I had a TV Capture card (i.e. A Hauppage WinTV-Express) from a long time ago that I’d bought when I was setting up my parents with a HTPC, but after building it they decided they wanted a desktop instead so it never got installed. It has a composite phono connection so it will be perfect for connecting to a VCR. So I installed it in my main PC, booted into my Vista x64 OS and tried to install it. This was my first hurdle as Hauppage have released no drivers for this card to make it compatible with Vista, instead, like some other unscrupulous companies, they have released a new card, that i’d have to buy, that is compatible with Vista. I have no intention of dumping this card because Hauppage won’t get around to retroactively providing support for it.

From research, the latest OS supported is XP. No biggy, I have an XP disc. However Dual-Booting with Vista can be messy due to the fact that both OS’s want ownership of the C:/ drive. Initially I had thought to install XP under VMWare, but due to the fact I’d need all of my PC’s power for the VHS encoding I decided against this and instead I’d install XP on a completely separate drive that was not being used. I had 2 320GB WD SATAII drives lying around from my last RAID 0 setup so I decided to use one of those. I disconnected the usual OS drive and installed the replacement. The OS install was fairly painless and as soon as I got to the desktop I installed the WinTV drivers, which completed without issue again (why couldn’t these drivers of been provided for Vista? )

I tried out the software that comes with the card (i.e. WinTV2000) but it wasn’t the best. I ran into a bunch of errors when trying to record the VHS stream so decided to start looking for an alternative. The first application I found was:

AMCap: The software is fairly basic, I mean its simple which is a good thing, but there was little in the way of knowing which codec to use for capturing the video and audio stream. Initially I thought this wasn’t going to be a problem as I’d just capture it uncompressed and then compress it at a later stage. I soon realized that this was not an option as I found the uncompressed video was about 1GB per minute. A 3 hour VHS would end up being 180GB’s, and I have to do about 30 VHS tapes (do the math). So I dumped it.

Next, I went back to a piece of software I’ve heard a few people use before:

VirtualDUB: Compared to AMCap and WinTV2000 this is like an explosion of information. But still there is little in the way of a guide as to what codec I need to use for encoding VHS. I don’t want to lose any video quality, but I also don’t want the file to be too large and pointless as VHS is fairly low res. After a while of messing with it I wasn’t closer to having a setup which would allow me to quickly pop in a tape and start copying it to the HDD. So I dumped it and went searching again.

Oddly, after another good while of searching I kept coming back to a piece of software that was consistantly recommended, and that I knew about but hadn’t considered.

Windows Movie Maker: I guess my natural bias against using MS applications was rearing it’s ugly head again. I use the MS OS out of compulsion as it supports all the applications and games I use. But aside from that my catalog of used apps are either Opensource or freeware. I’ve dabbled in WMM before, as it’s bundled with XP and Vista, mainly for Youtube videos when I just want to quickly add a title to them. But in regards to video capture and encoding I’ve never even considered it. However countless A/V forums where recommending it for VHS ripping. So I fired it up, aquired the capture source and actually found the UI gave me all the details I wanted. It lets me specify how long to record for, how large the file should be and what it’s quality should be. The application then does all the work for me, picking the correct codec settings that will give me my desired results. After a few tests I found the output wasn’t bettered by any of the other applications I had been using so there was no reason why I shouldn’t use it.

Here is a sample from one of the videos (below). Yeah the quality is horrible, but that’s VHS for you (it’s only when you look back that you see how far media quality has come). Unless I paid with an arm and a leg to get them upconverted frame by frame this is about as good as they are going to get. Still for me it’s more about peace of mind. We can now pack the tapes away into sealed storage, where they won’t be eaten up any more by dodgy read heads and watch the DVD’s and media files from their copies instead.

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