I spent thousands of dollars over the past 10 years on my perfect VHS capture
system and I realized it was all for nothing when somebody messaged me on
Twitter and told me about the Doomsday duplicator this is the Doomsday
duplicator back in the day I would use something like this which it digitizes
and captures over firewire composite
video it worked at the time however
you're still going through your composite out there's a lot of processing done on the actual VCR as
well as in the device itself in the early 2000s it worked but there were
always issues that's where this guy came in it does have a BNC connector right
here but that's not capturing composite video that's capturing the RF signal
from the VCR now something like this has its limitations you need a really Bing
VCR to get decent quality if you're
capturing older tapes which I am you need something that has the TBC with
something like the Doomsday duplicator you don't need any of that in fact you
can get the cheapest $20 VCR on Facebook
Marketplace and get the same result because you're capturing from the RF
test Point inside of this that doesn't
give you the footage itself that gives you the RF samples digitized to
something that you can decode on your computer at home so in my use case I'm
capturing old family tapes and some of
them you can't even recognize who's in
them anymore and through the magic of
VHS decode it's reversed the whole
process and I can actually see people's
faces again and it's kind of magical so
another use case is preserving old media that has never been digitized or brought
to DVD or any other digital platform one
example is the Doomsday 86 project which
was produced by BBC and this product is
named after it was mastered to laser dis
but never properly digitized and it
would have otherwise been lost if it wasn't for the team that made this but
that's not what we're going to do today we're going to capture a VHS
tape you pick uh Mrs delire all right
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our Link in the video description today one thing I forgot to show you is the
actual RF test point that we're connecting to there's many different
little test points here and they're usually listed on this particular unit
as TP so the one that I was looking for
is called TP something envelope EnV all
right so that's right there and this here is a ground there's also a test
point for Hi-Fi audio which will give you a high-fi audio signal this guy
can't capture it there are other products out there that can for today we
are just capturing the video with that said let's uh let's watch Mrs doire so
in order to connect to this I need to connect to this so that's the test point
and that's the ground and it all comes down here and around and out here that
is new that shouldn't be there Dan did this I am not good with solder Ing and
that is connected to the RF test point
now if you're not good at soldering there's also options for like alligator
clamps like these two so you can just connect these to your test points and
have uh your little BNC come go into this so capture software is pretty
straightforward just got a big capture button right here and uh I'm just going
to start playing the video I'm not doing a full capture because that would take
hours so we're just going to start capturing now so as you can see there
there are some issues visually with this tape right now we're capturing video
only you can capture audio however I
don't have anything set up for that at the moment I also don't need audio
because most of the tapes that I'm capturing are family videos so there's
not going to be much difference in terms of audio quality from an actual
conventional capture once the capture is done you'll have to run it through the
VHS decode software it is command line but don't worry
it's very straightforward you'll be left with two TBC files one is for Chroma one
is for Luma you can open them in LD analyze to see what everything looks
like and check out the signal to noise ratio see if you have any line dropouts
it's very straightforward and finally you can get your final output video
through TBC tools again it's command line just make sure your files are all
in the same folder as the software for more information there's a mass massive
Wiki with all the steps it's very straightforward you might need about an
hour to read through everything but once you're done you're good to go so looking
at the side by side it should be pretty obvious the capture from the Doomsday
duplicator is much cleaner it's much sharper there's way more color
information it just looks better but this does come at a cost
$500 or about $500 you can also build it
yourself but currently there are other options that are pretty much better than
this in every way the CX card with the clock gen mod is the gold standard Harry
one of the main developers from bhsd code informed me that they are currently
working on a new card the merch card
that just has more options and can do everything the CX card can do and run
through USB the CX card is a PCIe addin
card if you're running it on a laptop this is probably your best bet there
really is a lot and it's really hard to cover it all today you can check out the
Discord and the wiki and the GitHub and
it's a very active and Vibrant Community
International and they are always looking for new contributors and people
who are just interested in this project I know I am interested in this project
so if you are to comment down below maybe we'll check out more stuff like
this in the future maybe I'm going to get a merch card have a great day
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