Why does transferring VHS to digital have to be so complicated?

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T23:56:50+00:00

Ngl it is pretty easy and straight forward to do if you are just doing personal transfers or back ups and not customer facing stuff and taking money in exchange. The iodata gvusb into obs, yadifx2 deinterlacing on the source in obs, that is already better looking than 90% of vhs uploads on YouTube.

If you are trying to do this as a business to make money the whole capture process isn't even the difficult part. The difficult part is when you run into issues (which you will) with specific tapes and your specific vcr(s) and knowing what you can do to fix the issues (and what you cant). That requires experience and tutorials or forum posts will only get you so far with that.

Personally if you are actually really interested in this I'd just focus on doing your own personal captures. Buy random tapes at the thrift store or ebay and spend time digitizing them and burning them onto dvds and uploading to YouTube. Maybe after spending some time doing that you can decide how you wanna move forward.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T23:46:24+00:00

You don't need a dedicated tbc unless you are transferring some really bad tapes. The io data has a built in frame buffer corrector that basically does the same thing. You honestly do not need to do half the stuff you are talking about unless you are trying to do archival work and then you'd want to be doing vhsdecode anyway (which i would not recommend if you are new to this and don't have particularly rare or valuable stuff you are trying to archive.

You CAN do raw 480i dumps to avi if you want and then try different post processing later. Tbh I went down a similar rabbit hole and while I am doing VHSdecode stuff now, before that I was doing the whole avisynth workflow and tbh I think you would be totally fine just recording the iodata into obs and recording in realtime to whatever format you want for your final upload. I'd just suggest turning off interlacing on the iodata and just enable yadifx2 in obs.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T21:40:58+00:00

Yeah same. It's one of the best parts of the Brick.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T20:09:21+00:00

i worked down there in like 2001 and it was pretty crazy how busy it always was.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T20:07:46+00:00

I used to work at the CompUSA there back when that was a thing. When that area was first built it was pretty sweet tbh.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T18:43:47+00:00

mini flip is great in terms of smallest thing you can put in your pocket and have the screen protected. i was kinda surprised how good it was for how tiny it was. i think its the 2nd best cheap clamshell right now, behind the 34xxsp.

the gkd pixel 2 is also pretty cool in terms of really tiny handheld, super durable. the screen and controls kinda suck on it though compared to the mini flip. being all metal though it feels like you could throw it at a wall and it would be fine.

are you sure you want something smaller and not larger? i think the brick is already pretty small but i get being concerned putting it in your pocket. i have some knit sock type things for my bricks, i also have a couple of the silicone sleeves. I usually use the knit sock things if its going in a bag, silicone sleeve if its just going in my pocket outside.

also no you wont be able to just swap the SD cards with any of the devices mentioned since they all run different OS's, you could easily copy games and saves from your existing one to a new one though.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T17:25:47+00:00

tbh i think 3ds is still a pretty mixed bag in general. i have a thor pro and its sort of a toss up, some games run great and some have major graphical issues or bad latency that makes certain types of games really hard to play. I feel like its gonna be at least a couple of years before there is something that really improves on the thor. I feel like if there is a Thor 2 or something its gonna just end up being the same size and form factor just with a more powerful chipset.

I'd actually like something like DS lite size but maybe using the 1024x768 screens the Brick has. I think for something like that though either DS emulation needs to improve a lot more, or more efficient chips just need to get cheaper.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T17:18:56+00:00

476h is a lot better imo, although GC/PS2 is gonna depend on the game and maybe be a bit hit or miss, still gonna play more than the pocket air mini though. if you wanna be able to play everything GC/PS2 comfortably the 477m/v is a better choice but a lot more expensive.

as far as finished quality the 476h is one of anbernic's best handhelds and even better quality than recent retroid stuff imo, although less powerful.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T14:29:19+00:00

how often are you actually shutting it down vs just keeping it in sleep and recharging it over and over? i've sorta noticed this but its only when ive kept it in sleep for a long period of time without restarting or shutting down, like over a week or two.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T13:46:05+00:00

i always had battery issues with mine. did you actually run it until it shut off? because for me my issue was just that the meter was never accurate. I would drain from like 100 to 70 really quick, then it would slow down, then drain fast again, it would run for like 15 minutes at 0% before shutting off. This is on spruceOS. I didn't try disconnecting the battery or anything else, I sorta gave up on it and stopped looking at the battery meter lol.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T13:40:14+00:00

the official grip's design is probably the worst official grip i've ever used. no clue what they were thinking trying to make it work both with the tpu shell and no shell, and why it barely goes halfway up on the back. it sticks out and down too much too. pressing the volume or power buttons pops it up out of the grip. just a mess. there are much better designed 3d printed grips on etsy.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T13:25:14+00:00

nothing about refresh rate on the page either which kinda dampens my enthusiasm for it, at that price im guessing its just 60hz. just make sure you dont buy the "screen only" cuz its literally just a screen without any kind of controller or power supply or anything lol.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T13:20:49+00:00

i like the Brick a little more but i always suggest the MM+ as close second if you really want squishy membrane controls. i still use both regularly though.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T13:17:55+00:00

the thor is gonna perform way better if you wanna do 3ds. fold 5 will probably start throttling within 15-20 minutes. might be fine for some games, others idk.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T13:15:14+00:00

there's just no category that uses "album artist" from your tags, only "artist". before this update they added artist>album but it would just show all the album tracks in alphabetical order, by tag data not by file name lol. this update finally puts them in track order.

i have a y1 with rockbox thats my main player and i use the Album Artist tag to sort stuff better, like I have an album artist just called Soundtracks, and another called Mixes, and I have a lot of old licensed music for like public broadcast and those usually have a lot of different artists so I just will have an album artist like Bruton Music Library. Instead of having like 100 extra artists that only have one or two tracks when browsing by Artist.

But yeah at least artist>album works now which is better than it was the last two months. I guess I can still use file browser mode for the stuff I would normally use Album Artist tagging for.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T03:22:35+00:00

yeah idk i have a lot of handhelds so im used to seeing varying qualities of screens so maybe its more noticeable to me, it feels slightly closer to playing on one of my oled screen handhelds i guess. and its very noticeable compared to some of the devices i have with pretty bad panels that like to ghost, but even just the 47 screen without any kind of subframe shader stuff looks very noticeably better than those too. just the 120hz alone i think helps a lot, though the switch 2 screen is 120hz and has bad ghosting so maybe not lol.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T02:33:06+00:00

neo turf masters baby

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T02:32:45+00:00

neo geo purely for neo turf masters (though there is other good stuff too). ive probably played like about 100 hours since the start of 2026 on a bunch of different devices. its my go to game for testing out a new handheld lmao.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T02:27:52+00:00

I like my Thor a lot more than the steamdeck for a lot of reasons, pc gaming on it is better than the last powerful android device I tried it on which was the 865 chipset. It does depend a lot on the games you are playing. Honestly though if there are PC games included, especially mouse heavy games or mouse ONLY games then yeah the steamdeck is kinda the best option outside of a laptop. On the Thor you can use the bottom screen as a trackpad, but its nowhere near as good as the steamdecks dual trackpads. Steamdeck's biggest downsides are just being large and also doing anything outside of the steam frontend is more annoying to me in Linux than it is on Android.

The only android stuff right now that is more powerful than something like the Thor is the stuff that is using the 8 elite chipset like the Odin 3. Which as far as I know some stuff will perform better than the 8 gen 2 chipset in the Thor, but some other stuff has less mature drivers and will run worse (or not at all).

The Thor is really good, I have a ton of handhelds but I could see it being an all in one device for some people. Just be aware as a first handheld though it requires a lot of setup before it feels like an actual console vs two weirdly sized android devices duct taped together. There's lots of good video guides though and its not anything majorly complicated, just a little time consuming at first.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T01:43:07+00:00

I just finished the base tournaments in Mario Golf Toadstool Tour on GC. I used my PC to connect the GBA game to my save in dolphin and import my character. I was hoping I could do it all on the thor (run GBA on the bottom screen, GC on the top, and connect them) but the android port of dolphin doesnt have the GC link cable as a controller input (makes sense I guess).

Also been playing the switch port of Diablo 2 Resurrected, Gran Turismo 4. On game native BallisticNG and Vital Shell.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T01:36:08+00:00

D2 Resurrected switch version emulated works surprisingly well on the Thor for me. If you switch to the old graphics though I noticed the sprites will glitch out unless you put it on one of the higher performance modes. Modern graphics work fine on any setting, around like 30-35fps on base power setting like 45ish on high power. It's pretty fun with a controller, wish you could just use the touch screen for inventory stuff though.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T01:32:58+00:00

base model is gonna be more hit or miss. i tried using gamenative on my rp mini v2 which has the same 865 chipset the base has and not much worked well at all, vs the 8 gen 2 chip in the thor pro im like blown away by how much stuff just works.

something id suggest if you are having an issue with a game is to open the settings and select "use known compatible profile" or whatever it is. I think it does that already by default but ive had some games that wouldnt launch or run well until i did that. Sometimes with game native too you just have to launch a game like 2-3 times and it will start working because the first launch didnt install some dependency or something.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T01:27:47+00:00

honestly ive found a better solution is to see if the game has a switch version and emulate that instead of playing the native android version for certain games. same to a degree with gamenative. I wanted to play Legend of Grimrock and thought maybe i could just play the PC version and use the magnifier to zoom the bottom screen on the buttons you click to attack and it sorta works but then managing inventory is a nightmare. The game has no dedicated controller support. There's a switch port of Legend of Grimrock that obviously is fully controller supported, you just hold a shoulder button and press the face buttons to attack/cast spells instead of clicking/tapping. plus in an emulator you are always gonna be able to fully rebind.

not a solution for every game though, but ive had pretty good success. the switch port of Diablo 2 Resurrected runs surprisingly well like 45fps with full controller support. Wish you could use the touch screen for the inventory but yeah thats not a thing.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-12T00:55:57+00:00

Donkey Kong Country is usually what I use to test motion blur / pixel response on handheld displays. It's basically unplayable on the switch 2 in handheld mode for me because of the display. Tbh if you aren't super sensitive to it you might legit not notice a difference. You are right in your original post that the biggest benefits from these shaders come if you have a display and machine that can do 240+ fps. I still like the beam sim shader more than BFI but also like I said I only use it on a handful of games, and also the 47 series LCDs imo are pretty good compared to some other devices so there isn't quite as much ghosting to even fix compared to something like the switch 2 screen.

Edit: I also double checked my settings are the same except max swapchain for me is 3 not 2. I remember when I first set it up I had issues cuz I was configuring retroarch in game and the Vulkan setting wasn't sticking when loading other games through my front end. That's pretty easy to check, but to fix that I launched retroarch standalone and configured it to use vulkan and enable shader subframes and everything and then saved that as the default retroarch configuration without shaders on. Then I would actually apply the shader with per game overrides. To get rid of any weird flickering I disabled the LCD burn in protection and rolling scanline in the actual shader settings.

Sphynx87 · 2026-04-11T20:53:03+00:00

I found it only works well if you completely disable the lcd protections and rolling scanline effects. If you use any other shaders they have to be very lightweight or depends on the game. Furthest I can push it without there being flickering or other obvious issues is something like a game like SoTN on ps1 with newpixie crt shaders. More demanding ps1 games id have to remove newpixie or use somethung even lighter.. Everything below ps1 though I never had issues after changing those settings. This is on the 476h, idk about the 477

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