Startech video capture card

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Startech video capture card - file sizes

quickymart

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#320276 25-Jul-2025 09:37

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/ADPSTT4889832/StarTechcom-SVID2USB232-USB-Video-Capture-Adapter?qr=GShopping&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhYed7pClhwMVuqZmAh35ZQQPEAQYAiABEgL5hPD_BwE

I purchased one of these a few days ago and am finally using it this morning. I connected it up to my VHS and it seems to be capturing everything okay as far as I can tell - however how can I change the file size? 2 minutes of video is 500GB? 😮 This is only an old VHS recording from 1999, so not like it's 4K or anything.

I'm using the bundled software that came with it - MovAVI Video Editor SE version 11. It's quite easy to use - but I would like to know how to reduce the file size of what I'm capturing.

I had a 3 hour video made into an .mkv file by someone else last year and that one came out to 1.75GB in total for the 3 hours, so I'm thinking there must be some setting I need to adjust or something in the software to reduce the file size?

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#3397004 25-Jul-2025 11:34

Alternatively, if someone can suggest a good, free video capture application that I can use to capture my video I'm more than happy to take a look at it.

Of note, the default settings were on NTSC when I first installed MovAVI, so I changed it to 16:9, 24fps, PAL-B...but the file sizes are still massive. I can provide a screenshot if that helps anyone.

djtOtago

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#3397016 25-Jul-2025 12:16

I'm not familiar with that device, but I'm guessing it is capturing as a high bit rate MJPEG (Motion JPEG) .AVI file. Devices at the low end don't usually have many options when it comes to capture file settings.

Capture your video, then use something like HandBrake to convert it to a more compressed format

gzt

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#3397020 25-Jul-2025 12:22

Saw the headline came to suggest handbrake for conversion. Also commandline tools like ffmpeg but steep learning curve.

quickymart: Alternatively, if someone can suggest a good, free video capture application that I can use to capture my video I'm more than happy to take a look at it.

OBS is somewhat standard for this although I haven't used it for that specific purpose.

gzt

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#3397024 25-Jul-2025 12:37

In many if not most cases it is actually sensible to capture in a relatively uncompressed format and transcode later. Reality depends on system capability overall io and cpu etc etc. The consumer capture device is likely to have default or permanent settings chosen with minimal chance of hitting those limitations (and avoiding license fees) at the cost of filesize and limited options. Transcoding later is kind of expected.

quickymart

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#3397044 25-Jul-2025 13:21

Yes I thought that might be the case - I may have to make do with capturing a large file and then compressing it. I'll need to get a hefty external drive to save it to though, otherwise might see if I can save the file to a network drive with plenty of space as a workaround.

Thanks both for your suggestions 🙂

gbwelly

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#3397078 25-Jul-2025 14:53

quickymart:

Yes I thought that might be the case - I may have to make do with capturing a large file and then compressing it. I'll need to get a hefty external drive to save it to though, otherwise might see if I can save the file to a network drive with plenty of space as a workaround.

Thanks both for your suggestions 🙂

I've not dabbled in this space for about 15 years, but from my limited knowledge your options are:

Get a capture device that supports hardware encoding to H264 or HEVC in real time as it captures.
Capture terabytes of video and compress it later.
Get capture software that can use graphics card hardware encoding such as NVENC or Intel Quick Sync. (OBS might be able to do this, maybe will need a plugin.)

I'd personally spend a couple of hours on option 3. If it's all too much of a hack I'd then throw money at option 1. I certainly wouldn't spend money on more storage for option 2, I'd put it towards option 1.

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quickymart

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#3397081 25-Jul-2025 15:03

For option 1 I'd need to see if the settings support it.

FYI this was the device I purchased (from PB Tech): https://www.startech.com/en-nz/audio-video-products/svid2usb232?srsltid=AfmBOopwmn8VK5-VNvXr_KUslW9NXqzmM7ekWkwF6-6KUABi0WskP7tA

I'm out of time to do this today, but will see what settings I can tweak next week - although it doesn't seem particularly customisable in that regard; I may just have to create a large-as file and then compress it to something more manageable.

systemd

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#3397142 25-Jul-2025 17:59

As gzt said, OBS (https://obsproject.com/) is the standard for capturing and will let you leverage your PCs hardware.

The out-of-the-box recording settings will already produce a much smaller video file. Here's a short ~5 minute video (skipped to the part that actually matters) as a demo: https://youtu.be/6ZqMXcXnBE0?feature=shared&t=164

gzt

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#3397178 25-Jul-2025 20:02

Hopefully you can use the device as input for OBS.

In the worst case if you can't, OBS does an excellent job of just plain old screen recording non-copyright material.

quickymart

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#3397183 25-Jul-2025 20:14

Thanks, this looks (potentially) promising - will take a closer look next week when I have some time 🙂

fe31nz

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#3397216 26-Jul-2025 00:00

When I last did S-VHS video capture many years ago, the best method I found was to get the capture device to output uncompressed video to a big disk, then do a compression using good settings on good compression software. If there is an option for lossless compression (for example the HuffYUV codec), you should use that for slightly smaller output files. You may need to find and install the HuffYUV codec to get that option. My recollection is that with HuffYUV, my capture files were about 1 Gbyte per minute - so make sure you have enough space on the output disk. Any capture device that does real time compression will not be using good settings and will do a fairly crappy job. Unless you have a supercomputer or specialised hardware, good compression can not be done in real time.

When compressing the file after capture, you need to consider which compression codec you are going to use. The best one available now is probably AV1 - it gives the smallest size for the same quality result and is completely free of patents and so on. Also good is H.265, but not if you are doing commercial work as you would then need to pay. And it is not as good a AV1. H.264 is the one most used, but it is now a bit outdated - H.265 and AV1 do a better job. But you might still want to use H.264 if you are wanting to play the compressed files on devices that do not do AV1 or H.265.

Where the codec allows two pass compression it is best to use that - the first pass works out where the complex bits of the video are where more bits are needed and the second pass can then use that data to do a really good compression at the bit rate or quality you choose. Codecs that do not have two passes may have an option for lookahead, where they will buffer the data for the lookahead time period and then use the data in the buffer to work out where to spend the available bits best. So for the best results, you choose the longest lookahead that you can. And, of course, you set all the quality settings to as high as possible, and if that means the compression programme is going to take hours to do the compression, then just leave it overnight to do that - those are the settings you want to use. Generally, you will only capture a tape once and then may well be throwing it away - so you want to do the best job possible.

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quickymart

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#3397226 26-Jul-2025 07:22

Thanks, will take the above into account as well. Won't be doing much with it until next week now when I have some free time.

richms

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#3397246 26-Jul-2025 09:46

Real time hardware compression of VHS stuff seldom looks that good because you want to run a better deinterlace across it before compression. Deinterlacing after a lossy encode often gives way worse results.

If you capture in OBS then that will let you position the capture device in the scene, which means you can crop the waving around crap at the bottom off, any residial captioning or other junk at the top, and decide how you handle getting the aspect ratio sorted out yourself. That will then get you a clean 50/60FPS file from after deinterlace that you can control the compression on in much greater detail, but you you are planning on editing it then lowest compression possible here is important since you will be reencoding it in premiere/Davinci resolve or whatever you use to trim it down. This is where you can drop the quality and do a 2 pass compression.

Richard rich.ms

gzt

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#3397268 26-Jul-2025 10:58

might see if I can save the file to a network drive

Capturing to a network drive is potentially a world of pain. Try to avoid that one if you can. Besides corruption, there are many cases where it will cache locally anyway using the exact same amount of space..

quickymart

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#3398050 29-Jul-2025 14:29

Update, finally did this this afternoon (can't do much else with the weather). Captured about 1 hour and 10 minutes of video using OBS (came out to around 6GB) then used Handbrake and got it down to about 4GB.

Does this sound right? Is there a setting I should be checking? I didn't tweak a hell of a lot.

An earlier capture of the same VHS lasting around 90 minutes came in at about 880MB, so I'm wondering if there's more compressing I can do?

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