Poor quality VHS captures

[wguru]

Regardless that my VHS playbacks are high quality, the resulting MF4 captures are low quality grainy).

I've read that increasing the but rate helps, but is there nothing that will convert VHS to digital w/o degrading the quality?

Is there any software capable of converting VHS to digital w/o loss of quality?

Any other tips apprectiated.

[GeorgeW]

Regardless that my VHS playbacks are high quality, the resulting MF4 captures are low quality grainy).

I've read that increasing the but rate helps, but is there nothing that will convert VHS to digital w/o degrading the quality?

Is there any software capable of converting VHS to digital w/o loss of quality?

Any other tips apprectiated.

How are you capturing the analog source video to your computer (i.e. what equipment is in use for the captures)

Do you have a digital camcorder with analog-to-dv passthrough functionality? If so, you can capture to high-quality dv .avi, edit all you want, and then output to final DVD (that's just one example, there are many other methods / devices for capturing).

Regards,
George

[wguru]

Thanks for replying. I use a KWorld USB 2 DVD Maker (dongle) which the MF4SE software (MF4's program) recognizes that capture device as USB 2800 and I use quality RCA type cables for the connections between the VCR, monitor and pc (latter being the USB connection).

By your reply, may I assume that aside from any potential issue w/the dongle's driver or cables, one should expect not to see any difference in the tape's playback and capture quality?

If so, then it seems I need to start looking for the problem. I'll start by switching cables. Thanks again for the reply.

[DVDDoug]

I believe your Kworld device is MPEG only. Assuming you are making a DVD, choose high-bitrate MPEG-2. (Standard video DVDs are MPEG-2.) However, a higher bitrate will make a bigger file so it's best to choose a bitrate that allows your file to fit on a DVD without re-compressing.

The quality will depend on four things. The quality of the Kworld analog-to-digital converter, the quality of the MPEG encoder (maybe built-into the Kworld hardware), the type of compression (DV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, etc), and the bitrate.

In general, you should be able to make a DVD that's almost as good as the VHS tape. Although DVDs are capable of better quality than VHS, they have different limitations and weaknesses. So, there will always be some quality loss.

Here's an online DVD Bitrate Calculator.

Quoting myself

The DVD standard does not set a fixed level of compression -

Higher bitrate = higher quality = bigger file size = lower compression = less playing time.

Lower bitrate = lower quality = smaller file size = higher compression = more playing time.

A good "rule-of-thumb" is 90 minutes per DVD. You can get that with a 6000k bitrate and Dolby AC3 audio. This bitrate is typical of commercal DVDs (The DVD spec allows video bitrates up to about 9,800k, and up to about 10,000k combined audio & video.)

Note - Your "free" SE version of Movie Factory that came bundled with the Kword device probably doesn't have a Dolby encoder... Dolby always gets paid!

[wguru]

Thanks ever so much for replying. I sure hope someone will either stick with me on this or else happen across this post sometime and eventually help pinpoint what the problem is. I'm praying it's just me and not the software.

TVR affords optional capture formats and also other capture settings of 'video inout formats' of either YUY2 or UYVY, (clueless here, but I use YUY2 as it seems to be the default), 'capture formats' MPEG1, 2 or 4, DVD-NTSC, AVI, VCD, etc. (I've tried DVD-NTSC and MPEG2), 'capture size' I use is 720x480, 'capture quality' I set to highest, bit rate which doesn't seem to do much if anything, and then of course frame rate which I use 29.97.

No improvements in burning yet. Here's what I've just finished trying. Instead of burning w/MF4SE, I burnt w/KWorld's PVR BurnDVD feature, that after capturing a test segment from a VHS video, three times using default (3950 bps) and increased byte rates (5000 & 8000). I also used the same captured files and burnt them using MF4SE's burn feature. Again, no joy. Note: 10000 is max affordable byte rate.

I also viewed each byte rate's captures (before burning), and still no noticable playback differences.

Also, w/hopes of enhancing my connections, I switched from RCA jack/cables to S-Video, and as mentioned changes in byte rates differed only in a size increase (no improved playback quality).

Quite frustrating to have high quality VHS and the resulting captured/digitized files play back so dismally on DVD, VCD &/or SVCD. I'm holding out hope that there's some other capture settings I can try, that or perhaps KWorld's PVR Plus Encoder (assumedly somewhat separate encoding software from PVR's TVR capturing encoder).

While KWorld's PVR/TVR settings offer options for either MPEG1 and MPEG2 formats (separate capture format settings), the parent program (PVR) affords a "PVR Plus encoder" which seems only necessarily used for converting oddball video files, and the manual says this about that encoder:
MPEG Encoder converts video files from one video format to another.
Supported formats of video input files are:
MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, AVI, DV-AVI, ASF, DivX, DAT, AVS and most other video files that Windows Media Player can play.
MPEG Encoder generates any of the following output formats:
When selecting MPEG 1 or MPEG 2 formats, the following specifications must be maintained:
Video: data rate is between 256Kbit/Sec ~ 10Mbit/Sec,
Audio: data range of MPEG 1, Audio Layer 2, is between 128Kbit/Sec ~ 224Kbit/Sec.

Thanks in advance if hanging in here w/me.

[wguru]

As I have video 'color' settings afforded in both my analog-digital dongle's software and in MF, I eventually found that adjusting those settings (mostly saturation) finally resulted in improved resulting DVD burnt videos. I pretty much left the dongle's 'color' settings at default, the non-defualt settings most likely were causing the poor quality viseo previews and DVD burns.