VHS to...?

[r3nci]

My grandmother has a huge pile of VHS tapes full of material she's been recording off TV since, I suppose, sometime in the 90s. I am looking to transfer these tapes either directly to my computer, or to a DVD which I could then transfer to my computer. My questions are as follows:
1. How would I go about capturing these tapes? Would it be a matter of a set-top recorder, a capture card...?
2. What would be the highest-quality format, if transferring directly to computer, to render to? File size is not an issue, only quality.
3. What would be, if any, the legal implications of transferring these cable TV-sourced tapes? This is a personal project; I am not planning on using these tapes, or the derivative files, for anything commercial.
Thank you.

[hello_hello]

1. A capture card. They're not terribly expensive and there's USB capture cards if you prefer to do it that way. Mine has S-Video and component inputs.
2. I can't vouch for every card, but mine (A WinFast TV Tuner/capture card) captures in a few different formats.... or at least the software which comes with the card does..... mpeg1, mpeg2, wmv, h264, uncompressed AVI and DVD/VCD compliant files. Someone may also be able to recommend some alternative third party software, but if you're really fussy, capturing in an uncompressed (lossless) format and then converting it to a more user friendly format later might be the way to go.
3. My first guess would be "none". My second guess would be "who cares?"

If you've not watched a VHS tape on a HD TV or computer monitor before, prepare yourself for how horrible the quality will be.... ;)

[Ghitulescu]

3. they are still copyrighted, despite being sent free to air. I think that under most if not all jursdiction is ok to use them as you like as long it's not for commercial purposes.

1. considering these are "commercial" products, I won't expect colour/tint issues, nor white-balance ones, only quality degradation. Should the analog transmission be ok (no "snow" or the like) and the tapes still in pristine condition, I (personally) would go directly to a good DVD-recorder set in its max. quality. Since it's a commercial product, I expect no fancy editing, just cuts, which can be done easily in almost any cutter, without reencoding (at limits with "smart" cuts). I said that in max. quality (1h/DVDR) the results are more or less identical, but the "good" in a good recorder has to do mainly with its analogue part (which degrades the signal in cheap clones). A TBC would be needed also when the tapes seems to be ok. And of course, get the best S-VHS eqiupment you can get.

Check the sticky for analogue capture for more details.

I tend to do (but that's only me) to do all the things in HW. I spare extremely long PC processing times, with all that PC implies.

2. The best format for SD is DVD (distribution) and (for consumer) DV (for editing). DV has also some drawbacks (search for DV artefacts) and it's a bit too much for VHS. DVD is a distribution format, MPEG-2 interlaced coding has also issues (search for chroma upsampling) but it's universal and 1 step-up compatible (ie for Blu-ray). Your choice.

[setarip_old]

@r3nci

Hi! What would be, if any, the legal implications of transferring these cable TV-sourced tapes?The implications, if any, would most likely be the same as they were for your grandmother, when she initially recorded the videos...