842) in it that could handle video directly from a vcr in it but no one are - not even fancy ones from like blackmagic do...
A lot of the standalone recorders that have come out more recently seem to suffer from the same problems, using crappy video decoder ics and crappy codecs, resulting in similarly wobbly video, that's cropped to hell with low bitrate and deinterlaced badly to half framerate...
My general suggestion is to use one of the better usb dongles or a fancier capture device, ditch the bundled app and use virtualdub, amarectv or ffmpeg (unless you have a blackmagic or aja or something fancy), and use certain models of dvd recorders as a "tbc" for stabilizing the video. Just passing the video through them and recording the output directly rather than actually recording to DVD. Panasonic ones from 2005/2006 sans the DMR-ES20 (or any newer Pannasonic outside of north america), pioneer from 2005 or newer, or sony from 2007 or newer work well for this.
Yes, I've been using the Hauppauge USB Live-2 connected through a Panasonic ES-10 and AmarecTV to capture losslessly using the Lagarith codec and got much better results than some of the other USB dongles for sure.
I used to use virtualdub and audacity to do my old VHS rips in 2009 but not since! I need easier less time consuming ways to get that quality today! I did a LOT of rare AF VHS tapes and put onto the internet in the argh argh realm (nudge nudge wink wink!) But that was the best I could do back then, still got that capture card but it is so dated today, I got the Japanese language I-O Data one now, not used it yet, got a whole LOAD of VHS tapes to rip that I want to start another YT channel with its content. Dude these tapes are not golden they are beyond that they are PALADIUM from what I have watched!!! It is like a tv series!!!
TBC could be done in software or drivers but they aren't gonna be arsed are they. Lowest effort products.
@@rob1390 I have tested a LOT of USB2 grabbers without success.
Fantastic and detailed review. A extreme reminder about being 'buyer beware'. Sadly there are too many stories of items on Amazon that are dressed up rubbish set at a rip off price.
The El Gato might be more useful if it were possible to disable the built-in de-interlacer. I currently use a Digital8 Handycam w/ TBC enable, and use Selur Hybrid's deinterlace filter on the "VerySlow" preset. Clicking the "Bob" checkbox yield an output output of 60fps for those who might prefer it.
P.S.- In any case, I appreciate your detailed overview and comparison.
I had the same exact experience you did with this product when digitizing my VHS collection. Tapes that were more worn out were very jittery. Using a Macro Vision removal box in line helped some. The best solution was using an older PCI WinTV capture card in an XP workstation running an ancient version of Pinnacle Studio that came bundled with a Dazzle 150 box I bought years ago. I used the DV codec for capture in Pinnacle and then used Handbrake on a modern PC to re-encode the video to H.265 for smaller file sizes. The end result is very close to playback on a VCR. However, the above did not go so well with my Laserdiscs. The outcome seemed like the resolution was very reduced. I'm going to give the Elgato with OBS another try with my Laserdiscs as they shouldn't have any jitters on capture like tape does. I'm finding that video capture is more of an art then a science. I have been digitizing all my media onto my Plex server and so I have a good back up of my media as tapes ware out and DVDs as well as Laserdiscs can suffer from bit rot. I never bought into streaming services and kept decades worth of media.
The ATV part was really heartwarming, I loved it.
The other reason why those devices are crap for retro video game capture is because they capture at 30FPS, so when there's sprite flickering on screen it will either come out as not flickering at all or the sprites will disappear.
You’d really have to do a comparison using typical amateur camcorder footage to get a sense of whether the Elgato is sufficient for that type of material. Video transfer services are mostly dealing with that type of stuff, not Hollywood movies.
Are you Pea Hicks, the Optigan guy?
Guilty as charged!
Back in the day, when the first tabletop VHS/DVD burner combos came out. I converted all of my cassettes to DVD. It took about a year of doing it, but having them as DVDs and being able to rip as digital files made it worthwhile. I tried capture cards, but would get issues with humming noises and artifacts. I miss the Lite-ON VHS DVD combos.
Thank you for your review I just found your channel because I was going to purchase Sony NSC-GC1 and review convinced me not too loll and decided to check your channel! Amazing content unfortunately I have elgato I purchased years back and I did noticed it loook very off but never thought of using dvd to record vhs tapes! So thanks for that tip!!!
Interesting video! I have had really good luck with the Clear Click brand standalone units that input HDMI, S-Video, composite, etc. and record directly to SD card or USB.
Clear click destroys the quality of
12:53 I guessed it since the very beginning of the video. They answered worse than a primordial A.I. system. I do agree with your conclusions. I hope you were able to throw it back on they hands and have your 90 bucks back in your pocket.
Thanks for making this. I was considering trying an Elgato device but after watching this, I will steer clear! I'm getting good results with my Magnavox DVD recorder I got at the thrift store for $10,
In the future, could you possibly do a video about different TBC options? A lot of them seem prohibitively expensive for the amateur hobbyist.
Pioneer DVR-560H Recorder -> HDMI (4:4:4 PAL interlaced) -> Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder HD (Windows 10) I'll test next.
Really appreciate you showing the internals
great review. Is there a good DVD capture device?
for DVD capture device, just use something like handbrake to rip but if you're talking about DVD recorder then watch his video regarding the Sony VRD-MC5.
I have seen the YT channel by the same "pro" VHS conversion guy as you included a clip from, and despite his best intention and seeming like a nice guy, his toolchain makes me cringe. I wonder how many of his customers threw out their priced family memories because he claimed their tapes were in too bad a shape to be recoverable. He should never claim that with his bottom tier capture hardware and no TBC. Poor customers.
This Video couldn't have come at a better time! I was browsing for an analog capture device a couple days ago, and since I've owned two elgato HDMI Capture devices, I was thinking that this would work out great too. But now I'm glad I didn't. I didn't purchase one at the time because of the price, but now I'm won't because of the quality issues I'll be stuck with. I'll be removing it from the online cart. Thank you for the video.
For PAL, to this day, the absolute best method I have discovered to transfer analog video to digital, is with a VCR (VHS player), connected to a DVD recorder with TBC (Time Base Corrector) through S-video or regular AV, and then connect that (S-video or regular AV) to a DV camera with video passthrough and the DV camera connected to a PC or Mac via firewire, and record the damn thing in DV. Then you NEED to deinterlace the footage with QTGMC. I know it's a long list, but this recipe is hard to beat, both when it comes to quality, file size and effectiveness.
so i can use a dv camera as a captue card 😲, i usually just recorded with dvd recorder itself with an hard drive but i understand why would do you do that (no mpeg2)
@@namesurname4666 If you have a DV camera (or a Sony Digital 8) with an S-Video (or AV) that is both an input and output, you can send the analog signal from the VHS player into the camera, and then the camera converts it do a digital DV signal, and you can then connect the camera to a PC or MAC with firewire and record that DV signal as DV footage. BUT, you have to use a DVD recorder (With TBC) between the VHS player and the camera. I would strongly recommend this method for PAL video, not so much NTSC.
@@laurencewhite4809 some DV cameras with VCR function have TBC built in on their own
If I remember correctly there is an Open Source project that captures analog video in RAW, it doesn't do any conversion or adjustments on the device itself and you have to process the raw captured data later with a Software. That way you can do multiple adjustments, but I forget the name of the project sadly...
It's called vhs-decode
Pioneer once came with DVD recorders that could capture analogue in great quality, then rip the dvd to PC/Mac
Will soon be tested in Hamburg (PAL) with Pioneer DVR-560H via HDMI (4:4:4) to the Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder HD. Blackmagic support was kind enough not to reveal straight away that Windows 7 doesn't work. Windows 10 (🙄) should work.
The Pioneer deck I had was extremely durable for over 15 years, recording thousands of hours of materials for various projects. Video quality was first-rate; and the finalization process for the disc was quick, too.
It finally malfunctioned, probably due to a faulty capacitor or resistor.
Watching this convinced me to keep using my HDMI converter + capture card for my video captures. Colors look better, works fine with OBS and I can use the capture card with my gaming consoles too. I've seen this capture card get recommended over and over on Reddit and the quality doesn't seem to reflect the price tag.
@5:56 - HA! That's my family's old Quasar, that i still have! I also still have the original big ole camera. Bulky is an understatement for that setup lol
Another good capture option (if your PC has an IEE-1394 port) is the Sony DVMC-AV2 Media converter, it takes composite or S-Video and converts it into a DV stream, it will also convert a DV stream to S-Vido and composite with stereo audio. We used them in college on editing systems to fight Panasonic's brain damaged DVCPRO decks, which did not include a digital video I/O option.
I've been using the analog inputs on my WinTV ATSC tuner card for years with the WinTV software. It works great. Wouldn't mind to hear your technical breakdown on one of those.
There are flat screens with VGA for over 20 years now. VGA is fully analog. A flat screen "converts" this analog signals to a perfect digital image before it gets displayed.
Why isn't this quality possible with this capture devices? freakin sucks.
One reason is that VGA is pretty much as perfect a component video signal as one could hope for: separate signal lines for each color (and no color space conversion), as well as individual vertical and horizontal sync signal lines. And later, with a digital signal for identification, which can tell the display the desired mode. This makes synchronizing to it comparatively simple, aided by the fact that because it’s a computer-generated image, there are discrete pixels whose boundaries can be identified to fine-tune the timing. (As opposed to the truly analog signal within a TV line.) And of course VGA is practically never interlaced.
I’m not excusing the Elgato doodad’s poor performance, just explaining why syncing to VGA is quite a bit easier, despite its higher resolutions.
It's kind of sad that my DVD recorder from 2007 converts VHS to digital at a much better quality than any direct VHS-to-PC option I've ever tried, including this Elgato device.
(Of course, the DVD recorder option means I need to rip the disc again using Handbrake, but the resulting video quality is well worth it.)
I got one of those EzCap USB devices back in 2013 to capture two commercially bought VHS tapes, which my existing capture card could not handle, but I made sure to get a version that was not a cutdown clone, an EzCAP116 (EzCAP DC60+). I needed one that could capture a specific NTSC variant that would not capture with every other card or device I had tried. It did a good job and the included software capture at to MPEG2 at 720 x 480, 4:3 ratio, 8-bit depth colour, Chroma 4:2:0, YUV, interlaced and max bitrate 7 500 kb/s. The audio was done at 224 kb/s / 48 kHz. My favourite capture device I have owned is the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150MCE, which gives smooth, flawless captures and good audio quality in MPEG2 direct on the card. I use Womble - MPEG-VCR to edit the files, in much the same way as Virtual Dub does, e.g. it does not throw the video and audio out of sync when splicing and joining files, and its blazing fast to edit.
In elgato software you need to CALIBRATE the picture control, so i set the Brightness to 30 and contrast to -11 using the 240p test suite and S-Video using a PlayStation 1 connected to my VCR its a Super VHS Panasonic NV-FS200 with TBC, adjusting the video settings in preferences gave a great picture quality to my VHS captures.
if you go to this path for Windows Users: %appdata%\Elgato\VideoCapture you can edit the Settings.xml and change bitrate and resolutions to what ever you want, force YUY2, Quality from 1 to 10, cropping and other stuff. If you want a good product, just get a Retrotink4K and an HDMI video capture like i did, that is in another level! and it even has TBC biult-in (emulated)
I found these too, thanks fellow nerd
@@madmodder123 you are welcome bro
EXCELLENT well informed video! Thank you so much for taking the time to produce such a detailed well informed video. Steven. U.K.
I bought the same brand of Easy Cap digital converter from eBay. I was having trouble with it detecting the video feed from my VCR. It turned out the extension USB cable was defective. I didn’t have anymore problems with it afterwards.
Another thing noticable about the DVD recorder vs the Elgato is the framerate. The DVD recorder appears to be capturing the 60 interlaced fields per second as 60 progressive frames per second, unless you were doing that conversion while resizing the video for TH-cam. In any case, you're getting the original motion of the VHS instead of having the interlaced fields merged into a 30 FPS video, creating the aforementioned motion blurring in fast action scenes.
I've seen a lot of analog to digital converted videos, some of official TV broadcasts that do this 60i to 30p conversion and even if they do a good job at de-interlacing the video, the loss of motion is noticeable if you remember the original broadcast or even have a recording of it yourself!
The bundled software generates 640x480 @ 30p, this is a known fact. But when used with third-party software it can AFAIK generate proper 720x480 @ 30i, so just don't use the bundled junk. Regarding the wobbling, it does not have built-in TBC, so this is normal. Your DVD recorder does have a TBC of sorts. The VC500 would be an ok dongle if it did not shift levels sporadically; something with its AGC that makes it change levels from time to time, and this makes it unusable. Price-wise, yeah, the Elgato is overpriced. The I-O Data USB2 is probably the best bang for the buck in the $50 range.
Yes, it would be interesting to see what this Elgato device really can do with better software (e.g. Virtualdub/AmaRecTV) and a stabilized video source.
What software would you recommend? I have access to both Mac and Linux in my house, but can pinch one of my kids' Windows laptops if absolutely necessary.
VHS and other old formats can look excellent! I always use a CRT to watch something like a VHS movie and when it’s on a huge CRT, it has that feeling of a high end setup from back when they were new. Especially with a good VCR, it can look just like a DVD on those TVs. I’ve got a stand-alone digitizer that can save to SD cards or USB, and it looks better than this. No interlacing at all, which helps a lot. It works well, but the ultimate setup for me would be to use an old Mac and have some Sony Handycams and other similar equipment, FireWire all the way! Combined with an older version of Final Cut and the final DV video will be excellent. I’d rather use a PowerPC Mac with old Final Cut than the software they provided for this, at least those were made for the Pro market. Great video!
I bought an unused elgato video capture at a garage sale for $5 a few years back. I had no idea they still sold it
$5? Usury! , my opinion
I got very lucky with my VHS video capture. I found a Samsung HDMI VCR/DVD player at Goodwill for maybe $12. Then I bought a $20 Vivitar (I think) HDMI capture card at Walmart.
I’m not sure if it’s as good or bad as other capture cards, but I’ve been beyond thankful for it, as I’ve saved several home movies.
I recently ordered a composite to HDMI device and an HDMI capture device. Theoretically this should produce terrible quality as the signal will be de-interlaced and at 60 fps. However, the result is surprisingly good!
I capture using virtualdub at 720x576 (PAL resolution)
These devices can't handle non-standard signals like that Tandy you showed. That system relies on several things that can only feasibly be done on a CRT. Many DVD recorders (and VHS decks!) are equipped to handle non-standard signals and stabilize them. Heck, I recorded some Sega Genesis video with another device and I couldn't get it to be stable until I passed it through a VHS deck. (The video is in my channel.)
And budget capture devices will only get worse since most TVs nowadays only support the very bare minimum to get old composite video displayed on the screen.
ElGato just coasts by on goodwill from their earlier products. The quality isn't that great and hasn't been for a long time.
Edit: I'm not sure if this is the case these days, but for years, this was the only "decent" video capture solution available for Mac users, IIRC. Easy to install and get capturing. Of course, Mac users also had the benefit of built-in Firewire when this came out so I'm not sure what the point of this was.
Now that I know what NOT to buy, I would love to know what I SHOULD buy to digitize VHS tapes properly!
same here! it's either a low framerate, bitrate, resolution.. is there really NO plug-and-play solution for digitizing VHS?
Search from thrift store some DVD recorder. I used Panasonic's, got very good results. Need to have computer also to make files to MP4.
@@clayerik thats not plug and play my friend. I want an all-in-1 solution, dvd recorder deteriorates the VHS quality
@@mistermariio Yes, but it's working solution. It was not deteriorating anything. I didn't find myself good plug and play solution and I searched it long time.
Thanks for this video. I was really close to buying one of these a while back and I remember seeing your video come up on my feed a few days afterwards. I thought "Elgato can't be that bad, can it?" and I ignored the video at first. Soon afterwards I decided against buying the Elgato because of how expensive it was (It was around £90 brand new and £60 used). Now that I knew I didn't want one, I watched this video to see if they were actually as bad as you said they were and thank god I did because jesus it looks terrible.
I imagine Magicbox has boxes of easycaps in use to do their “conversion” . Even this is a step up!
10:52 - Prompting for the Jim Leonard link for others; I found it, but I'm subscribed to his channel (I've met him in person, as well) and knew where to look.
If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Most of this eras cameras do have analogue tape but also a FireWire interface to access the media via PC.
Instead of encoding / decoding the signal multiple times and losing quality, i would prefer to use the camera built in converter and save the stream "as it is" on the PC.
I had my eyes on this thing when i started digitizing old tapes but I found the JIm Leonard tutorial and got the Startech device. Great stuff.
What's even better (if you want to spend the money and/or already own the hardware) is a good HDMI solution. I happen to own a RetroTink 5x Pro for gaming and the current software version is great for capturing video. Time base correction, motion adaptive deinterlacing for 50/60 fps stuff and 2:2/3:2 detelecine for everything shot on film. It's really awesome
Excellent excellent video!!! It's astonishing that one of the "professional" guys you're talking about...with all that equipment...has any business at all, very very strange attitude to his customers that are paying his wages for low quality transfers.
Just how it is these days, I suppose...
I use an avermedia HD H727 card . It gives the best analogue captures out there. Tons of them out there second hand.
That Elgato software looks like it hasn't been updated in about 15 years.
Yeah because some of the icons were from Windows Vista & 7 era.
@@卡拉永遠OK唱不完 they know people will be using OBS
@@BeautifulAngelBlossom Elgato cannot output PAL and OBS cannot record interlaced.
@@TTVEaGMXdetrue, it just direct deinterlace but you can select the deinterlacing methods and record in 59.94 or 60fps though.
@@卡拉永遠OK唱不完 There is no reason for me why I have to deinterlace.
Good video and advice.
I've been noticing this in a lot of different electronic devices, it's something that clashes between established brand names and no name stuff all the time.
The way I imagine without internal knowledge that this went, which is also the case for lots of different types of electronics, goes like this. At the time it was designed and created, Elgato probably had very good components there in comparison to the competition. Problem is, this product is only profitable if it can sell long term. So they invested a lot on brand recognition, marketing, etc.
But this strategy is incompatible with the product itself. Since it's all chip and software based, in probably less than a year better tech was already available, and it was also cheaper. But it's not worth for the brand to go back to the table and redesign the whole thing again with newer tech and software in mind. Given enough time and production, it's easy enough for a no name business to churn out something that works way better than their original product.
See, this also happened with HDMI capture stuff, with USB C chargers, it's happening with keyboards and mouse, with docking stations, with all sorts of electronics metering systems, with power banks, it could happen with portable projectors, it's mostly happened with audio stuff like Bluetooth speakers, portable microphones, and some others.
The HDMI capture in particular, I remember a time when generic brands worked so badly that I wouldn't recommend anyone to risk getting the white label stuff. They mostly worked very poorly or not at all, and even though they were cheap, you'd just be wasting money. Nowadays? I think most of the generic stuff works reasonably well. Unless you want something very specific to high end brands, a white label HDMI USB dongle will do.
There are lots of areas in the electronics and hobbist categories where something similar happened. Portable soldering irons, motorized screw drivers, CCTV camera testers, USB testers, power supply, devboards, several types of tools, vacuum cleaners, hair trimmers... the list goes on and on. Most people don't notice this because they are not dealing with this huge range of products at the same time I guess.
Branded stuff might still have the very top of the high end because it's a company that is not only in product development but also research, but those are kind the exception, not the rule. For the mundane stuff that not everyone has an interest in, you start seeing the generic stuff taking over expensive branded stuff - until the generic stuff coalesce into a brand themselves, that is. xD
Personally, I think Elgato is kinda on the way out. It's just that their competition still didn't coalesce under a brand with a consistent product line, looks and marketing strategy just yet. But most of the company's products have some generic competition that might not look as cool or well finished, but they are also a fraction of the price. Elgato branded itself around streaming and vlogging market. So, capture cards, microphones, webcams, lighting, etc. They are not for super high quality per se, they are for whatever is considered "good enough" for streamers. I guess because it's such a nebulous concept and new-ish, you still don't have much of a competition there... but it'll eventually happen.
Anyways, this doesn't always work, but just to leave a tip - if you are going for the generic stuff, try getting something that has new tech in something parallel to the product. Some stuff you can just add up the current year in search term.
In the case of VHS capture, the only thing I can think of is it having an USB-C port instead of regular USB. Or perhaps something that takes video from S-Video or SCART instead of RCA if you have a way to export the signal. Sometimes you get better electronic components on those. Also try looking at the description and specs of the product if they list a bunch of details on the internal components. This is kinda rare, but when it happens it's another layer of guarantee that whoever is doing those actually care. But it's never a guarantee...
Oh, another recent purchase I got was an HDMI Splitter. I had a decade old thing lying around that had all sorts of random problems and glitches. Got a new generic one... working perfectly.
$90 is expensive in 2024? Way back in the early 2000’s I tried all kinds of devices from $150 and lower… none worked well. Finally, I found the Canopus 300 which used Firewire instead of USB and that worked ok. It was also $300+ twenty years ago! It was worth it because it worked. Actually, it still does…
12:40 Im surprised that your ElGato device was create on my 18th birthday. That was surprising.
The older blackmagic intensity cards, both usb and pci, are so cheap these days no one should bother with elgato.
I have a number of DVD recorders I use for transfers. The two I use the most are a Panasonic DMR-EZ485V, and a Pioneer DVR-520H-S. Although the Pioneer is an older machine (from 2004), I tend to use it more than the others. Produces nice stable results. It has a built in HDD that allows you to break up videos and do minor editing. It'll be a shame when the HDD or disc drive in it finally fails. I've looked into making a clone of the HDD so a replacement could be had when needed, but from what I've read, one will need the Pioneer service remote and specific setup disk to initialize the unit even if you were to ever disconnect the original HDD (and or disc drive) and just simply reconnect it.
Pioneer DVR-560H -> HDMI (4:4:4) -> Blackmagic DeckLink Mini Recorder HD I'll test next.