Super, super cool initiative.

I would be interested to know what capture hardware they're using. As someone who took on this project for my own family's videos, I ended up using the Canopus ADVC-110, which captures composite (or S-Video) NTSC (plus stereo audio) and generates DV, which you can then capture over FireWire.

It worked well for me since it didn't require any non-built-in drivers on macOS (though I hear Tahoe drops FireWire support entirely -- boo), and it therefore was easily interoperable with FFmpeg, VLC, and custom AVFoundation code I wrote.

Unfortunately, I don't think the ADVC-110 is made anymore, and my experiments with various USB Video Class devices (which would be similarly interoperable), mostly based on MacroSilicon chips like the MS210x, were utter failures in terms of quality.

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valleyer 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Looks like Santa Clara is using the VuPoint Digital Video Converter -- not familiar with this one, so I'll have to look into it.

https://www.sclibrary.org/services/other-services/vhs-conver...

	▲	lldb 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately devices like the VuPoint - while low cost and accessible - deliver impressively terrible results. It’s a composite to usb converter which will fail to handle delinterlacing and get the colors wrong. The best bet for people who aren’t going to build a domesday duplicator (which decodes the VHS signal in software), is to stick to technology from the era. Such as later released VHS players which had FireWire out or could even burn a dvd.