Hubi@feddit.orgNot op but in my case I’ve seen huge differences between USB cards and high quality cards. 20 years ago I used to use bt878 capture cards. A few years ago I bought a Viewcast Osprey on eBay.
In particular I use a svhs tape player with built in time base corrector. The reason for svhs is because the hardware supports actual svhs output. Vhs tapes are store with luminous and chroma as separate signals. With regular composite output, that data is mixed into one signal. This causes interference patterns like dot crawl and color fringing.
The other big advantage over USB dongles is all the ones I’ve seen don’t let you capture the raw data- it’s pre compressed with lossy like mjpeg or mpeg which is another huge quality drop because you’ll usually want to post process the video with avisynth before compressing it to mpeg4.
My target is for the captured video to look just as good as it originally did on a VHS player on a crt. So the interlaced to progressive conversion is always tricky. I don’t personally do it but one trick to keep resolution is to capture at 60fps and play each 30i field doubled. That way no detail is lost in the source and it uses your eyes to motion blur the fields together.
I paid $50 on ebay for the Magewell, because the seller had a huge lot of them to liquidate.
The TINK 4k is indeed expensive, but it was one I had laying around collecting dust. I have a museum of gaming consoles and for a while was upscaling them with the TINK, before moving on to a different solution.
The 16:9@60 is simply my not yet having implemented conditions in my script for variable capture settings. I am fortunate to have an 8TB HDD in the server, and an additional 140TB data server, so file size footprint isn’t currently high on my priorities.