Video Asylum

Posted by bassbinotoko (A) on December 26, 2009 at 00:15:10

In Reply to: RE: Anyone upscaling laserdiscs to HD? posted by Jeff Jenkins on December 18, 2009 at 13:45:05

Play them on the TV? Surely it'll still have composite video inputs... I'm pretty sure the chroma/luma separators in recent sets are light years beyond the ones that were built-in laserdisc players back in the '90s. As for capturing, using DScaler and a WinTV card didn't look as good as running the signal straight into my TV (720p Sony CRT). Only problem is with letterboxing... the zoom function on the TV seems to cut off a little of the sides, though perhaps no worse than with native 16:9 material on a set with overscan.

It would be interesting to pass the composite video through a DVD recorder with HDMI output. I've read that some DVD recorders have time-base correction which improves VHS material for capture, so they may do a better job converting LD material to the digital domain. With the incredibly low cost of DVD blanks, just burn one LD side per 4.7 disc.

The results I got capturing using a WinTV card didn't look good enough to warrant chucking the player and disks. However, I would like to capture the PCM soundtracks, and see if it is feasible to remux those into a Blu-ray or DVD rip of the video portion. At least for movies that lack a lossless soundtrack, or if songs have been changed from the original.

If anyone reading this has a suggestion for a really good, but affordable, capture card, please send me a PM or something. Or just reply to this, and I'll set it to notify me. I've tried a couple of WinTV (the TV/FM one, PVR250) and a Pinnacle AV/DV, and the results weren't what I'd hoped for. Maybe I'm hoping for too much from composite sources. An MPEG2 capture of Hi8 camcorder video with the PVR250 looked very good.