S-Video to RGB

[nick1austin]

Does anyone know where I could get my hands on an S-Video (sometime mistakenly called S-VHS) to RGB convertor?

The are plenty of convertors the other way around (I used to own one made by Keene and very good it was too).

The time has come to digitise my collection of VHS tapes. To try and keep thr quality I want to use the player's S-Video output which I intend to convert to RGB then into the TiVo AUX.

[steveroe]

Something like this? http://www.play.com/Electronics/Electro ... d:12455128

(I'm no expert on this, just googled "s-video to rgb converter"

[nick1austin]

Yes, that looks like it will do the job. Price is a bit steep, is there anything cheaper?

It's output connectors are all RCA (phono) so it looks like I also need to budget in an RCA-to-SCART RGB lead.

[mrtickle]

That seems to be about the price for those kind of things (with a limited market) unfortunately.

The cheaper option is to do the Video capture on your PC - many video cards have S-Video in and come with software to do it. You could capture uncompressed, and then compress to a variety of formats not just MPEG-2, which may give better results than the TiVo's realtime MPEG2 encoder chip which is a bit long in the tooth by today's standards (but still fine for our uses)!

(Presumably you were planning on then ripping the recordings out of your TiVo to make DVDs - and the least lossy way is to make TyTool DVDs which still involves transcoding the audio from 32kHz, for instance).

[nick1austin]

I've tried PC capture before and not been impressed. Often they are poor at coping with analogue-noise and also the resulting capture has lipsync problem when edited. I dare say that expensive editing packages will cope better but I'd rather the capture was correct in the first place. I know and trust that the TiVo is able to do the job.

Space is the main factor therfore I will be archiving to hard drive. I reckon 1 3TB drive will hold someonewhere around 350 tapes (average 3 hours/tape). Even allowing for the need to keep backup drives (because current hard drives are not reliable) it's going to be a massive space saving.

I not fussed over the exact format but I've been archiving stuff anyway for the last few years as demultiplexed streams and just re-multiplexing them on the fly whenever I want to watch stuff. I happy doing it this way so I see no reason to change now. The TiVo will be set to 720x576 using a high bitrate and have the mode 0 fix.

[baggsey]

Assuming you buy a convertor to convert S-Video to RGB, it is not necessary to waste space with mode 0. S-Video maxed out at a horizontal resolution of 420 vertical lines, so a lower value than 720 vertical pixels will still yield the same result. Standard VHS was only around 240 vertical lines resolution.

Personally I have converted tapes on a US Series 1 TiVo (unsubbed), as it has an S-Video input. The copy is accurate, but the quality is still perceived as very poor when compared to the picture quality expectations we now have from HD TV. I suggest you convert using composite and compare the TiVo recording to the original, and see if its worth the money to buy an S-Video to RGB upconvertor.

[nick1austin]

Cheers, but I now have a second-hand Sony YR-1000 convertor. The owner didn't have the means to test it so I was able to grab it at the "spares or repair" price of £5.

As for resolution 720x576 is only 30% more than the next lowest option (544x576) and it's what I've been using for archiving for several years now so I know it give acceptable results and can it can survive further re-sampling without noticable loss.

I'm just waiting now for the price of hard drives to drop a bit...