I have dedicated this blog to camera and photo stuff but rules have to be broken and this is one exception. I have a bunch of old analogue video tapes that are gathering dust and deterioration by the minute. How to go about and save them I thought? I had a small capture device but it didn't work on Win7 64-bit and all those capture devices rely on the computer to work properly.
After searching I finally found a rather old device - Pinnacle Video Transfer. It's a small portable USB device that you supply with power, a video signal and some sort of USB device. That's right, some sort of USB device! Not a computer! You simple plug in an USB disc or USB memory stick and it records straight to the USB without any computer, software or drivers. Sounds simple? It is just that simple.
This device is not without it's faults. The recorded resolution is 720x576 pixels so I don't have any complains with regards to resolution. Old tapes are PAL at best so it's just fine. But the bitrate in the highest setting is only 1.5mb/s. This is just to low to avoid any kind of artefacts. The record compression is H264 and a very efficient one but 1.5 mb/s is just to low. How strange and wacky it sounds there is a bit of a fix for this. Just put a file called "best.txt" in the video root folder and the bitrate jumps up to 2.5mb/s and maybe even a bit further! How wacky is that?
Doing this easy "fix" the recorded video looks much better. Not perfect but okay to salvage those forgotten tapes. The device itself is very easy to use and it even stops recording if the signal is lost for more than 10 seconds. The only thing that's bad is that if the signal interrupts the recorded image after that point can be all screwed up and look just like a paint bucket painted video file. If it happens the quickest fix is to check at which point it happens and start over again a little later than that point to get a clean recorded file.
Since this one is so simple, there's no way to monitor what's recorded. You have to use some sort of display connected to the playback device if you want to check what's going into the box and eventually the output file. On one end of the unit there's a USB "B" connector. It's for future use the manual states. I doubt we'll see anything new here but you can power it via USB connected to a computer so that's at least one use if you misplace the net adapter.
I'm a bit puzzled on how I totally missed this device. It's an old design dated back to 2007 but I haven't found a similar device made since!