ace123

i've had good luck with irfanview. it does batch resize/resampling as well.

and on vinyl, they do sound great because, noise aside, they have excellent dynamic range.

dlq04

I just used that one as an example; the vast majority are personal stuff I videotaped (Glen, Sebring, etc.), or cool old stuff from Speed Channel when it first came on (MG races, etc.)

dlq04

I wasn't expecting to see an improvment but then, I wasn't expecting to see it look worse either. I just wanted what I had to transfer the same.

I've been working on the MG for the past two days and haven't messed with this problem. I plan to try an (1) HDMI cable and (2) burn a DVD from VHS. If neither of these approaches improves anything, then I'm stuck with what I have. I have 90 days to return the LG tv or the recorder but I probably won't.

Bass

he's right... hence the reason analog tv looks awful on a high def tv

and HDMI cable will not help with resolution as that's a digital cable it will help with the DVD feed but no so much with the vcr feed to the tv

BUT for cables buy from monoprice - best prices for hdmi cables

dlq04

Fortunately I already have a couple HDMI cables for my family room tv setup, so I'll test with one of those.

boltonblue

Dave,
The process of making a 1080 image out of a 480 line image is called up-converting.
Basically the TV needs to have the blank lines filled in between what you have.
This entails taking the average of each of the neighboring pixels in the display.
A Simple average would be the pixel above and below, but this looks like crap usually.
It's better to take the pixel to the left and the right from the line above each pixel, the do the same on the line below.
These are not a straight average but a weighted average since the distance is farther away, it's not as important.
With 2 million pixels per frame at 30 frames per second, that a lot of multiply and add operations to derive each new pixel.
Unless you spent a lot on your video processor, it is very hard to do in real time.

you might be able to capture it with a computer video card and run some cleanup on it.
you don't care how long it takes to run cleanup and then save it to dvd.

Zippy

Hi Dave :wave:
What you are seeing is many generations of technology that don't play well together.
Many HDTVs do a rather pitiful job of handling the digital to analog conversions, to go from NTSC (old American TV standard) to ATSC (new digital standard). This sounds like it should be relatively easy, but it is not.

I know that this will sound like a real PIA but my suggestion is to convert all of you VHS tapes to DVD using something like http://www.roxio.com/

I say this for two reasons. The software will upconvert and I believe it will oversample, and might even reduce/remove video noise, artifacts, etc. The second reason is that VHS tape has a shelf life. I really do not remember what that life span is, but the take itself (I believe it is the polymers) break down over time.

If you want to archive on recordable CDs, I would also look at archiving CDs which are a bit more, but have less volatile compounds in that that wi break down over a very long time.

That's my 2 cents.

dlq04

Thanks Ken, the Roxio connection sure looks good in the video they play. That gives me another reason to buy a new pc, as mine getting as old as my VHS tapes.

dlq04

I played the tapes over the HDMI; no improvement at all. No surprise. Next we try a burn...

Zippy

Dave, I can't promise that this will work. I would check all of the DVD burn software to see who does the most processing. But using your computer to process, convert, and clean up the image should give you some relief.

I used an earlier version of Roxio to convert VHS dive trips to DVD and the quality was noticeably better.