BG VHS thread

Videos about cats and stuff
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ian
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Re: BG VHS thread

Post by ian »

Calavera wrote: Wed Apr 13, 2022 8:16 pm How are you outputting the video to VHS? Are you doing it from a computer or DVD/Blu Ray player? Are you using an HDMI to RCA converter or using a player with composite outputs? I need to get an HDMI to RCA converter so I can record things straight from the PC onto Beta or VHS. Right now if I want to do it the easiest way is to burn what I want to record onto a DVD then hook the composite out of the DVD player to the composite inputs of the tape recorder.
I have many ways of doing it.
But for Ghostbusters I was using an HDMI to composite adapter that I picked up a few years ago (About 3-4 months before COVID at a swap meet) directly from HDMI from my Computer into a splitter where one went to my TV and one to the adapter and right into the VCR. If you're buying one of these adapters or splitters, you gotta be careful it can support the resolutions you wanna use, I had older ones but they wouldn't do 4K. For just transferring 1080p/i or lower, your barrier to entry is a lot lower. and I've found various ones have various conversion qualities.

To be clear, recording to VHS from 4K is absolutely stupid, but I had the 4k stuff all there ready to watch anyway so it was simple enough to just record a video and have it on a CRT while I watched on a good screen as well.
I prefer computer because VLC will play absolutely anything and OBS has some great tools for re-framing sources.
Powerful tools that I can dick around with and get settings just right.

The other way I do it (and watch a lot of content on CRT) is a I have a few WD TV Live's. These things are great because you can get stuff off a network or just plug USB drives into them and they just work. The only downside is they've gotten old and won't do 99.9999% of .MKV files, and these days everything I get and indeed rip myself is various combinations of MKV's.
The players have HDMI, but most importantly Composite. You plug em in, set your picture to 4:3, and bam. If you have a lot of AVI's and MP4's these players are perfect for getting your content onto old displays or VHS's Beta's. No fuck around, only watch!

The last way is what you do. Burn to DVD (Which doesn't at all help with a 24GB Bluray file), then output with one of the million DVD players.
If you have a DVD/HDD recorder, these can be helpful too because ones of a certain vintage will have HDMI out and upscaling (Thus being able to support recording HD content) and composite/svideo/component out. so you can record whatever you want and then output it to your chosen format.
If using a DVD recorder, be a little careful as some (particularly Panasonic and Pioneer) have not so brilliant digital to analog conversions and vice versa, and you may find that after you record your analog source and it digitalises it and then you output to analog again it looks like absolute arse even for VHS.
I've been looking at getting a sony one to try as most of my other vintage AV stuff is sony, and the bits that aren't typically don't work as well.
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Dr. Zoidberg
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Re: BG VHS thread

Post by Dr. Zoidberg »

Wanna watch 4 hours of random 1989 American TV recorded on a VCR?


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