Elgato Video Capture is RUINING the quality of your VHS tapes!

I run a video transfer business in the UK. I never use any of these simple USB converter devices, they all produce small video files of limited quality. For most domestic formats I use DV capture equipment, the DV codec looks much better than these compressed files and is much better suited to editing. For miniDV and Digital8, the DV-AVI file format is not only a lossless bit for bit copy of the tape contents, it also retains the original time/date metadata which some software can display. Then for Video8/Hi8, most Digital8 players will output the same video file format from analogue tapes. For other domestic formats, a DVCAM deck or a Canopus AD-VC55 is used to generate it. Typically I additionally generate smaller de-interlaced MPEG4 files as well. For professional formats such as Digital Betacam, SDI video capture equipment can generate huge files for broadcast use. I appreciate that your DVD recorder gave better results than the USB capture device, but there are issues with that route too. MPEG2 files are not very well suited to editing, and to get the highest bitrate you are limited to about an hour on a single layer DVD. Another key component, and the reason you saw that wobble, is requiring a Digital Timebase Corrector (TBC as you have in the Hi8 player). Some high end SVHS players have this built in, and I also use external standalone TBCs on all of my video capture systems.

Some people might be rightly upset about owning one of these to archive their memories. Just remember the first rule of archiving is to archive. If you’ve captured using one these and now safely backed up a digital copy, excellent, it can no longer be completely lost forever. It’s better than no backup at all. If you can manage to archive it later with a better capture device, even better.

You can tell how old the device is by the YouTube logo in the software.

I purchased an Elgato Video Capture new two-ish years ago and after watching all my LaserDisc transfers back (they're on my channel if you're curious) I grew to hate that thing more and more. At first I didn't spot all the compression and frame dropping but it's impossible to ignore once you finally notice it. Found a Panasonic DMR-ES30V VCR/DVD recorder at the thrift store last week and from there I rip the DVDs via HandBrake, and it's a night and day difference.

12:55 someone at Elgato figured they could save a bunch of money and nobody would notice. Wonder if you're the first to figure this out?

The most outrageous part as you pointed out, is Elgato charges almost $100 for this device, on-par with the $10 ones.

The problem is the current generation of I.T people didn't grow up in the era of standard definition interlaced video and don't really know much about it. To be fair it's pretty esoteric stuff and took me years to understand how it works. Interlaced, progressive, field cadences, inverse telecine, double rate deinterlacing, Rec601 colours, nonsquare pixels, 704/720 width discrepancy for analogue/digital. It's kind of a nightmare to be frank. Even the big online streaming services don't know how to properly deinterlace and/or detelecine older TV shows. As a random example NBC's streaming service have Alfred Hitchcock Presents but they've just replaced every second field with a copy of the first field, rendering it as effectively 240p24 inside a 480p30 container with a 1:1:1:2 cadence (1 repeat frame every 5 frames...stuttery). This they then upscaled to 1080p30 and called it a day. They have no clue what 30i is or anything about field cadences. Another another random example, in the video I can see the Elgato unnecessarily downscales it horizontally to 640x480 because they don't know anything about nonsquare pixel formats. If they wanted 4:3 square pixels while preserving all resolution they would have scaled it to 704x528, or alternatively, left it as native 704x480 and flagged the metadata in the mp4 file as having an aspect ratio of 4:3 so the media player scales it to 4:3 at playback. If they didn't do that then I'm pretty confident they didn't flag the colour matrix and gamut as 601 either and the skin tones are almost certainly more orange than they should be, unless your media player is smart and guesses correctly based on the vertical resolution and/or framerate (I use MadVR and that has very good guessing logic, for example it sees vertical height < 576 therefore not PAL, and 24/30fps therefore definitely not PAL, therefore probably NTSC, therefore assume 601 matrix and SMPTE-C primaries).

I've been holding off on buying any capture device, including this one due to its high cost, and am glad to see you do this deep dive into a clearly inferior product. I'm still at square one.

It'd be awesome if you (or somebody with the time and hardware to do so) did a video comparing the various chips inside these converters, I have a pretty strong feeling there's only truly a handful out there that are branded under many different names

I bought this recently and have spent some 3 weeks digitalizing our old VHSC tapes. My father, who doesn't really care about technology at all, complained that it looked "odd" but acceptable. The purpose was to have our media in a format which will not decay with time, and to that end it does it's job. However, it's only after watching this I realize how our memories have been effectively corrupted from this device. Comparing the digital version with the direct output of our camcorder revealed how truly bad it was. I thought it looked OK but oh boy was I wrong. My parents are happy I could save our memories at all, but there are details which will never be recoverable. Thanks for bringing awareness to the awful quality if the thing. I wouldn't have known otherwise.

I know we're not naming names, but I'm pretty sure the channel you're talking about is the one that convinced me to buy one of these in the first place. Knowing that these were used in a professional setting was enough to convince me of their quality. Sucks to be the sucker I guess

I use an AJA Kona LHE for all types of analog capture. It can capture in uncompressed 10-bit format and in many other formats. I also use an HD Storm and a DV Storm. The key is to use formats that are true video formats, maintaining interlacing in PAL 50i and NTSC 60i video formats, so as to have a digital file that can be played back on a CRT monitor while preserving the quality of the analog image. Later, appropriate deinterlacing can be performed, or not performed at all on video signals that contain, for example, film footage, which in PAL format are usually progressive (meaning the two fields belong to the same frame but each contains half of the total lines of the PAL system with different information). These capture cards are not very expensive; the only issue is getting them to work using specific computers.

BRAVO! VWestlife for posting this video about the suspect quality I've noticed about those VHS to digital capture apps/devices; as years ago I spent dollars on a couple of them, and after noticing the lackluster quality results of those capture apps versus the process of 'VHS to DVD-R recording to digital ripping,' I've stayed with the 'DVD-R to digital ripping.' Thanks, VWestlife, for confirming my impressions about the inferior video transfer quality of those widely marketed VHS to digital capture devices/apps.

that Sony DVD recorder does a fantastic job !

This particular Elgato device always struck me as a device they should've stopped selling years ago but for some reason keep stock of it despite knowing that its not part of their priority devices, and likely hasn't been for a good number of years by now. Its a shame, because their 'Game Capture' lineup of capture cards are often excellent devices (albeit sadly overpriced in most scenarios, when you consider that devices from the likes of EVGA and NZXT can deliver the same performance at a cheaper price), but it seems like that's where their priorities are because its where they make all the large sum of their profits nowadays. Those who are looking for a more simple straightforward recording device (that keeps focus on these older connectors like Composite, S-Video, SCART, etc.) deserve something better, and this particular Video Capture device just doesn't cut it anymore. Especially when you compared it to that Sony DVD recorder (the quality on that looked fantastic!).

Hello. Thank you very much for a very solid chunk of knowledge about ripping analog media to digital - I was just finding my way in, not necessarily to archive old tapes, but rather to purposefully record stuff just for that analog vibe and it's quirkiness and artifacts. I was skeptic about Elgato from very beginning, so thank you very much for confirming my suspicion. But most of all, thank you for an epilepsy warning. As a person suffering from seizures on regular basis, I appreciate your concern. You're a real MVP.

There are flat screens with VGA for over 20 years now. VGA is fully analog. A flat screen "converts" this analog signals to a perfect digital image before it gets displayed. Why isn't this quality possible with this capture devices? freakin sucks.

4:28 I'm willing to bet that the YouTube upload button hasn't worked for several years, due to YouTube occasionally changing their APIs and breaking older software that uses them :)

you did a great job with the comparisons. people who have never watched a VHS tend to think they all are extremely grainy and low quality because of bad captures.

I use the Elgato to capture old VHS tapes. I find the quality is much improved if you run the signal from the VCR through a DVD recorder first before it goes to the Elgato. You don't need to burn a DVD or anything; it's just there to stabilise the signal. I'm also in a PAL region, so maybe it works better/worse with NTSC sources.