Every now and then some old VHS pops up after cleaning old storages, shelfes, workshops. And I am by far not a professional VHS digitizing service, but some VHS’s are really worth preserving to me, so I have a cheap VHS player and a Hauppauge USB-Live2 analogue USB capture device.
A very simple way to capture the video and store it, would be:
ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 25 -i /dev/video0 -t 03:10:00 -f alsa -i plughw:2,0 -c:v libx264 -vf format=yuv420p -preset ultrafast -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 192k output2.mp4
One could ofc adjust some parameters. In my case this was running on old hardware, where everything more CPU-bound than libx264 with the “ultrafast” preset would congest the CPU too much, leading to frame drops.
The point here was also never to store in archive quality, for that I would need another VHS playback device with a TBC (Time Base Corrector) to decrease the horizontal jitter in the VHS, anyway. They are expensive. Or I would have to enter the whole new world of vhs-decode. Maybe one day.