Will it always lose some quality when capturing no matter what device a person uses? How much of a quality will it lose on the best capture devices? Would it be 5 percent or 10 percent less of the original quality?

Yes




It depends on the equipment, I don't think there is any set number, sometimes more sometimes less.
Don't let others fool you about the doomsday capture and all that, you lose on analog signals when there is any copy off the original.
Unless you have a great analog master that hasn't lost anything but then again when you copy off the original master its a copy
and you lose, each copy is a loss, no way around it.

Search up old daisy chain VHS copies, you will see what I mean.
Same with LD, you will lose on 2nd 3rd etc gen copies. LD is 1st any copy off that is a 2nd gen.

Who's saying that the Domesday duplicator allows for capturing with zero degradation in quality? It still has less loss in quality compared to a typical capture because it's a more direct path.

Normal: RF signal -> Player extracts composite signal -> Analog-to-digital conversion
Domesday: RF signal -> Analog-to-digital conversion

Like you said about daisy-chaining, each time you copy or transform an analog signal you lose something. Copy twice and all other things being equal you will lose more than copying once. Domesday isn't snake oil; it's just overkill for most use cases and too expensive and involved for hobbyists. (I'm not trying to sell it, and I'm never going to use it myself.)

No.



Near 0 percent if your capturing device offers a good analog to digital conversion and samples high enough.

Agreed. You don’t lose quality capturing it unless you capture it to an inferior device or another analog device.

If you have a perfectly adjusted CLD-D503 and a perfectly adjusted CLD-D703 and capture same video from both, the CLD-D703 will look better.
If you capture via Domesday, they will look the same. Same can be said for other players that share same base.

You will never get 1:1 from a LD. That said the DdD is the best quality/workflow for actual preservation.

Any other type of capture (analog or digital) will be a mere reflection of the LD.

Some here claim that in an ideal scenario with a perfectly aligned player (aka unicorn for most people) and a high enough resolution capture device, maybe 4K (most likely prosumer level at best) there would be no loss. Even if that were true (I suspect it isn't) you're ignoring the possibility of ADDING things to the signal that aren't there. Ringing, Aliasing, Flicker, Color variances, etc. This is discussed on the DdD page I think.

Add to the fact that most LDs are made from D2 480i DIGITAL masters. Grid on top of an analog grid and then captured to another grid. Ugh. No.

The goal, IMO, is to get to that 480i 4:2:2 signal.

DdD all the way. It IS the high resolution capture device you want. It has enough bandwidth to actually contain the NTSC signal. You ever hear of Nyquist? RF>A/D>File and DSP in post for combing, de-interlacing, scaling and decoding of audio and CC/data. The only down side of this workflow is that it isn't real time, uses a lot of storages space and processing. Sure, you could do it with any player but at that point it should be done right, no spared expense...

Yeah this is what I was getting at. Everything downstream from RF tap does not matter. If doing RF captures, cheaper players are viable. Alignment still matters, but you can kind of work around it if you are not able to adjust players. You could buy three $100 players, capture GGV1069 on each and go with the unit with best decoded test patterns and SNR. Sell the other two and you're better off than gambling the combined $300 on a single player.

I think, yes. It depends on a person what percent loss it would be.

When I capture from VHS, I am using a decent grade JVC "SVHS" VCR featuring stereo audio & S-Video outputs going straight into my Happauge HDTV Tuner card. Mind my setup is a solid decade old now, so the Happauge hardware software combo is upscaling my VHS video to nominal 480p resolution for recording. For best possible capture I have it setup to record to a secondary HDD (and for this you do not want to record to a SSD in the manner I'm doing this as it causes A/V synch issues oddly), but I record in lossless raw AVI. Keep in mind a 480p lossless raw AVI averages around 2GB per thirty seconds recorded, hence why it doesn't play nice with SSDs. Raw AVI files are super easy to edit though, so once I crop out the A/V segment I want I can just run that file through virtually any converter program to get it compressed into a modern video format, such as MP4.

Now mind there are very late entries to the home theater world that came into being around 2005-ish that are highly coveted and sought after in the VHS preservation circles, those being fairly high-end VCR/DVD combo players with internal hardware upscaling and conversion that output VHS through the HDMI at 1080i. Now obviously you would need to pair one of these wallet murdering units up with a HDMI capture device, but the obvious upside is it cuts out quite a lot of steps on the PC-side getting the video to where you want it. Such VCR units are quite rare and to my knowledge only Sony and Samsung made them. Broken units sell for $100+ on Ebay, and functional units frequently sell for $300+. These absurd prices are driven by businesses that do home video processing as a paid service.

Video and analog audio: there will be always a loss, depending on several factors (disc, player, capture card, cables)
Digital audio (PCM, DTS, AC3): if you have a bit-perfect capture card, there will be no loss of quality - 1:1 copy.

There are two ways of looking at the question: mathematically and practically. Mathematically, there is always degradation, however microscopic, when an analog signal moves from a source to a destination. Practically, if you're using good equipment and we're not talking about multiple generations of capture -> record -> capture -> record -> etc., the loss in quality will be negligible at worst and downright unnoticeable at best.

From what i can say capturing with a Domesday duplicator and the right setup (that works for LD and VHS) is the best you could ever had as for LD you can stack different decode to get a 1:1 copy off the video quality
like i said "video quality" not the "master quality" cause with your Domesday duplicator setup you could end with a capture that have a SNR Higher than what recorded on the disc so yes sure it's not 1:1 copy of the disc but because you resolve more than what the video actually contain you can say its a perfect copy of the content
(you just need to be sure to sure to have good calibration for crosstalk and stable power and connection for avoiding interference)
sayin capture isn't 1:1 is like saying you haven't resolved every grain and is precise shape on a film cell if your scaning at 8K a 8mm film there is nothing more to see than at 4K (just an example)

19 years ago I had some VHS tapes. "Rock Video Monthly" that I copied to DVD. I used the 1 hour mode on a Panasonic DMR-E80HS to get CD like audio on the discs. I play them back, and the image looks better than the original tapes...