Freil Thrift on Piano; from a 30-year old video Using AV2HDMI!

    I've been tearing my shed apart trying to find old recordings of my uncle Freil playing piano.  This VHS tape is over 30 years old, so it's not perfect, but it really means a lot to hear him play again!  I've found several others, but this is exceptional.  Nearly 25 minutes of video with Freil playing, and there are quite a few songs I don't have recorded anywhere else.  The video quality is rough, the tape is stretched, and the VCR's auto-tracking couldn't compensate enough.  But this may be the only surviving copy, and I'm grateful it works at all.

    The search for more recordings is just about over.  I've gone through nearly every box that could possibly hold any more.  Haven't found the Hi-8 tape I was actually hunting... but did turn up some audio cassettes and vhs tapes. Even got my hands on a couple of record albums he played on.  

    This videotape was recorded somewhere between 1990 and 1991.  Maybe on multiple days.  It wasn't made by me, and I have no recollection of how it came to be in my storage.  It's an awesome video.  The quality's not great... probably a copy, but more importantly, the tape is about 33 years old at this time.  VHS wasn't meant to last this long, way back then nobody knew for sure how long it would hold up.  It certainly hasn't been kept in optimal conditions.  Most of those years were in a box in a shed.

    As a result, the quality would be unacceptable, had it not been for the unique and irreplaceable nature of the subject.  For a few weeks, I couldn't even test it out.  The old digitizer (EZCap) that worked years ago no longer works.   The computer identifies it as attached hardware, but I couldn't find any software able to use it.

 

    In a previous post, I mentioned a YouTube guide by Jumble that explained an inexpensive setup to digitize videotape. It involved an RCA to HDMI converter called MINI AV2HDMI, and a small video capture device that converts HDMI to USB.  Everything else I already had, or was available for free (the OBS "Open Broadcast Software".)  OBS is way over my head, but Jumble explained the basic setup in his video.  Once it was all connected, it still didn't work, but a quick Google search fixed that.  Hint - check your windows privacy settings.  I had all related settings for Windows Webcam turned off.  As simply as turning on permissions, and it was recording video.

    Beyond that, the resulting video files had an odd echo effect.  The audio was being mixed back into itself.  I turned off the desktop/mic volume in OBS, and it worked perfectly.  Or, at least as good as the videotape itself was.  Repairing the damage of years was beyond me.

    The result is a fabulous memory of some of my favorites.  I hope you can forgive the inconsistent video quality and enjoy the music!

    IMPORTANT NOTE!!!

OBS worked great... once.  I didn't use it again for a few weeks, and the next time I tried to use it, there was NO AUDIO.  After days of googling, struggling to learn, trying different things, I went looking for other solutions. Here's the step by step process that finally worked: VLC Media Player Transfer to VHS