I run a video transfer business in the UK. I never use any of these simple USB converter devices, they all produce small video files of limited quality. For most domestic formats I use DV capture equipment, the DV codec looks much better than these compressed files and is much better suited to editing. For miniDV and Digital8, the DV-AVI file format is not only a lossless bit for bit copy of the tape contents, it also retains the original time/date metadata which some software can display. Then for Video8/Hi8, most Digital8 players will output the same video file format from analogue tapes. For other domestic formats, a DVCAM deck or a Canopus AD-VC55 is used to generate it. Typically I additionally generate smaller de-interlaced MPEG4 files as well. For professional formats such as Digital Betacam, SDI video capture equipment can generate huge files for broadcast use. I appreciate that your DVD recorder gave better results than the USB capture device, but there are issues with that route too. MPEG2 files are not very well suited to editing, and to get the highest bitrate you are limited to about an hour on a single layer DVD. Another key component, and the reason you saw that wobble, is requiring a Digital Timebase Corrector (TBC as you have in the Hi8 player). Some high end SVHS players have this built in, and I also use external standalone TBCs on all of my video capture systems.

You can tell how old the device is by the KZfaq logo in the software.

Some people might be rightly upset about owning one of these to archive their memories. Just remember the first rule of archiving is to archive. If you’ve captured using one these and now safely backed up a digital copy, excellent, it can no longer be completely lost forever. It’s better than no backup at all. If you can manage to archive it later with a better capture device, even better.

I purchased an Elgato Video Capture new two-ish years ago and after watching all my LaserDisc transfers back (they're on my channel if you're curious) I grew to hate that thing more and more. At first I didn't spot all the compression and frame dropping but it's impossible to ignore once you finally notice it. Found a Panasonic DMR-ES30V VCR/DVD recorder at the thrift store last week and from there I rip the DVDs via HandBrake, and it's a night and day difference.

12:55 someone at Elgato figured they could save a bunch of money and nobody would notice. Wonder if you're the first to figure this out?

I've been holding off on buying any capture device, including this one due to its high cost, and am glad to see you do this deep dive into a clearly inferior product. I'm still at square one.

It'd be awesome if you (or somebody with the time and hardware to do so) did a video comparing the various chips inside these converters, I have a pretty strong feeling there's only truly a handful out there that are branded under many different names

you did a great job with the comparisons. people who have never watched a VHS tend to think they all are extremely grainy and low quality because of bad captures.

I bought this recently and have spent some 3 weeks digitalizing our old VHSC tapes. My father, who doesn't really care about technology at all, complained that it looked "odd" but acceptable. The purpose was to have our media in a format which will not decay with time, and to that end it does it's job. However, it's only after watching this I realize how our memories have been effectively corrupted from this device. Comparing the digital version with the direct output of our camcorder revealed how truly bad it was. I thought it looked OK but oh boy was I wrong. My parents are happy I could save our memories at all, but there are details which will never be recoverable. Thanks for bringing awareness to the awful quality if the thing. I wouldn't have known otherwise.

I went down this rabbit hole a while back and ended up building a PC to run Windows XP with an old ATI capture card. Barely cost more than buying an Elgato since I had most of the components laying around already. I'm very glad I went this route. There is quite a learning curve, not recommended for the average person, but the end result is well worth the time and effort. It's a shame that so many people are digitizing their priceless tapes without any regard for the capture quality.

I use an AJA Kona LHE for all types of analog capture. It can capture in uncompressed 10-bit format and in many other formats. I also use an HD Storm and a DV Storm. The key is to use formats that are true video formats, maintaining interlacing in PAL 50i and NTSC 60i video formats, so as to have a digital file that can be played back on a CRT monitor while preserving the quality of the analog image. Later, appropriate deinterlacing can be performed, or not performed at all on video signals that contain, for example, film footage, which in PAL format are usually progressive (meaning the two fields belong to the same frame but each contains half of the total lines of the PAL system with different information). These capture cards are not very expensive; the only issue is getting them to work using specific computers.

The problem is the current generation of I.T people didn't grow up in the era of standard definition interlaced video and don't really know much about it. To be fair it's pretty esoteric stuff and took me years to understand how it works. Interlaced, progressive, field cadences, inverse telecine, double rate deinterlacing, Rec601 colours, nonsquare pixels, 704/720 width discrepancy for analogue/digital. It's kind of a nightmare to be frank. Even the big online streaming services don't know how to properly deinterlace and/or detelecine older TV shows. As a random example NBC's streaming service have Alfred Hitchcock Presents but they've just replaced every second field with a copy of the first field, rendering it as effectively 240p24 inside a 480p30 container with a 1:1:1:2 cadence (1 repeat frame every 5 frames...stuttery). This they then upscaled to 1080p30 and called it a day. They have no clue what 30i is or anything about field cadences. Another another random example, in the video I can see the Elgato unnecessarily downscales it horizontally to 640x480 because they don't know anything about nonsquare pixel formats. If they wanted 4:3 square pixels while preserving all resolution they would have scaled it to 704x528, or alternatively, left it as native 704x480 and flagged the metadata in the mp4 file as having an aspect ratio of 4:3 so the media player scales it to 4:3 at playback. If they didn't do that then I'm pretty confident they didn't flag the colour matrix and gamut as 601 either and the skin tones are almost certainly more orange than they should be, unless your media player is smart and guesses correctly based on the vertical resolution and/or framerate (I use MadVR and that has very good guessing logic, for example it sees vertical height < 576 therefore not PAL, and 24/30fps therefore definitely not PAL, therefore probably NTSC, therefore assume 601 matrix and SMPTE-C primaries).

I use the Elgato to capture old VHS tapes. I find the quality is much improved if you run the signal from the VCR through a DVD recorder first before it goes to the Elgato. You don't need to burn a DVD or anything; it's just there to stabilise the signal. I'm also in a PAL region, so maybe it works better/worse with NTSC sources.

I remember I was saving for this very one capture card because I kept seeing it everywhere, until I got my Sony DSR-250 camcorder, which also works as a DVCAM vcr, and can also convert analog footage with a built-in TBC, and because it's DVCAM I can just directly capture footage through firewire to my computer and have pristine quality captures.

BRAVO! VWestlife for posting this video about the suspect quality I've noticed about those VHS to digital capture apps/devices; as years ago I spent dollars on a couple of them, and after noticing the lackluster quality results of those capture apps versus the process of 'VHS to DVD-R recording to digital ripping,' I've stayed with the 'DVD-R to digital ripping.' Thanks, VWestlife, for confirming my impressions about the inferior video transfer quality of those widely marketed VHS to digital capture devices/apps.

4:28 I'm willing to bet that the KZfaq upload button hasn't worked for several years, due to KZfaq occasionally changing their APIs and breaking older software that uses them :)

I used a few different routes for my transfers - 1. Hi8 played on a Sony digital 8 player via firewall to a Mac, 2. MiniDV from the camera via FireWire, 3. VHS tapes to a Sony HD/DVD recorder hard disc then to DVD and ripped with Handbrake. The best advice I can give is DON’T DELAY. Your tapes are deteriorating and that decay will dominate any quality issues.

SCART is a genius solution for an easy to use universal connector. It can carry Composite, S-Video, Component or RGB. Together with stereo(maybe more) audio and also has extra pins for sending small amounts of data between devices or signalling standby status. It also allows chaining devices and connecting all of them into one single input on the TV.(example: a DTV box chained with a DVD or some kind of media source connected to a hi-fi audio amplifier which passes all the signals through itself into the TV for the picture, all just one connector, no mess of tons of unlabeled RCA cables that get all tangled.) The chaining feature is the main reason most devices with SCART have two SCART connectors. One carries the output of the device. The other is an input for the signal from another device. The input gets added to the output connector. No external connectors needed either.

This particular Elgato device always struck me as a device they should've stopped selling years ago but for some reason keep stock of it despite knowing that its not part of their priority devices, and likely hasn't been for a good number of years by now. Its a shame, because their 'Game Capture' lineup of capture cards are often excellent devices (albeit sadly overpriced in most scenarios, when you consider that devices from the likes of EVGA and NZXT can deliver the same performance at a cheaper price), but it seems like that's where their priorities are because its where they make all the large sum of their profits nowadays. Those who are looking for a more simple straightforward recording device (that keeps focus on these older connectors like Composite, S-Video, SCART, etc.) deserve something better, and this particular Video Capture device just doesn't cut it anymore. Especially when you compared it to that Sony DVD recorder (the quality on that looked fantastic!).

that Sony DVD recorder does a fantastic job !

This video actually stopped me from making a big mistake for exactly the project I'm about to undertake, exactly the tech reasons you mention in the vid. Kevin, it's happening everywhere now with 'honest reviews' being penalized or even threats made - speaking your mind, forget it, a thing of the past. I weep for the future...

The most outrageous part as you pointed out, is Elgato charges almost $100 for this device, on-par with the $10 ones.

Hello. Thank you very much for a very solid chunk of knowledge about ripping analog media to digital - I was just finding my way in, not necessarily to archive old tapes, but rather to purposefully record stuff just for that analog vibe and it's quirkiness and artifacts. I was skeptic about Elgato from very beginning, so thank you very much for confirming my suspicion. But most of all, thank you for an epilepsy warning. As a person suffering from seizures on regular basis, I appreciate your concern. You're a real MVP.

2 Thank-Yous: 1) Thanks for the flashing lights warning. As a new epilepsy patient, I actually need to be aware of those. And 2) Thanks for doing this work. I'm not currently upconverting or transferring old videos, but I've done conversions in the past, and this will save people a lot of trial-and-error time, so this is a huge gift for fellow video fans/nerds!

That Sony DVD recorder does such a good job, even at MPEG-2 compression. It may take an extra step to put it on your computer but at least you end up with a backup physical, non-volatile copy

Dude you are quite the guardian angel here. i was just now looking for a capture device and was thinking elgato was the way to go and no way i need dvd recorder in my life... Turns out i do! Thanks a bunch for this. Also... I must admit i am quite plesed with "having to get" a DVD-R ;)

I use the Diamond VC-500. In my opinion it's great, but you have to use it correctly. You want to run everything through at least a Line-TBC like you find on older Pro-sumer S-VHS VCRs or many (pretty cheap) panasonic DVD recorders. And you need to capture in a lossless format with software that allows it. Personally I prefer AmaRecTV.

I'm glad people are talking more about these types of issue now

In late 2016, I bought one of these, and it was the worst decision i could've made. I didn't have a time-base corrector like I do now so whenever a tape is having tracking problems, the video goes blank with white dot-crawling. Audio would occasionally skip if you have even a blip of another application taking up a little more resources than usual. Video and audio would desync really easily, which means capturing an entire 6 hour tape isn't feasible. I would only get to transfer a tape in chunks of 30-50 minutes. They may have good HD capture devices, but I think they should focus all their energy into that instead of a really crappy SD device. Also that response email is so cringey to read, lol. They need to discontinue this damn thing.

For VHS capture, I still use a Canopus AVDC-100 I bought 19 years ago. Results are pretty good. I keep an old FireWire card installed in one of my PCs for such use. Software is WinDV 1.2.3 (free) feeding the Vegas NLE. I don't need to capture old video formats often, but when I do, the solution I used in 2005 still works today. Well, how 'bout that

I know we're not naming names, but I'm pretty sure the channel you're talking about is the one that convinced me to buy one of these in the first place. Knowing that these were used in a professional setting was enough to convince me of their quality. Sucks to be the sucker I guess

That came out in true stereo! the right and left channels were very close. the right channel was echoed a bit to center, but that is what 4 track does to a stereo mix!

Over the years, I’ve seen these praised time and time again as the best quality budget capture device but I honestly questioned those claims, as it’s difficult to accurately judge something’s quality without testing it yourself. I’ve seen my fair share of video capture device reviews that gave glowing accolades, only to see the test footage and wonder if the source footage looked that bad to begin with, or if the methods and settings used along the way caused that, so I really wanted to get one and judge it myself. The price was always what kept me from taking the plunge; after having seen this video, I’m glad I didn’t.

For PAL, to this day, the absolute best method I have discovered to transfer analog video to digital, is with a VCR (VHS player), connected to a DVD recorder with TBC (Time Base Corrector) through S-video or regular AV, and then connect that (S-video or regular AV) to a DV camera with video passthrough and the DV camera connected to a PC or Mac via firewire, and record the damn thing in DV. Then you NEED to deinterlace the footage with QTGMC. I know it's a long list, but this recipe is hard to beat, both when it comes to quality, file size and effectiveness.

The other reason why those devices are crap for retro video game capture is because they capture at 30FPS, so when there's sprite flickering on screen it will either come out as not flickering at all or the sprites will disappear.

The elgato is not compatible with 240p sources like the NES. It tries to deinterlace the image as if it were 240i. This causes straight vertical lines to be jagged and text to be hard to read The similarly priced Japanese capture dongle from IO data also has the same problem, as do the cheap dongles, as do the rca to hdmi adapters. Most of the few new tvs with rca also have this problem. I bought a Chinese RetroTink 2x knockoff "retro scaler" that specifically promises 240p compatibility, yet it still has the exact same problem (plus several other problems) Turns out it's pretty hard to find a reasonable way to capture Nintendo footage from retro hardware, right now. But what's gross about the elgato being incompatible, is that Elgato is the first console capture card brand that retro gamers know about. I'm not sure why. Maybe their PCI cards used to be good?

I run a local digitization service and I agree. The elgato is what I got started on but I found it frustrating to use for these reasons. I believe why the pro services use it is because the software is one click, stops by itself, and allows them to fulfill bulk orders quickly. For the price, I’ve found that the IO-Data capture card works great. It passes through the direct signal so you can apply whatever interlacing algorithm on the footage. These days, though I’m using black magic stuff…

The older blackmagic intensity cards, both usb and pci, are so cheap these days no one should bother with elgato.

I’ve given up with all these converters! A few months ago I went ahead and bought some BlackMagic recording equipment, and I’ve never looked back! I use component from my VCR to an analogue to SDI converter, then a Video Capture 3G from black magic also to record to the Media Express recording software. The analogue to SDI converter can detect what resolution and frame rate the video is playing back at, and will send data back to the PC running, Media Express, and it will automatically adjust the video settings as necessary.

I've seen the videos of that particular "professional" services. I got really shocked when he treated all the media like crap, and had 0 inventory management. It might be a step up above legacybox, but still... I hope the people who send their old media to get converted with them thinks it twice! I even think their "un-mold" machine is really crude, and their skills to "cut the tape" where it might be mangled was completely unacceptable.

The ATV part was really heartwarming, I loved it.

I’ve been transferring videotapes to digital for quite a while now for extended family and people around my local area, and luckily I’ve always been aware of the limitations and poor quality of these cheap converters with all the same chips from China, even before I started this little freelance operation. For VHS transfers it starts from my prosumer spec Sony SLV-R1000 VCR, passes through my AV Toolbox AVT-8710 external Time Base Corrector, and then arrives to my Retrotink 5X Pro via S-Video. The Retrotink then takes that clean analog separate chrome and lume video feed that’s now free of any timebase errors, de-interlaces it via FPGA Motion Adaptive, then digitizes and upscales it to 1080p using bicubic interpolation as I’ve set, and finally sends that to my Elgato HD60X for recording and encoding in OBS via HDMI 2.0. Now I know many purists would be against the upscaling, but to be honest it’s always come out great and has been what everyone I’ve converted for has always preferred.

It’s worth pointing out that Elgato video capture device is one of the few USB devices that will work on Mac, most USB devices will not work at all on Mac, only PC. Unfortunately, when it comes to converting analog footage it’s a real pain, The method I use is I have to upscale my footage from 576i to 720p in real time, while this is not considered efficient for analog purists if I was to use their method they use, I would be here all day and quite frankly, I’ve got more important things to do with my life. The DVD method is a tedious problem, especially over in PAL territories where the standard videotape length was 3 hours in length in SP mode, which meant if you wanted to convert one whole tape, you would need 3 blank DVDs recorded in XP mode for the best quality. (Not counting the dual layered ones) which means you would have to stop the tape to change the DVDs over in order to record the whole tape. You would then have to rip the DVDs using ripping software handbrake and then edit the footage and by the time you go through all that it could take an entire day to transfer ONE TAPE digitally at the proper native resolution. Not happening. Another problem at the moment is to this day, I still cannot find a USB capture device that is compatible with Mac software and is able to capture interlaced footage so you can convert it to 50/59.94fps progressively.

the unfortunate thing is a lot of people actually LIKE the way this capture looks. they actively want a worse capture because they want their video to look old if anything they'd look at the sony dvd recording as worse cuz it's too good

You’d really have to do a comparison using typical amateur camcorder footage to get a sense of whether the Elgato is sufficient for that type of material. Video transfer services are mostly dealing with that type of stuff, not Hollywood movies.

I'm so glad you made this video, as I was stuck between purchasing two transfer devices a couple of years back. The Elgato and a ClearClick HD Video Capture Box Ultimate. I sprung for the ClearClick. And it looks like that was a wise choice. I've been very happy with it thus far. Might be a device you would like to review at some point. Great video as always!

There are flat screens with VGA for over 20 years now. VGA is fully analog. A flat screen "converts" this analog signals to a perfect digital image before it gets displayed. Why isn't this quality possible with this capture devices? freakin sucks.

I still have ADAPTEC AVC-2010 Video PCI Kit VideOh! from year 2000 something, works on Win XP only. The results were pretty good. Captures MPEG2 for DVD and MPEG1 for VCD. I also have Pioneer DVD recorder and very good and expensive (back in a days) ADS PYRO Av-Link from 2004 which converts DV to video and video to DV. So I'm pretty much covered.

Thanks for your research, I was always wondering, what kind of USB dongles was that guy using. Crapware with no bitrate/quality setting, however with absurd duration setting, is ridiculous. Not sure if the digitization guy is just oblivious to this problem, however he doesn't look like the one for whom the quality of transfer wouldn't matter just to earn $$$. Watching him painstakingly cleaning molded tapes and then transferring them to such low quality output seems to me like wasted effort though.

Pioneer once came with DVD recorders that could capture analogue in great quality, then rip the dvd to PC/Mac

I have one of those AV/S-Video to USB devices for my Hi8 Sony camcorder. I've been told to just use Firewire, but the problem is that it isn't really that easy for someone like me to do so. I would have to find a laptop on ebay that works okay and has a firewire port, and honestly I don't like having to buy stuff like that for digitizing my tapes. The copies I have right now aren't that bad either and my mother was still thrilled to see her tapes looked good (the ones that didn't degrade that is)

I looked up the specs for this device and it said 640x480 for 4:3 and 640x360 for 16:9 so that's interesting you found it to be 640x480 for both aspect ratios. The DVD recorder will be superior as it will capture 720x480 (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL) at high (XP/HQ) or normal (SP) bit rates. I also discovered that some of the older Panasonic DVD recorders have a TBC on their A/V inputs so it doesn't matter if the VCR has one built in or not as the DVD recorder will correct all the jitters in the image, so it might be the same for Sony. I think the picture quality on DVD Recorders will be superior to anything found on a small USB device, as they were designed to record broadcast TV not from VHS/Hi-8 etc, it's just a pity they are stuck with older MPEG-2 compression.

The bundled software generates 640x480 @ 30p, this is a known fact. But when used with third-party software it can AFAIK generate proper 720x480 @ 30i, so just don't use the bundled junk. Regarding the wobbling, it does not have built-in TBC, so this is normal. Your DVD recorder does have a TBC of sorts. The VC500 would be an ok dongle if it did not shift levels sporadically; something with its AGC that makes it change levels from time to time, and this makes it unusable. Price-wise, yeah, the Elgato is overpriced. The I-O Data USB2 is probably the best bang for the buck in the $50 range.

Now that I know what NOT to buy, I would love to know what I SHOULD buy to digitize VHS tapes properly!

As a retro gamer/streamer it sucks that the big guys (elgato, avermedia, etc) don't have an easy composite/component high quality converter. Especially since there are open source upscallers.

The El Gato might be more useful if it were possible to disable the built-in de-interlacer. I currently use a Digital8 Handycam w/ TBC enable, and use Selur Hybrid's deinterlace filter on the "VerySlow" preset. Clicking the "Bob" checkbox yield an output output of 60fps for those who might prefer it. P.S.- In any case, I appreciate your detailed overview and comparison.

The only somewhat decent usb capture dongle of these you can get nowadays afaik is the I-O data GV-USB 2 - though even that one isn't optimal but it's much better than the ones based on the conexant chip and the cheap easycap things. Also idk if the bundled software is any good, most of these bundled apps are crap like the one that comes with the elgato thing, using crappy codecs with low bitrate, deinterlacing to 25/29.97p instead of 50/59.94p etc. I wish one of these companies actually put in the effort and made a capture card with a decent video decoder with a tbc (like e.g a ADV7842) in it that could handle video directly from a vcr in it but no one are - not even fancy ones from like blackmagic do... A lot of the standalone recorders that have come out more recently seem to suffer from the same problems, using crappy video decoder ics and crappy codecs, resulting in similarly wobbly video, that's cropped to hell with low bitrate and deinterlaced badly to half framerate... My general suggestion is to use one of the better usb dongles or a fancier capture device, ditch the bundled app and use virtualdub, amarectv or ffmpeg (unless you have a blackmagic or aja or something fancy), and use certain models of dvd recorders as a "tbc" for stabilizing the video. Just passing the video through them and recording the output directly rather than actually recording to DVD. Panasonic ones from 2005/2006 sans the DMR-ES20 (or any newer Pannasonic outside of north america), pioneer from 2005 or newer, or sony from 2007 or newer work well for this.

It's kind of sad that my DVD recorder from 2007 converts VHS to digital at a much better quality than any direct VHS-to-PC option I've ever tried, including this Elgato device. (Of course, the DVD recorder option means I need to rip the disc again using Handbrake, but the resulting video quality is well worth it.)

I had the same exact experience you did with this product when digitizing my VHS collection. Tapes that were more worn out were very jittery. Using a Macro Vision removal box in line helped some. The best solution was using an older PCI WinTV capture card in an XP workstation running an ancient version of Pinnacle Studio that came bundled with a Dazzle 150 box I bought years ago. I used the DV codec for capture in Pinnacle and then used Handbrake on a modern PC to re-encode the video to H.265 for smaller file sizes. The end result is very close to playback on a VCR. However, the above did not go so well with my Laserdiscs. The outcome seemed like the resolution was very reduced. I'm going to give the Elgato with OBS another try with my Laserdiscs as they shouldn't have any jitters on capture like tape does. I'm finding that video capture is more of an art then a science. I have been digitizing all my media onto my Plex server and so I have a good back up of my media as tapes ware out and DVDs as well as Laserdiscs can suffer from bit rot. I never bought into streaming services and kept decades worth of media.

If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Most of this eras cameras do have analogue tape but also a FireWire interface to access the media via PC. Instead of encoding / decoding the signal multiple times and losing quality, i would prefer to use the camera built in converter and save the stream "as it is" on the PC.

I see VWestlife, I'm watching. No matter what the topic. He has this rare knack of making everything interesting.

Really appreciate you showing the internals

I'm glad someone has FINALLY said that those USB devices to capture media are basically crap. I first used the Elgato back in 2011 and never have liked it. Thought it was me being too picky. Bravo sir for speaking out and calling it what it is. And I know exactly who the "pros" are on YT you reference that use those things in their conversion services. I guess they figure their paying customers just don't care. Sad.

I have one of those older Dazzle Video transfer devices, that one is probably better than the overpriced Elgato here (the Dazzle came out before everyone started on the cheapness battle to the bottom). I also have a DVD recorder I can just plug a VHS player (or 8MM video camera) into. Biggest problem with the DVD recorder is I have to guess what speed a tape was recorded in, to know what recording tome to use (yes, I did a test by recording the same tape at different recording times, and it does reduce resolution at those longer recording times)

I was stunned by that price tag. $88??! I paid $20 for this near-identical unit a decade ago. It never left the box since I had a Dazzle that did just fine, and was trying to move to HDMI capture anyway. Now working on a retro television project that will require capturing and transcoding tapes soon, it's going to be fun having a critical eye on my and others' VHS rips now.

In elgato software you need to CALIBRATE the picture control, so i set the Brightness to 30 and contrast to -11 using the 240p test suite and S-Video using a PlayStation 1 connected to my VCR its a Super VHS Panasonic NV-FS200 with TBC, adjusting the video settings in preferences gave a great picture quality to my VHS captures. if you go to this path for Windows Users: %appdata%\Elgato\VideoCapture you can edit the Settings.xml and change bitrate and resolutions to what ever you want, force YUY2, Quality from 1 to 10, cropping and other stuff. If you want a good product, just get a Retrotink4K and an HDMI video capture like i did, that is in another level! and it even has TBC biult-in (emulated)

Watching this convinced me to keep using my HDMI converter + capture card for my video captures. Colors look better, works fine with OBS and I can use the capture card with my gaming consoles too. I've seen this capture card get recommended over and over on Reddit and the quality doesn't seem to reflect the price tag.

If you are going with an EasyCap-like USB capture dongle, go for one with an UTV007 chip. They are hard to get, but that it's the best one. It doesn't TBC but also doesn't do noise-squelch or drop out when there are issues with the video.

Thank you for your review I just found your channel because I was going to purchase Sony NSC-GC1 and review convinced me not too loll and decided to check your channel! Amazing content unfortunately I have elgato I purchased years back and I did noticed it loook very off but never thought of using dvd to record vhs tapes! So thanks for that tip!!!

Elgato is mostly terrible for home movies, which lot of my VHS-C tapes from the late 1980s look garbled, while the direct capture from a VHS/DVD combo recorder looks clean! The only reason I use the Elgato is for movies and television shows that have copy protection, especially since they aren’t all available digitally because streaming services keep removing them one their deal expires.

Fantastic and detailed review. A extreme reminder about being 'buyer beware'. Sadly there are too many stories of items on Amazon that are dressed up rubbish set at a rip off price.

thank you for calling out this overpriced junk, I hope at some point you can get ahold of a Dazzle USB capture device, and give your thoughts on them, as I have a DVC 100, and it produces okay results.

I've been using the analog inputs on my WinTV ATSC tuner card for years with the WinTV software. It works great. Wouldn't mind to hear your technical breakdown on one of those.

I have seen the YT channel by the same "pro" VHS conversion guy as you included a clip from, and despite his best intention and seeming like a nice guy, his toolchain makes me cringe. I wonder how many of his customers threw out their priced family memories because he claimed their tapes were in too bad a shape to be recoverable. He should never claim that with his bottom tier capture hardware and no TBC. Poor customers.

Sadly it seems like the understanding of how analog video works, and which of its properties have to be taken into consideration is slowly getting lost to the sands of time. Deinterlacing is quite a complex topic, it took me and a friend a long time to finally understand how it needs to be done to preserve the most quality possible. But then there are other pitfalls that even professional equipment these days may fail at. I have a quite expensive capture card made by Blackmagic Design, manufacturer of professional video equipment. Turns out that card can not deal with instabilities in the signal of a VHS cassette (coming from a VCR with TBC!). Instead it just drops frames entirely, and even worse, it does not correct the audio recording, so as frames are dropped, the video and audio slowly but surely go out of sync. The DVD device shown here as a positive example is really not the most practical option though. That is still any old MiniDV camcorder with analog video input. Most of these camcorders have the ability to take in analog video and convert it on-the-fly to an AVI video stream that can be captured into the computer via the Firewire interface. That's of course not a common feature anymore on computers today, but especially if you are doing this stuff professionally, you should be able to maintain some older computers with Firewire. Only for NTSC there is one limitation though, and that is the 4:1:1 colour subsampling used by the DV standard. The mpeg2 compression used for DVDs uses the improved 4:2:0 colour subsampling, so the Sony DVD device would give somewhat better colour reproduction than a MiniDV camcorder used as converter. However, mpeg2 is often limited by relatively low default bitrate settings, and I have noticed support for mpeg2 in modern software is getting worse and worse. In the PAL world DV too uses 4:2:0 colour subsampling, so there is no difference there. For PAL however there are other factors that need to be considered. For example, most of the cheaper capture devices, as shown in this video, are limited to 640x480 resolution, wich is the correct resolution for NTSC video. However, PAL video has a higher resolution, 768x576. So capturing PAL video with one of these cheap things means you are loosing precious video resolution straight away.

These devices can't handle non-standard signals like that Tandy you showed. That system relies on several things that can only feasibly be done on a CRT. Many DVD recorders (and VHS decks!) are equipped to handle non-standard signals and stabilize them. Heck, I recorded some Sega Genesis video with another device and I couldn't get it to be stable until I passed it through a VHS deck. (The video is in my channel.) And budget capture devices will only get worse since most TVs nowadays only support the very bare minimum to get old composite video displayed on the screen. ElGato just coasts by on goodwill from their earlier products. The quality isn't that great and hasn't been for a long time. Edit: I'm not sure if this is the case these days, but for years, this was the only "decent" video capture solution available for Mac users, IIRC. Easy to install and get capturing. Of course, Mac users also had the benefit of built-in Firewire when this came out so I'm not sure what the point of this was.

Nice analysis. In the past, i have used a PCI digital tv card which also has analog input. I believe its also a connexant chip. I captured it to lossless HuffYUV using menvoder or ffmpeg. From there it can be deinterlaced, cleaned up (to an extent) and encoded to the bitrate of your choosing. I think it looks ok but is probably missing the TBC stage in the DVD device you demonstrated.

I bought an unused elgato video capture at a garage sale for $5 a few years back. I had no idea they still sold it

8:04 "Night and day difference" Yes the capture looks absolutely dreadful while the recorder only looked awful. I suppose thats just down to the source media

Elgato has a low bitrate. It's the number one problem with it. For taking snapshots Elgato has nice captures with laserdiscs but in motion it looks horrendous. I post screen caps on lddb and reddit. lddb is the laserdisc database. I prefer Hauppauge PVR but I have to tweak the colors just right to get Hauppauge to look right. Hauppauge has a much higher bitrate. Some people will be shocked to know that laserdisc needs a lot of bitrate to look decent otherwise it will have artifact or bitrate issue problems. It might be an old format from 1978 but it's still an analog source at a higher resolution than vhs and it needs higher bitrate than what Elgato has to offer. Elgato is basically 90 dollar junk unless people just like screen captures. It does that decent enough but it's bitrate is awful for laserdiscs.

Reminds me of the Technology Connections video where he was exploring many ways to get a VHS cature in the best quality.

Thank you so much for the review. I thought their products are on a bit higher standard, but I was wrong. (I've never used their product though.) My method for VHS digitizing is to use my DV camcorder (mine has analog input) and use it as AV converter unit. DV camcorder is connected to Mac via FireWire. I use QuickTime.

I've been telling that for years. The best ratio of quality vs price is DV. Whoever uses those dongles cannot be called a professional. I do wonder however are those elcrapos even compliant with ITU-R REC.601 specification. I see it doesn't matter it already puts it into square pixels for 4:3.

I can nitpick about some of the flaws in the other capture methods (the Sony DVD recorder has issues too, but WAY better then the Elgato), but I won't knowing what the capture chain is. If anything this video reveals why one needs a good playback deck with an onboard TBC. Heck, the Elgato failed in other areas like luminence levels and I wouldn't be surprised if it has AGC problems too. Ideally, you want a chip that can properly capture 720x480 interlaced analog video without dropped frames. Deinterlace and resize in post.

The best way you can capture is to get a camcorder and a computer with firewire and use the camera as a bridge between the analog VCR and the computer. I even captured DVDs bypassing the piracy restrictions and the capture was flawless.

Damn, I wish had known this before I transferred a bunch of my tapes and then gave them to goodwill.

Nice that you did a video on the Elgato. On your previous video about the Sony device I commented exactly this, that it performed much better than most uploads I've seen done with devices like the Elgato. You've now demonstrated exactly what I wrote. 👍 I would still like to know what the best direct capture solution is available for OS-X. Maybe somebody here knows of a better device / software?

This Video couldn't have come at a better time! I was browsing for an analog capture device a couple days ago, and since I've owned two elgato HDMI Capture devices, I was thinking that this would work out great too. But now I'm glad I didn't. I didn't purchase one at the time because of the price, but now I'm won't because of the quality issues I'll be stuck with. I'll be removing it from the online cart. Thank you for the video.

"Ride only on designated trails" ... which peeps around here would do that, rather than destroying everything. Aaaaaanyway! Ye, the difference is visible :D

dude, yu rock. my utoob feed is full of 'that fella' who has rooms full of said devices. and i shudder to think of all the time spent cleaning and repairing tapes - only to get captured via elgato. i have three sony dv encoders and two s-vhs machines. not perfect, but works. i also have a star tech usb 3 capture that does a decent job w obs 'per tom's photo'. could you share your link w/ the obs setup so i can compare? great job taking one for the team.

Another good capture option (if your PC has an IEE-1394 port) is the Sony DVMC-AV2 Media converter, it takes composite or S-Video and converts it into a DV stream, it will also convert a DV stream to S-Vido and composite with stereo audio. We used them in college on editing systems to fight Panasonic's brain damaged DVCPRO decks, which did not include a digital video I/O option.

I had my eyes on this thing when i started digitizing old tapes but I found the JIm Leonard tutorial and got the Startech device. Great stuff. What's even better (if you want to spend the money and/or already own the hardware) is a good HDMI solution. I happen to own a RetroTink 5x Pro for gaming and the current software version is great for capturing video. Time base correction, motion adaptive deinterlacing for 50/60 fps stuff and 2:2/3:2 detelecine for everything shot on film. It's really awesome

avermedia pci cards are really good for analog capture. i specifically bought a motherboard with a pair of 32bit PCI slots under the PCIe for mine my card is a early 2000s AverMedia A-180. only downside is it's got an ATSC tuner instead of NTSC

Aaaaaand thats why i use dvd recorders. I still use one routinely to record live tv too. I have an SVHS deck with a TBC and hook it to the recorder using SCART and svideo. Sure ripping the disc to the pc is an extra step but I frequently just don't rip! I just keep the DVD.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually had pretty good results using this device with an old Core 2 Duo laptop from 2009 running Win 10 and using an old version of VirtualDub. I recorded to an internal SSD in a lossless raw format and I use either an external TBC or a JVC S-VHS deck with a built-in pseudo-TBC. Once captured, I send the video over gigabit Ethernet to a faster machine to deinterlace and encode to H.264 via ffmpeg (and yadif for deinterlace at 2x framerate).

In the Japanese analog capture community, At a low price, IO-DATA GV-USB2 is said to be the best. This is perfect for SNES as it can capture at 240p/60fps.

I recently ordered a composite to HDMI device and an HDMI capture device. Theoretically this should produce terrible quality as the signal will be de-interlaced and at 60 fps. However, the result is surprisingly good! I capture using virtualdub at 720x576 (PAL resolution)

Low quality sources like VHS etc. needs to be captured uncompressed, otherwise you will get horrible results.

Good video and advice. I've been noticing this in a lot of different electronic devices, it's something that clashes between established brand names and no name stuff all the time. The way I imagine without internal knowledge that this went, which is also the case for lots of different types of electronics, goes like this. At the time it was designed and created, Elgato probably had very good components there in comparison to the competition. Problem is, this product is only profitable if it can sell long term. So they invested a lot on brand recognition, marketing, etc. But this strategy is incompatible with the product itself. Since it's all chip and software based, in probably less than a year better tech was already available, and it was also cheaper. But it's not worth for the brand to go back to the table and redesign the whole thing again with newer tech and software in mind. Given enough time and production, it's easy enough for a no name business to churn out something that works way better than their original product. See, this also happened with HDMI capture stuff, with USB C chargers, it's happening with keyboards and mouse, with docking stations, with all sorts of electronics metering systems, with power banks, it could happen with portable projectors, it's mostly happened with audio stuff like Bluetooth speakers, portable microphones, and some others. The HDMI capture in particular, I remember a time when generic brands worked so badly that I wouldn't recommend anyone to risk getting the white label stuff. They mostly worked very poorly or not at all, and even though they were cheap, you'd just be wasting money. Nowadays? I think most of the generic stuff works reasonably well. Unless you want something very specific to high end brands, a white label HDMI USB dongle will do. There are lots of areas in the electronics and hobbist categories where something similar happened. Portable soldering irons, motorized screw drivers, CCTV camera testers, USB testers, power supply, devboards, several types of tools, vacuum cleaners, hair trimmers... the list goes on and on. Most people don't notice this because they are not dealing with this huge range of products at the same time I guess. Branded stuff might still have the very top of the high end because it's a company that is not only in product development but also research, but those are kind the exception, not the rule. For the mundane stuff that not everyone has an interest in, you start seeing the generic stuff taking over expensive branded stuff - until the generic stuff coalesce into a brand themselves, that is. xD Personally, I think Elgato is kinda on the way out. It's just that their competition still didn't coalesce under a brand with a consistent product line, looks and marketing strategy just yet. But most of the company's products have some generic competition that might not look as cool or well finished, but they are also a fraction of the price. Elgato branded itself around streaming and vlogging market. So, capture cards, microphones, webcams, lighting, etc. They are not for super high quality per se, they are for whatever is considered "good enough" for streamers. I guess because it's such a nebulous concept and new-ish, you still don't have much of a competition there... but it'll eventually happen. Anyways, this doesn't always work, but just to leave a tip - if you are going for the generic stuff, try getting something that has new tech in something parallel to the product. Some stuff you can just add up the current year in search term. In the case of VHS capture, the only thing I can think of is it having an USB-C port instead of regular USB. Or perhaps something that takes video from S-Video or SCART instead of RCA if you have a way to export the signal. Sometimes you get better electronic components on those. Also try looking at the description and specs of the product if they list a bunch of details on the internal components. This is kinda rare, but when it happens it's another layer of guarantee that whoever is doing those actually care. But it's never a guarantee... Oh, another recent purchase I got was an HDMI Splitter. I had a decade old thing lying around that had all sorts of random problems and glitches. Got a new generic one... working perfectly.

Thanks for this video. I was really close to buying one of these a while back and I remember seeing your video come up on my feed a few days afterwards. I thought "Elgato can't be that bad, can it?" and I ignored the video at first. Soon afterwards I decided against buying the Elgato because of how expensive it was (It was around £90 brand new and £60 used). Now that I knew I didn't want one, I watched this video to see if they were actually as bad as you said they were and thank god I did because jesus it looks terrible.