after i capture my vhs tapes to my hard drive and replay my video on my pc the resoultion is worse than the original vhs. i think this is due in part to the original video. however there must be a way to at least capture the same quality tp the hard drive. i am dropping no frames. thanks any response is welcomed

Look here for information:

http://www.divx-digest.com/articles/vhs_capture.html

There is allways going to Be some loss Captureing from a Analog source especially from Old VHS tapes...

precisly luisifer.

There is a general misunderstanding that because vcd or svcd are said to be in the same quality as vhs, then it would look the same as the original whs when you capture. This is simply wrong. What this means is that if you have the master source and from that source at the same time recorded to vhs and captured to vcd/svcd - then you would have the same quality !

Everytime you record or capture something analog you will ALLWAYS lose some quality, so if you first record it to vhs you lose quality there, if you then try to capture from the vhs that allready had lost quality, you will lose quality once more. And everytime you reencode you lose quality even at the highest possible bitrate.

Morale is:
Allways use the best possible source, know that a vhs is the absolute worst source for capturing, firstly because it is allready in very low quality, secondly because vhs is a mechanical construction that can NEVER ever be build to timesynch 100%, tapes stretch during time, mechanical components gets worn, even a new mechanical unit cannot be 100% precise, this is a technological impossibility. Allways capture with the highest possible resolution and bitrate allowed for the format you want in order to minimize the loss. If the format you want are vcd, which in itself is lowquality due to lowresolution and lowbitrate, then capture with highest resulotion and bitrate allowed by your capturedevice and reencode using a good softencoder that can spend all the time in the world examining and compensating for errors in the source.

ps: and above all - lower your expectations of the resulting quality if your source is less than perfect. It will never be exactly like the original.

If I didn't know better, I could despair all together after reading the last 2 posts, and abandon all hopes of capturing VHS.

This is not so. I get VERY GOOD results capturing VHS. The way to go is to capture the VHS source to a Video Digicam and then to the computer, if you have a digicam (this greatly improves quality). If you don't then capture at a higher resolution than VHS (352 x 240 NTSC), and then resize before encoding. You should at least double the vertical resolution, because VHS is interlaced, and unless you do so, you'll lose have the information. The link in the first reply explains this in more detail.

Secondly, there are good filters for processing the captured video, and improving the quality. I think the best is Convolution3D, which has a setting for "Bad VHS quality". It is an AviSynth filter, and can be used in the frameserving process.

In conclusion, although you cannot expect to get better quality than the source, if you know what you're doing, you'll get very good results.