fjs Posted January 19 Share Posted January 19 Hi, this is very unfamiliar territory for me. I have inherited a large number of vhs tapes of family recordings and want to convert them to mp4 files so i can easily edit and view on my computer and email to other family members. The vhs player that i also inherited has composite rwy rca plug outputs. My computer is windows 10 desktop pc but i also have a windows11 laptop. After some reading it would appear that i need a video capture card and mp4 editing software. I dont want to spend a lot of money because this is a once only project. Dont need 4k so standard viewing quality is fine. It looks like obs studio freeware would be suitable editing software but the capture card is a mystery to me. I want an external card and all recordings will be to an external hdd. Can anyone suggest a capture card that converts vhs to mp4. Looked at elgato video capture but it converts to h.264. Maybe someone can sell me a used capture card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steff Posted January 20 Share Posted January 20 (edited) 2 hours ago, fjs said: Can anyone suggest a capture card that converts vhs to mp4. Looked at elgato video capture but it converts to h.264. mp4 is a container format while h264 is a codec, ie. often the codec in the mp4 container is a h264 or variant thereof. There are also easy ways to switch containers, e.g. from .mkv to .mp4 with freeware software. This process is sometimes called remuxing which is different to "converting" (that would entail quality loss through re-encoding). There are plenty of instructions for this v. simple process online, e.g. here. I would be surprised, though, if the capture software didn't give you a choice of containers anyway... If you can, capture to your win10 desktop HDD and then copy data across to external USB hdd. That way you cut out any USB shenanigans during capture mode. Edited January 20 by Steff 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fjs Posted January 20 Author Share Posted January 20 16 minutes ago, Steff said: mp4 is a container format while h264 is a codec, ie. often the codec in the mp4 container is a h264 or variant thereof. There are also easy ways to switch containers, e.g. from .mkv to .mp4 with freeware software. This process is sometimes called remuxing which is different to "converting" (that would entail quality loss through re-encoding). There are plenty of instructions for this v. simple process online, e.g. here. I would be surprised, though, if the capture software didn't give you a choice of containers anyway... If you can, capture to your win10 desktop HDD and then copy data across to external USB hdd. That way you cut out any USB shenanigans during capture mode. Thanks, all new to me but i will do some internet searches to get a handle on what you have said. I will also adopt the procedure you mention in your last paragraph so thank you. Any idea of a good video capture card around the $100 mark. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steff Posted January 20 Share Posted January 20 I haven't played around with any of this for over a decade, the old gear is probably sitting on people's shelf unused. This looks pretty inexpensive...worth a blind try-out for $35? https://www.auselectronicsdirect.com.au/composite-rca-s-video-to-usb-video-capture-dongle~59702 Video output quality might not be great (mpeg would need converting/encoding to another container if you are solely intent on .mp4)...but any computer based media player can easily play back mpeg, as can most DVD players. Lots of similar solutions on ebay, too: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/296095094042 Nothing high-quality that I can find but note that the VHS standard didn't allow for anything equal to our current video quality expectations (not even 1K!) - so you won't be able to capture the footage to and then "jazz it up" digitally, it will likely be a small screen format of 480 width or perhaps even under, depending on the camera this footage was produced on... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lorenaparas Posted September 10 Share Posted September 10 On 1/20/2024 at 3:14 AM, Steff said: mp4 is a container format while h264 is a codec, ie. often the codec in the mp4 container is a h264 or variant thereof. There are also easy ways to switch containers, e.g. from .mkv to .mp4 with freeware software. This process is sometimes called remuxing which is different to "converting" (that would entail quality loss through re-encoding). There are plenty of instructions for this v. simple process online, e.g. here. I would be surprised, though, if the capture software didn't give you a choice of containers anyway... If you can, capture to your win10 desktop HDD and then copy data across to external USB hdd. That way you cut out any USB shenanigans during capture mode.And in general, there are plenty of related information online. Some time ago, I was looking for information on how to take a picture from a video. It sounds very real, but still, I needed to know how to do it in a proper way. And it took me a few minutes to find this article https://setapp.com/how-to/convert-video-to-image-sequence and read that all information. It's actually not that hard to do if you and even with a good quality. I use Mac, and that article explained how to do it; I tried and succeeded. Now I will have to spend some time on it because I have a lot of videos, so I can create cool photos too. Thanks for the information. I've never done it before, too, because I always postponed the process. I also have some old tapes. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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