datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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Good to know! That link has a lot of good information.
Noted! I will keep this in mind.
I came across this video about digitizing VHS tapes [1]. It talks about hardware to use, and hardware to avoid [1.6]. One of the examples that it gives for hardware to avoid seems to be a clone of the device that I was looking at on Amazon [1.2]. The rationale for why it should be avoided was that it doesn't pass both fields of the interlaced video through independently [1.1]. Though, you have mentioned that it's fine to capture the video interlaced, so perhaps this isn't a big deal-breaker. The capture cards that the video recommends are:
References
So, uh... The EasyCAP device passes both fields into your PC but the video says that the driver does not interpret them correctly and uses probably the most common, incorrect deinterlacing method (see earlier comment with the method list). It is technically possible to reinterlace the video but I haven't needed to do that, and you should do so before any lossy encoding to a file. I assume the community-written Linux driver has no such issue.
The tutorial is mostly correct for people who want to create YouTube uploads with just one program (for YouTube, progressive video is required and the 480p stream cannot be 60 fps and has a terrible bitrate (and 576p for PAL is not available AT ALL so 1080p60 makes sense) but I strongly recommend not deinterlacing nor scaling in OBS, you can do that later. Record 480i (interlaced) files at very high bitrate and perform the deinterlacing in post.