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While garage sale-ing recently, I found some old VHS tapes - I've now decided I want to start a personal archive and digitize these types of obscure tapes
(programming.dev)
I got an Elgato capture card and a VCR off of EBay and have already digitized three tapes I've found at garage sales.
Any advice for cleaning up the image and audio? I recall there were VCR cleaners but never was confident of their efficacy.
AFAIK you should be able to do most of your cleaning with alcohol and compressed air. Its not normally difficult to get to the parts you need to clean if you remove the top cover. (Unplugged of course.) If you're getting a good image already and the video isn't having a bunch of audio dropouts you're probably ok for the time being. Most likely the cleaner tapes would work but I personally am always nervous to put a non-standard item into an old mechanical device that you may or may not ever find parts for again.
If you're wanting to keep this up, looking term its definitely worth seeking out the service manual for your vcr model if you can find it.
The other thing to make sure of is your capture settings. The deinterlacing algorithm can make a pretty significant difference.
After its captured there are a lot of AI "improvements" that can be made that will manufacture detail. Topaz AI for windows is kind of the gold standard at the moment but there's an open source project called video2x that might also work. Both would require a fairly decent gpu.