Encoding VHS Home Movies

[Weatherton]

I would appreciate some suggestions on what codec to use and what settings to use to encode a few hundred hours of home movies. I want to get them down to a reasonable size while not sacrificing much quality. I am capturing the video as uncompressed DV and then using Mediacoder to compress them. I'm considering H.264 and DivX at the moment...

 

[gsellis]

Considering that VHS is about half the quality of DV, anything you have is the best it will be without using something like the advanced Canopus AVDV devices to clean it. H.264, DivX, and WMV will store what you have without too much loss. H.264 can be more intensive and hard to find a player for (you can get over the counter DivX settop players currently for DVD). A stream rate of 2000kbps on WMV would be probably keep everything. I don't use DivX that much, but I think the latest codec uses about the same stream rate for DVD quality, which is higher than your source VHS.

 

[Weatherton]

Thank you for your input. Do you have a recommendation for the resulution I should use?

The tapes are being captured by a Canopus ADVD-50 at 720-480, but that is probably a higher resolution than necessary. Also, in some players the video seems to be stretched horizontally, making people appear fat. I'm not sure why this is but if someone understands, I would like to know how I can prevent that.

 

[rh71]

Are you simply going to burn a bunch of encoded files onto a DVD for storage/archiving/watching or do you plan on 1 DVD = 1 VHS movie ?

 

[Weatherton]

I plan to burn a bunch of encoded files on DVD for storage etc. -- so I was hoping to get several (or hopefully many) VHS tapes per DVD.

 

[yukichigai]

Okay, lemme lay it on ya:

VHS stores video in (roughly) 320x480 interlaced format. The nearest appropriate DVD resolution is 352x480, which can be interlaced. If you can get your video card to record the input in 320x480 to something lossless (uncompressed AVI for example) you can convert it to DVD-compatible MPEG-2. To do that I highly recommend TMPGEnc, which is easy to use. It costs a little money past the 30 day trial for MPEG-2, but it's very easy to use.

I'd type out the whole process but it takes a while. Feel free to ask me for details though.