VHS to digital conversion
Mar 8, 2021 17:49:45 #
Phil Singer
Loc: Beautiful Downtown Brighton Michigan
Once upon a time I had some luck doing this with a dongle connected to the output of a VHS player and this script running on openSUSE42.2:
<code>
#!/usr/bin/env bash
OUT="$1"
if [ "$OUT" == "" ]; then
echo "Usage: remux.sh out_prefix"
exit 1
fi
OUTCAPTURE="$OUT.avi"
OUTAUDIO="$OUT.aac"
OUTVIDEO="$OUT.h264"
OUTFINAL="$OUT.mp4"
echo "Remuxing..."
ffmpeg -i "$OUTCAPTURE" -acodec copy "$OUTAUDIO"
ffmpeg -i "$OUTCAPTURE" -vcodec copy "$OUTVIDEO"
MP4Box -add "$OUTVIDEO" -add "$OUTAUDIO" "$OUTFINAL"
echo "Cleaning up..."
#######################rm "$OUT.avi"
rm "$OUT.aac"
rm "$OUT.h264"
</code>
So, I know this can be done. Have not had to touch any of my (really old) VHS tapes in 6 years and have forgotten the details.
<code>
#!/usr/bin/env bash
OUT="$1"
if [ "$OUT" == "" ]; then
echo "Usage: remux.sh out_prefix"
exit 1
fi
OUTCAPTURE="$OUT.avi"
OUTAUDIO="$OUT.aac"
OUTVIDEO="$OUT.h264"
OUTFINAL="$OUT.mp4"
echo "Remuxing..."
ffmpeg -i "$OUTCAPTURE" -acodec copy "$OUTAUDIO"
ffmpeg -i "$OUTCAPTURE" -vcodec copy "$OUTVIDEO"
MP4Box -add "$OUTVIDEO" -add "$OUTAUDIO" "$OUTFINAL"
echo "Cleaning up..."
#######################rm "$OUT.avi"
rm "$OUT.aac"
rm "$OUT.h264"
</code>
So, I know this can be done. Have not had to touch any of my (really old) VHS tapes in 6 years and have forgotten the details.
Mar 8, 2021 19:19:36 #
John Hicks
Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England
I am lucky I have a machine that takes the and records on to DVD it is made by Toshiba.
Mar 8, 2021 19:20:10 #
John Hicks
Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England
I am lucky I have a machine that takes the cha tape and records on to DVD it is made by Toshiba.
Mar 8, 2021 19:31:13 #
If you guys have vcr tapes they should be standing up on any of it's 4 slim sides and not on the 2 flat sides otherwise they will not last too long.
Mar 9, 2021 00:57:04 #
Just picked up a like new GoVideo unit that works both ways. VHS to DVD or vice versa (although can't imagine wanting to do that!) The DVD copy works very well on an HDTV. I'm converting a bunch of 30-40 year old tapes that haven't been played in probably at least 20-30 years and they still work perfectly.
Mar 9, 2021 10:37:41 #
Toshiba Recorder will work u play VHS comes out of vhs into toshiba recorder go from recorder to tv i dod all my VHS came out good takes some time though be patient
Mar 12, 2021 20:45:40 #
Using Diamond VC500 which I’m not real impressed with can output different video types, MPG, AVI, WMA etc. It says MP4 but it does not (says a Windows 10 issue). So outputting to MPG, a full tape is about 6.5GB. Now MPG is not a real current format, MP4 is more acceptable.
I read in the tapes as MPG. Outputting to other formats did not improve quality but some formats were extremely large, AVI. I found a "free" conversion program that will convert and clip files to MP4 so a 6.5gb input file can be converted to MP4 file size about 1.5gb
https://www.videoconverterfactory.com/hd-video-converter/
Nice feature was allowing to clip the one large to multiple smaller files.
I read in the tapes as MPG. Outputting to other formats did not improve quality but some formats were extremely large, AVI. I found a "free" conversion program that will convert and clip files to MP4 so a 6.5gb input file can be converted to MP4 file size about 1.5gb
https://www.videoconverterfactory.com/hd-video-converter/
Nice feature was allowing to clip the one large to multiple smaller files.
Mar 14, 2021 12:59:22 #
crphoto8 wrote:
I'm finally converting my old VHS tapes from ~30 y... (show quote)
I put all of my photos and videos (and many other files) on Dropbox for cloud storage and sharing. A 2 TB account is $120/year, 3TB is $199/year. I have been very happy with it and think it's a fair price.
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