Converting Porn VHS Tapes to digital
 

Hey... was wondering if there are people who are converting old VHS porn tapes to digital.

I'm in the process of heading down this path for some VHS that's never been released on DVD that I'm in the process of acquiring. It's something that I may look to do long term in order to preserve some of this great material before it disappears forever.

I figure there must be people in this place who already do this so I'm curious as to what others are doing to get the best transfers.

Good VCRs are hard to come by these days, so I'm considering a significant investment over what I have now to ensure the highest quality transfers.

Would love to hear back from others on what they're doing and/or suggestions.

EZ converter was what I used last time. Still have it somewhere. You plug one end of it into a scart convertor, which turns the three coloured plugs into a scart connection for the back of your vcr; then the other end into a usb port; in the middle of which is the magic box. Simple device so long as you select the correct format. You hit play on the video machine, then record on the on screen player, and hey presto. one digitised video file, though often of a large size unless you chose a smaller file option again. Bit of trial and error will see you through with one of those things though.

It's been some time since I've done this but I used a filter that I purchased online from a company in the Middle East that removed the Copy guard protection. It was plugged in line between the bar and the interface to the computer. The interface we used was an onboard creative sound labs card that had front panel RCA inputs. This worked on Windows 7 pro and then we upgraded to Windows 10. It appears to have upgraded even though card and drivers are no longer available. The software used was Nero 12 Vision for importing, editing and burning to DVD.

I had a few home movies on VHS i needed to convert, picked up a cheap dazzle usb unit at best buy. plugged it in via s-video, loaded the pinnacle capture software and plugged in the av cables and it went ok, the files were huge though ...2 hour movie was around 30 gb... then i used handbrake to convert to mp4, which is the standard nowadays for dvd movie burning/playing, set the bitrate to 1500 and the files shrank to a manageable size, I kept the dimensions the same... i think i noticed that when you pull a video off of an established commercial DVD, it will be a mp4 and the dimensions aren't really huge. i was scared of what that dazzle thing would do if i tried HD. the files would have been hundreds of gigabytes.

so, i have them on my PC and they play fine, i can't testify if they burn to dvd and play from a DVD player to TV feasibly.

a few years ago, tv tuner cards were the way folks did the video import/capture.... not really applicable unless using a desktop model PC if going that route though. most of the tuner cards are over ten years old (xp/vista days) and getting the drivers for modern operating systems (windows 10) is futile.

I used to do transfers back in the day of non-porn, but that was 15 years ago. I had a Canopus ADVC-1000 then that worked well converting to DV. I long since sold that but I have a MiniDV camera that does passthrough so I can transfer tapes that way. The Sony VCR I used then no longer works so I picked up a middle of the road Panasonic off Ebay for about $60. So far it's working decently. I also have an ATI TV Wonder USB capture device coming that I'm going to experiment with.

I'm using VirtualDub to adjust brightness, color, deinterlace and do some low level noise filtering. So far the results are not bad at all on my practice runs.

To my knowledge, commercial porn doesn't use Macrovision due to licensing fees.

I was digging through my hoard the other day, noticed a PCI firewire card. I think that is a direct link to mini-cams and video import.
i used s-video out of the VCR to the dazzle capture device, and thern plugged in the audio cables, i cant remember which color, but the dazzle had the ports color coded. .i remember reading that s-video and not the av cables were the way to go before the hdmi config became mainstream.

i think older windows (xp) had the movie maker app available, not really sure about the newer windows releases.

I have a couple of VCRs that still work (vhs and beta) and I hook them up to a Panasonic DVD Recorder dmr-es20 to copy video tapes to DVDr.

A couple of years ago I bought Elgato Video Capture equipment from amazon.com so I could record directly to my PC and Macbook Pro but I have yet to hook it up.

still got two working vhs machines and two working dvd recorders so i simply hook them up and off we go. One of the dvd recorders (the oldest) has much better editing capabilities than the other. Never been tempted to try to do it straight to pc.

My 2 cents: One of the advantages with cards vs usb capture devices would be that cards generally allow you to get an uncompressed stream from the VCR while USB capture devices usually compress the stream to your hard drive. Size is of course less but so is the quality. So always use maximum settings (bitrate, resolution etc.) when using a capture device.

Doing some post processing (noise reduction, de-interlacing) is recommended and in my opinion you get better results if you run the raw file through an encoding software instead of burning directly to DVD. And if you go for the encoding software option don't encode for a specific size or a set bit rate since every movie is different when it comes to noise and compression.

This But I put a " video stabilizer inbetween. supposed to cut out a lot of the white noise and on the odd tape with some sort of copy protection it wipes it out

https://thumbs2.imgbox.com/f3/dd/4B80OBWX_t.jpg https://thumbs2.imgbox.com/2e/d2/Gfwg4GQA_t.jpg

F****** I paid $99 for mine, I'll go pick up a spare at that price during the week