nicholas, 25 days ago

If you're going to go through all that effort, why don't you just mix your own pans and scans from easily found letterbox versions?

foone, 25 days ago

@nicholas that sounds like a lot of work for even one movie

damieng, 25 days ago

@foone A bunch of my earliest DVDs have widescreen on one side and pan & scan on the other.

grumpy, 25 days ago

@foone I'm looking to start digitizing my VHS collection. Do you have recommendations for tooling/output formats for archival storage?

foone, 25 days ago

@grumpy not really. But I will say that using an RCA->HDMI adapter and USB3 HDMI capture seems to be a lot easier to set up (compared to just getting a composite capture device) and has equivalent quality

ryanfb, 25 days ago

@grumpy @foone VHS-Decode (forked from Laserdisc Domesday) looks pretty interesting from an archival perspective, not least being you can store the raw drum head signal and reprocess it https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

foone, 24 days ago

@ryanfb @grumpy I've been intimidated out of using this project given how many RF capture points you need to have to do it comprehensibly. VHS is annoyingly complex compared to laserdiscs

artandtechnic, 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

@foone It definitely has become very, very hard in the last 2 years.

One of the 2 places that I could still reliably get commercial VHS tapes from, one liquidated all their tapes in Jan/Feb. 2023. The other place, which I’m way overdue on a return visit to, did have a large box ‘in the back’ full of them… but I’m not sure if even they still have them, now that a year+ has gone by.

Let us know if you have a want list. I digitized several P&S tapes for CC research, which I don’t need anymore.

jpm, 25 days ago

@foone notably The Simpsons Movie had a 4:3 DVD release alongside the widescreen DVD release. You had to be careful which one you bought…