Originally Posted by deadgrandma
Anyway, I know this is going off topic but has anyone had much experience in ripping VHS to computer format? Any suggestions on best method? Are them USB VHS players as cheap and nasty as the USB turntables?
|
USB VHS players can be (and usually are) much worse than USB turntables. USB itself doesn't stop the turntables from offering you 96kHz/24bit PCM, but decent quality video needs a lot more bandwidth.
As with analog audio, the analog-to-digital converter (which you've gotta have somewhere) doesn't need to be an internal component of the player itself. There are intermediary devices you can connect between your computer and whichever player you want to record the analog content from. There's a whole quality spectrum of such devices. I can't find the official page for the exact product, but I've had good experiences with something a lot like
this.
I wouldn't say that Firewire itself is the #1 most important thing about a product like that, but you should nevertheless beware of video recorders based on USB 2.0. Since uncompressed video would be pushing the bandwidth limits of that interface, USB 2.0-based recorders tend to pre-encode the video into some form of lossy akin to the video quality we've come to expect from most webcams.
The Canopus devices I've used, could get through Macrovision. I don't know if the one I linked to, can. It tends to be a non-advertised feature on any of the recorders which do it, so this is something you have to independently research before committing to buy a particular device.
This also ought to go without saying, but there's a whole quality spectrum for VCRs, too. It's been my experience that the multi-format players (which do PAL and NTSC) don't yield NTSC as nicely as an NTSC-only player, but I can't speak for PAL-only players, or for any professional-grade multi-format players released more recently. Maybe you already have a player which is awesome at one or both, and the only thing missing from it is you can't already hook it up to your computer - so you might not need to buy a whole new player just to get that recording-to-computer capability.