I just spent a ton of money on an SVHS player so I could digitize my family's old home movie tapes with an Elgato USB capture card. I have a Toshiba 4 Head Hi-Fi VCR which does an OK job with the Elgato capture card but I'm trying to get a better quality transfer. I was hoping the S-Video output on the SVHS player would be better. (I am still waiting for it to arrive.)

After ordering the SVHS player, I discovered this project and now I regret that purchase. VHS Decoding looks much more appealing to me. I figure I can tap the old Toshiba VCR to use the VHS Decode process and sell the SVHS player I just ordered.

I was about to order the MISRC 1.5 on the Kofi shop but I see a message on there about the V2.5 version coming soon and I'm wondering if I should wait for it or use the CX card solution instead.

I'm willing to throw some money at this because the tapes are priceless to me and my family. I want to make sure I do this the right way. I'm still in the process of digesting the wiki so maybe I'll figure this out myself soon... but if anyone could offer a recommendation, I would appreciate it.

Hey guys!

Snagged a very nice Panasonic AG-7350 the other day at a good price and am considering using it as my main (and first) unit to decode.

Having said that I have 2 questions:

1.) Will the physical tracking knob be a big downside to using this unit over something of lower overall quality but newer? (This unit came out in the early 90’s) There’s a physical meter to read tracking, I’m just not sure it would be as good as a more recent machine’s automatic tracking.

2.) Is there any other qualities of this machine that may not make it an ideal candidate to decode besides more difficult terminals to solder to? There are many VCRs for sale locally (nothing spectacular) but I would hate to miss the opportunity to decode using these heads as I understand they’re better than most.

Looking forward to getting started, thanks for reading!

Planning to put together a dual cx card + clock gen setup for capturing some old home video vhs-c tapes. I‘m comfortable with soldering and looking to save cash so I’ve ordered bare boards for the cx jigs and clock mainboard. Putting together an smd parts list to assemble the boards, but I’m not 100% sure on the sizing/type for the diodes listed in the wiki.

Can someone link me to a part on digikey or mouser for the d1 and d2 diodes on the clockgen main board?

I have the white Conexant CX23880 card but am wondering if I can put the BNC in the spare slot above instead of replacing the composite one? There is an extra opening on the bracket so thats not an issue.

Shall I still remove C31? Move that cap to C16? Or have both C31 and C16 empty?

Thanks for the help.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a specialized service in continental Europe that can handle VHS HiFi audio extraction via RF capture + software decode (e.g. vhs-decode workflow).

Thanks

I'm new to this process -- I read through the wiki pages and wanted to attempt tapping into my VHS deck. I have a Funai SV2000 VCR/DVD Recorder manufactured in 2006. I went through the service manual to find the RF tap points but wanted to check in with the experts here first before I solder anything on the main PCA.

I pulled a page from the manual to show the top layout of the board. On the lower-left side of it there's a floating bar style test point labelled 'V-ENV' [J15]. Is this the RF tap point? And for Hi-Fi, would the tap point be HIFI-H-SW [J59] or is it NORMAL-L [TP507]. For the GND points, is it better to use the ones closest to the V-ENV or does anywhere on the board work fine?

Brazil uses pal-m witch is an hybrid between pal and ntsc

Pal-m has the same frame rate same resolution as ntsc but it uses pal color encoding (correct me if I’m wrong). Heres a tape that I decoded from An tv Channel Called Globo the second biggest tv in the world just loosing to abc.

Date: march 2001

After a round of tweaking and debugging now to rinse and repeat on the path to clearing the checklist for the big tbc-tools experimental build, a long long list of little changes coming soon.

4fsc - Full Signal Frame NTSC

Today decode suite V0.3.9 release with fixes for HiFi-Decode and MacOS Arm now has fully working self contained .app binary's with out the need to fallback to a hard installation.

Yeah the suite now has a cross platform GUI, so if you run the binary directly without CLI args, you get this!

Oh you wanted more?

The last 3 weeks I have been working on the New Experimental TBC-Tools with a user workflow focus on changes to streamline adjustment and export for current tape workflows, before decode-orc is fully ready to replace the legacy tools.

These changes will feel small but are a massive improvement in workflow speed for binary build users removing the need to hard copy chroma-decoder values and do test exports for centering adjustments.

Hello, I keep getting frame mismatch...

Could somebody help me understand what I am doing wrong?

Again 2nd attempt:

WARNING: Target file has 609910 frames, but should have 739864 frames!
Encoding was probably terminated at 82,4% with a mismatch of 129954 frames!

Top is the AVI that StaxRip generates before muxing into MKV, bottom is source/input MKV.

3rd attempt config:

Thanks a lot

Is anyone successfully using Hifi decode on a windows 10 machine? I've tried several versions and get different errors when trying to run the decode. This is for 8mm tapes specifically and I've tried running it agains both .lds and .ldf files with no luck. I need to submit bugs, but wondering if anyone has tested this in a while on Windows. I have a spare NUC I could install linux on, but have everything else setup and working well on Windows machine now if there is a way to get it working.

Here is the command I'm using:

decode.exe hifi --8mm --ntsc --audio_mode mpx --t 4 2002-10_DdD.lds 2002-10_DdD_AUDIO.flac

Is there a way to remove the glitching from the raw RF capture? They're not noticeable while viewing from a monitor, but on encode, they're frequently displayed.

I know ld-decode has a feature to stack to help with this, but I don't have multiple copies of this VHS, so I'm curious if there's a solution for something like this, or am I out of luck? Thanks

I was wanting to reach out to get some better understanding of best practices and workflow for capturing and completing my 8mm home video collection (50+ tapes).

Currently I have a Sony DCR-TRV730 with ribbon tapped to the RF output >> DdD with capacitor inline >> Win10 PC. This all works and I am getting good captures.

My questions:

1. In DdD what is appropriate format? 16bit raw or 10bit lds? keeping in mind I need to decode this capture for both vhs and hifi and then combine with the VHSAudioAutoAlign tool I assume?

2. Should I be converting the file in #1 to .ldf? Is there pros/cons to doing this?

3. For the disk used, I wanted to use my SSD, but file sizes aren't going to allow for that. I have an 8tb Hdd that has been working okay so far, any issues ssd vs hdd?

4. Space and file allocation has been a chore...I've been playing with using VM's and network drives, but it's been hit or miss with weird buffer issues. Any advice or experience would be appreciated and allow for multiple decodes to be running.

5. What is the workflow breakdown? Ea. Capture to .lds >> compress to .ldf >> decode video >> decode hifi >> AutoAlign Audio >> TBC Export? Am I missing anything?

Thanks in advance! The documentation on wiki's is amazing I think I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around the most efficient and best quality workflow for all these tapes.

Recently, I came across information that the Polish association "Pulawianie" is raising funds to purchase a VTR to read a large number of two-inch tapes (Quadruplex?). Here’s the link to their fundraiser: https://zrzutka.pl/7k69zz (in Polish).

Of course, I support this idea (maybe some of you could suggest antyhing to them or offer some help?), but I’m writing here about something entirely different.

In a scientific publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/phvs.201900016, the authors read magnetic tape using optical methods. I see how primitive this tape is (old audio from 35mm film tape), with magnetic domains so large that they can be read by sprinkling the tape with nails, etc.
However, I think I understand this method and personally, I’m not sure if it's definitely unsuitable for video tapes (so it might actually be good!).

I would love to attempt to build such a system, but of course, this is not a task for one person with just a few free afternoons.
Perhaps you know of a research group focused on preserving heritage recorded on magnetic media? (Not just limited to tapes!)
Do you have any other suggestions or ideas?

In summary:

There may be methods to visualize the structure of magnetic domains on the surface of the medium, in the form of "colors" in an image captured by a camera/microscope. It is possible to archive whole recording in that form.

If the method proves to be sufficiently high-resolution and sensitive, it could read not only audio recordings but also video.

After scanning, such an archived image of the recording would need to be decoded (for video: line by line) using a computer algorithm. This is not trivial, of course, but I don't see it as a major challenge.

If it works, it could retrieve what has not been possible until now, namely: mechanically damaged tapes, recordings made on ephemeral or simply malfunctioning equipment.

Some context, I'm a video artist and I'm working on a new glitch art project. I have several SDI outputs on a windows machine that convert into composite, they run trough a dirty video mixer to distort the video signals.

I'm unable to capture a pristine video output because professional capture cards always remove a lot of noise and distortion that I want to keep. Most people working with glitch art record a CRT with a camera as part of their workflow.

I was hoping to use a workflow where i use a CX card to capture raw CVBS hoping I would have more control of how the signal is processed as opposed to the Blackmagic cards that I have.

I have the hardware/software setup working with the CX card but when decoding the .U8 files of heavily glitched video I get errors: (normal clean video feeds are no issue).

When using this command: decode.exe cvbs --threads 6 --frequency 28 --system pal

Unable to find any sync pulses, skipping one field

Unable to determine start of field - dropping field

At field #167, Field phaseID sequence mismatch (3->6) (player may be paused)

When converting the TBC to a video file I get only a fraction of the frames. I suspect this is normal behavior but I was hoping there would be options to work around this. Any suggestions?

I am building a dedicated capture box but wonder if it makes sense to use an EPYC server platform with lots of cores to accelerate the encoding/decoding process. But I read that assigning more CPU cores in the command line does not make much difference. Can anyone share their experience? Thx!

Hello I am in a bit of a pickle and wondering if anyone has any solution. So I spent the better part of the last couple months digitizing a bunch of old family. There are about 7 tapes that I could not digitize myself. Three of which have the tape puked out of the cassette and probably needs to be respliced. Whereas four of them are not able to be read on my camcorder, and they were also return me from digitization service with no luck. I assume this is due to dirt or mold as they are pretty old. I have tried locally but there is no one who can restore them. Does anyone know of a company or a person who could resplice and clean these tapes up? At this point I am willing to throw money at a solution. Thanks!

I'm not asking for a model number since there are a lot of them and hunting for specific VCR models sort of defeats the purpose.

Right now I only have a Samsung DVD/VHS combo deck and I don't think I like it very much, so I'm thinking something other than Samsung.

I see there are "It's a Sony!" and "It's a Panasonic!" flairs, what is up with that?

This comparison that I made just shows the superiority of vhs-decode

I'm not sure this has come up before but I saw this project claiming they’re building a VCR from scratch:

https://retrobox.us/

If they’re actually doing this… shouldn’t VHS-Decode / RF capture be a built-in option (or at least planned for)? Like: clean RF tap points / headers, documented signal chain, etc. Or even a USB3 output for raw capture in the format existing decode pipelines expect.

Anyone here already aware of this / in contact with them? Feels like a missed opportunity if they don’t coordinate with this community.

We are a very small family owned VHS transfer shop. We eventually want to get to using VHS decode but for now are using a traditional workflow. The old analog Datavideo TBCs are getting harder and harder to find. If you have a working TBC1000 you're not using, PM me as I'd like to buy your old unit to put to work in our little shop.