Just in case everybody ever hoping to digitize from videotape has been scared off, it IS possible. Off newer VCRs, fairly new recordings (within the last two years), I get almost as good quality as I do capturing from composite off the antenna. A couple weeks ago, I captured two tapes, circa 1995-97, recorded on one of the scuzziest VCRs it's ever been my displeasure to own. One of the movies had a tracking problem on playback, didn't feel like opening the playback machine to tweak hardware for just one movie, so left in the line down at the bottom of the picture. Both of them were mono, of course, since the original VCR was, and the video was a little washed out, but otherwise they came through just fine. No lost frames, no more sound leakage than I get on a good recording. A couple months ago I did some tapes from about 1990-92, with the same capture results, only the video was better cuz they'd been done in a better VCR. I'm doing this with a Pinnacle DC10+ (hardware compression) with lavrec from the mjpegtools v1.4.1. The relevant settings to lavrec are -d2 (decimation 2, which produces frames 240x288, which give me better quality fullscreen playback than capturing at larger framesize) and -q100 (quality 100%). Just in case that's useful to anybody ...... Donna. pudge@xxxxxxxxxx
