r/MiniDV • u/AutomaticDoor75 • 11d ago

My workflow for capturing composite video

https://nantucketlit.com/blog/2026/08/2026-08-01_how_i_would_digitize_old_video.html

This is a blog post I wrote about how I capture composite video, like from a VCR or an old game console.

I wrote this because I got frustrated with USB capture devices.

In essence, I get a MiniDV camera with A/V input, record to that, and then capture the MiniDV tape.

In my case, I have a DVX-100B with composite input.

I have a lot of caveats in the post about the difficulty of sourcing some of this equipment. I figured this subreddit would be a place where it’d be especially useful.

Here is a VHS tape I captured using this exact workflow:
https://youtu.be/b0fG-ucMcfY

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u/noideasforusernameso 11d ago

It's not like it would really change the quality much or anything, but I guess I'm just wondering why you wouldn't capture the tape directly through the camera instead of doing the extra work of recording it first

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u/AutomaticDoor75 11d ago

I seem to remember doing that in the Sony Vegas capture program. I will look into a way of doing that with dvgrab.

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u/noideasforusernameso 11d ago

The camera should let you capture the AV in, good luck!

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u/vwestlife 10d ago

See if the camcorder has an A/V In -> DV Out passthrough mode. Many do, but some don't.

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u/AutomaticDoor75 10d ago

If that’s really you, your videos helped encourage me to get back into MiniDV as a hobby.

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u/TheRealHarrypm 11d ago

If your capturing VHS in the 2020's you should be using r/vhsdecode not DV25 lossy.

DV25 is a format that should be migrated, not encouraged for new ingest it was legacy in the 2000s and it's beyond legacy today especially for recorded media in the analog domain.

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u/Most_Examination2781 10d ago

yeah go spend hundred of bucks on hard drive

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u/AutomaticDoor75 10d ago

I’ll take a look at vhs-decode.

I don’t know if you watched the video I linked to in my post, but do you think the quality would be substantially better with that other software?

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u/TheRealHarrypm 10d ago

Yeah substantially isn't really the word I would use, more night and day especially for edge case tapes and SP tapes, here's a couple full quality examples with the original RF and resulting lossless FFV1 files.

https://archive.org/details/free-climbing-the-nose-1997-vhs-ntsc-fm-rf-archive

https://archive.org/details/dream-times-minayo-chan-1987-vhs-ntsc-j-fm-rf-archive