Best but cost effective setup for Capturing Camcorder/VHS to Digital Footage?

RMS Oceanic

My dad is in the market for a new PC. It would mostly be for office work/internet browsing, and if it were just that I'm confident with recommending 8GB of RAM, half a terabyte ssd and keeping clear of 13th/14th Gen Intel chips, with little else really needed. However he's also expressed interest in using the computer to copy camcorder/VHS footage he's rediscovered into a digital format, footage from 20-30 years ago that includes my late grandmother and other family. He somehow wound up with a little USB <-> RGB dongle and software to run it, but I've straight up said to him I highly doubt the footage will look any good, the hardware limitations probably strangling the quality like no tomorrow, and when dealing with stuff of such emotional value I doubt you want to skimp on that. However other than relying on USB being ill advised, I have no experience with capturing from tape either. Is a separate device that does the hard work better, or would he be better off with a capture card built into the computer? Does such functions impact the CPU needed? Would a graphics card be useful? A dedicated storage drive is probably good too, but how much? What sort of budget should he be setting aside? The office-only PCs we were looking at were around £300-400.

Bowen

You can probably find a "high quality" version of those dongles in the $90-120 range. Elgato used to be the go-to brand for them and I'm sure they're still decent. Converting from VHS to mp4/mkv is relatively easy and doesn't really need much. You could probably do it on a laptop from 20 years ago. Hardest part is getting a high quality VHS device.

From there you want storage. Lots of storage. Probably one of those raid 1+ external USB enclosures like this: https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-233-US-Affordable-Cortex-A55-Quad-core/dp/B09VCYCFSY (drives sold separately).

From there just pick a nice solid computer, shoot for 8-16 gb (more is better, it makes things snappier when converting and doing other tasks). And yes avoid intel like the plague. This type of thing is especially in the wheel house of AMD. But also AMD isn't burning through cores right now so, no reason to even bother with intel for a while.

Donkey Kong

You want 16 GB of ram baseline these days. AMD processor will be a better deal, run cooler, and they're not having a perpetual crisis of failing products.

The USB capture devices are actually not so bad given most of them have a hardware H.264 encoder with a pretty high bitrate, which means the USB pipe is not so limiting really. Its not archival quality but give it a shot. Anything that captures raw footage and is able to properly deinterlace old analog video for maximum quality is going to cost as much as the PC you build.

If the USB dongle is bad but you still want to get something inexpensive, idk what will still handle what your probably PAL VCR puts out. Listing the cable and video format would help.

djmitchella

For what it's worth, I transferred some VHS tapes to PC back in 2016, using a laptop that was a low-end laptop even at the time (an asus eee pc 1005, 1gb of ram and an atom N280 at 1.66ghz), and it was perfectly able to keep up, VHS is not a lot of data to worry about, so anything you buy nowadays should be more than enough. (the quality is, well, VHS quality, ie not the greatest, but that's the fault of VHS, not the transfer technology).

furlion

Beefier is better obviously but you also have to keep in mind that VHS has a maximum resolution of 480. Which is so small compared to HD that even a cheap off the shelf prebuilt can almost certainly handle it no problem.