Hi, I've managed to use an old TV tuner with RCA input to stream video from my VHS to PC using VLC player, but using the Convert/Save... option of VLC isn't giving me any good results, and VirtualDub uses literally 1GB/min when saving in AVI format. Are there any good programs that are able to save this type of video, or alternatively what is the best compression program for converting the huge videos VirtualDub makes.

PS. The software that came with the tuner does not work with 64bit Windows.

The best device for capturing VHS and converting to DVD format is the ElGato Video Capture Device, which you can get from Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Video-Capture-Device-10020840/dp/B0029U2YSA/.

I was looking for software, not hardware, as I already have a capturing device. Although I might end up buying a new one with software, if I don't find out any other solutions.

Try using Honestech VHS to DVD. It's the best one I've ever used.

I have an old ATI All-in-Wonder VE PCI card, which is what I always use to capture video. It produces progressive 720x480 MPEG2 @ 8000 kbit/sec. The video files it makes are something like 3GB per hour of video. I realize it's not "HD", but this card makes really good-looking video.

Well, just record it. Just make sure you have a lot of space, then compress it.

All you have to do is compress the video with more compression options, merp.

You have to select compression manually in virtualdub. Otherwise it should default to raw RGB output.. which is expensive.
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html This is a good lossless codec if you want to capture as "raw" files but without the ludicrous space requirements.
You can also search for various MJPEG codecs and whatnot.
Final pass is the compression to the obsolete & lossy MPEG2 format that the DVD uses.

Remember interlacing/de-interlacing when dealing with interlaced footage!
I use virtualdub all the time, it's fantastic and works well for 720p60 captures that I do quite often (combined with avisynth you can do some pretty neat stuff).

I suggest capturing to lossless AVI (very big file, as you said 1GB/min) and then convert it to a lot smaller and quality h264 file using StaxRip
http://sourceforge.net/projects/staxmedia/
or Handbrake that is a bit more easy than StaxRip
http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

The other option is to capture to MPEG2 but in the end you'll need again to convert the file to Xvid avi (not recommended, very old and results in bigger files with inferior quality compared to x264) or h264 mkv because a 8Mbps Mpg files are also big. You can capture to MPEG2 with ArcSoft TotalMedia 3.5 that is compatible with 64bit Windows (Google it )

Thanks for all the replies, very helpful. Ok so its best to capture as uncompressed and then compress later, I'll have a look at StaxMedia. I only have about 100GB free on my external disk, so I think I need to buy a new HDD to do this project of converting old videos. For some reason virtualdub wouldn't allow me to change the compression settings (said that my hardware doesn't support it), but compressing on the fly might require too much power for my PC, so I'll do it later.

Looking around the web I found AVSVideoRecorder, which is free, so I'll try that too (had a couple of crashes with VirtualDub), or just stick with VirtualDub.



3GB/min, at first with just 1GB/min I was thinking I had a problem (just think how big a 3hr VHS will be after recording), but since it was uncompressed AVI I thought it might be true, this confirms it. Although I doubt that our old videocamera had that good graphics, but I don't want to loose any quality either.



I'll have a look.

You can use various encoders depending on what end format you want to have your videos in. You can either use the built in ones which unfortunately doesn't give you many options in terms of encoding quality, size control etc, or you use an external application such as Ripbot264 (for h264 encodes). There are many other encoders as well that will swallow a raw AVI file.

Thats about what you'd want for converting VHS tapes, plus MPEG-2 is good for DVDs since its the same format they use IIRC.

AVSVideoRecorder is working pretty well, quality might not be best, but the quality of the VHSs are not good when viewed on TV either. Thats one of the things I also need to figure out-how to maximize the quality, without going over the top.

I'm using default settings:
Video: MPEG-2; 640*576; 25fps; 6.05Mbits
Audio: MP2; 48000HZ; 128kbps

Is this good enough for VHS, or am I loosing quality? VirtualDubs AVI looks a bit better, but I can't notice huge differences-and if I use VirtualDub I will need to encode it later, which would take time, and I might just end up with what AVS is giving me real-time (+with preview, which I can't do in VirtualDub-not enough power in my laptop).

Store the video with VirtualDub, then transcode with ffmpeg.

Don't try compressing on the fly, I have an i5 2500K clocked to 4.2GHz and it can't do it...

Be sure to use HuffYUV compressor in VirtualDub and not complete uncompressed. It is lossless and virtually doesn't have any difference to uncompressed video.



It is good, I would personally use a higher bitrate, like 8 to 10Mbps for video and 256 or 320kbps for audio.

I used golden videos and everything worked out fine. Also if you are willing to pay Wolf/Ritz camera has a service that will do it for you.