Find an S-VHS player with a decent Timebase Corrector. eBay/craigslist or something. I hope you're not in the UK, they're very hard to find at decent prices over here (I tried a while ago). Run the S-Video output to a PC video capture card. Then record that signal as uncompresssed 4:2:0 video at either PAL or NTSC DVD resolution (depending on source tapes).
If you want, you can record in DV or something instead of the huge bandwidth uncompressed files. I'd guess that the bitrate of DV should be enough to cope with VHS footage without visual loss.
Either way, for best quality, the important part is the first 2 steps. S-VHS player with an S-Video output and a TBC. PC Capture Card.
DVD Recorder method would work, but it will incur loss.
If you are in the UK it might even be easier to find a professional service which will do a proper transfer for you and give you the footage on a hard drive than for you get a decent S-VHS machine yourself. I dunno, I've never looked, but there are services which will do proper 8mm film transfers outputted uncompressed to hard drives so I'd guess there are some which do the same for VHS tapes.
Thanks for that.
I initially started looking for players with a S-video out (and yep, they do seem to still go for silly prices here) but Wikipedia suggested that S-video was inferior to the RGB component output that some VCRs would output through the SCART. Is this not the case?
I had thought about sending them away for transfer but thought that the costs of doing it for two families' worth of 25 years of home videos might make it cheaper to buy some decent equipment to do it at home...
And have you got any recommendations for a USB or Firewire based interface? - I don't own any desktop PCs anymore.
I'm not sure about the component, you might well be correct. I only looked into S-Video, as my capture card only has an S-Video input.
That said, I can't imagine a standard VHS tape has enough quality on it to be noticeable between S-Video and Component.
I know that Scart > S-Video has weird problems, like the image being black & white and softer than the actual VHS. IIRC there's some kind of workaround but I never got it to work. And I think you need a converter box to go from Scart to Component (
like this).
I can't help with specific external USB/FW interfaces, but I would guess that external interfaces with component input will be quite expensive.
I dunno man. The thing is, if you can get a decent S-VHS player, the inbuilt TBC will do a lot to improve the picture quality too. Note: External TBCs will do nothing of the sort, all they do is remove copy protection. If it's a choice between spending £85 on a Scart > Component converter box plus christ knows what on an external component interface, I think I'd rather get a cheaper S-Video only USB/FW interface, then put all the other money saved towards a proper SVHS deck off eBay or something.