USB video capture in 2002: Dazzle DCS 200 

I have no idea how they have achieved that quality over usb 1.1. Just outstanding

Please keep this video capture series going, lots of cool gems from the 2000s must be out there Also thank you for the immaculate pronunciation of the product key

I just love the way you record your videos, a lot of people use phone cameras and stuff now, but I love the minor artificating and fuzz of older camcorders and stuff. Never stop doing it, adds a unique vibe lost now.

2002 wasn't that long ago :(. You can't convince me otherwise

Product Key readback was absolute gold.

My Jaw dropped at 5:49 when I saw just how good the video capture from this 22 year old device was. You'd think it wouldn't be *THAT* hard for a modern device to have similar results while keeping the price down, but Elgato would sure prove you wrong. I can't wait to see how the device from 1998 performs!

I used to capture VHS with virtualDub and Avisync plus audacity for the audio side of things. All freeware, old school stuff! I captured and enhanced seasons of rare AF tv shows and tv show specials then uploaded them onto torrent sites - those versions are now in some cases the only versions that currently exist as some were never released onto DVD. This was in 2009 on a Windows XP desktop I built with dual core CPU. I chose that AMD over an Intel quad core as it did what I needed it to do over the quad higher priced one by another brand. But my capture card only recorded as RAW .avi video files. a 45 minute episode took up approximately 180gb - in 2007 - 2009!! I did have a few 1TB hard drives back then - back before that was normal - of course, but still, the level this guy went to, to re create this with period hardware and software is just so sweet!!! Fun Fact - ALL of my band's song releases were edited on an XP version of freeware Audacity! Edited, mixed and mastered! I am about to capture some amazing home movie VHS tapes from a friend of mine whose Dad recorded these in his early 20s before my friend was born - I showed her a few of these tapes and I honestly can say, without hesitation, it is such enticing footage that begs you to want to see more! It will easily be a cash cow of RU-vid content - but I wanna capture it the best I can - 50fps upscaled to at least 720i. One tape is damaged due to sticky tape syndrome - it still plays yet flickers, amazing it works at all tnh!! It has a weird 4th wall point in one scene! Real though!!!

The 1st of ARPIL :) (typo on the PCB). In the early 2000's I was working at a local TV station and there was one of these hooked up in the commercial editing station (where local commercials were edited). From the looks of it I assumed it was kind of junk compared to the rest of the equipment we were using, it was the only thing that looked like it was made for the home market. But I toyed around with it and was surprised to see it was much more capable than it appeared.

It's impressive they managed to squeeze live video through USB 1.1. Here in Germany, back in 2002, Hauppauge was king because they were the first to figure out a convenient way to provide a good SCART input. I have had a PCI capture card, and remember recording music videos off analog TV alot. A few years later I switched to DVB-S and captured the digital data stream directly.

Amazing quality from this thing. Loved the commercials from ‘85!

I thought it was difficult to digitize analog video over USB 2.0. Now I'm learning that they were doing it over USB 1.1, and it looks amazing, and there's not even any time base correction!! Simply amazing.

What's nice about this capture device is that it correctly preserves the interlaced video structure of analog video. The files would correctly output the correct interlace structure on analog CRT TVs as if it came from analog videotape. Newer capture devices modify that structure, or captures only the field from a frame, hence the captured video would no longer resemble what was on the analog video signal. Best bet is to use any Dazzle device or any DV or Digital8 device for analog capturing that can faithfully be reproduced on CRT screens, or recorded to analog videocassettes. 16:20 I've never seen that 8mm tape of the Sony Handy Guide to Handycam. I can see some of the shots were in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Hey VWestlife, I''ve been a fan since about 2009, love your videos and so happy to see you still upload quite regularly!

I can't even tell you how many Dazzle devices I've had run through my PC rigs of yore. I had a couple of the old parallel-port-based DVCs, a couple of (USB-based) DVC2s, and a couple of the PCI-based cards, which produced DVR-level captures. Absolutely stunning, for the time ( 20 aughts). So my SHVS VCR copies of Giants' Super Bowl victories in '87 and '91 have been preserved to mpeg2 files. My most ambitious project for the older DVCs was converting MTVs music videos to files. This was before RU-vid existed; so there was no way to just "watch an old video". At the start of 2000, MTV (M2, actually) played all of the videos in their history to that point, sorted by song title. I made SVHS recordings onto giant stacks of VHS tapes. Still have them ... all the way to "Zoot Suit Riot". For weeks afterwards, I scanned through the tapes and used the Dazzle device(s) to make digital copies. This video really brought back some great memories. Not the least of which was seeing Chuck Scarborough(!) again ...

The performance of that thing is nothing short of amazing. That videotape from 1985 looked far better than it had any right to!

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go all in on that '86 Tempo GL. Factory cassette player? *Air conditioning?* Insane. Sold.

Back in the day, I was a great fan of this device and remember coverting every episode of all seasons of Star Trek TNG which was no small task!

I ❤ the Ford Tempo. Loved seeing a good copy of that ad captured! Also this confirms my suspicions about the old Dazzle stuff being better than a lot of what people are using now.

The video from 1985 was a blast from the past, although it doesn't seem that long ago for me. That Ford Tempo looked like a brick on wheels, lol. Television was a lot more fun to watch back then.

That's really cool to see the NES launch video! While it seems 1985 gets cited as the year everyone bought an NES and video games were saved, the NES was launched only in limited quantities in New York at the end of 1985, and didn't see wide release until September 1986, and its popularity grew over the next few years. I looked up that WNBC on the videotape label and sure enough, that's the New York station which both perfectly fits the timeline, and makes sense considering you're nearby!

When I was a teen I had the parallel port version and really wanted the USB version but it was too expensive for me at the time. Love your videos!

Your limitation with 6Mbps video was likely due to USB 1.1 (12Mbps max) than anything else. There were internal versions of their cards that connected to the PCI bus which was faster, and had a thick cable connecting to the outside pod which had all the video connetions.

This is a great ad! Now you can go back to 1985 and broadcast it. Also tell them 2020 was not as good as planned :p

If you come across a Sony GV-D1000 Digital Video Cassette Recorder at your "thrift store that has everything" that would make a great episode. It had all the features of the Sony high-end DV cameras but in a desktop format. It would convert VHS to digital format on the fly. It works best with a Firewire cable and a MacIntosh with Firewire or a rare Windows PC that has a working Firewire port. In the heyday of MiniDV we had a row of them connected to iMacs for students to do video projects. Everything became easier with the switch to video recording direct to solid state memory, but for about 10 years MiniDVD was the big whoop.

Glad you've brought up FireWire capture devices. I've been fortunate to be able to mostly capture to DV since college (so about 20 years). I have a Panasonic S-VHS player with FireWire that I've used to digitize things for years, either tapes directly or through the composite/S-Video inputs. It also has a MiniDV deck (and supports bidirectional transfer of MiniDV and S-VHS/VHS) but it eats tapes and was the reason it was scrapped in the first place--I saved it from the junk pile at my college IT job. Some MiniDV cameras also support analog capture through the AV port -- I think my Canon does.

Wow I remember that device from about 20 years ago It was an excellent device to digitise VHS recordings. We also used it to record TV shows from analogue TV. I completely forgot about it. It was an excellent device. Thanks for bringing back those memories.

I have that same coffee mug. And, I love that you played "Queer as Folk" at the end. Thank you.

The quality is really good, surprising. I had a dazzle device back in the day around the same time. Pretty good devices.

What a beautiful device. I was highly astonished with the video quality! They don't make em like this anymore.

And a new video series is born...

I had a Hauppauge USB capture device around 2001 or so that was just chef's kiss. No video lag, good SD quality, perfect for what I needed. Unfortunately I broke the audio input after that particular model was off the market and nothing else was ever quite as good for what I needed. I used the VirtualDub software for capturing and extracting screengrabs. Good stuff, nostalgic feelings.

I’m very glad you are taking the time to do these Analog-to-Digital converters. It’s insane that still, in 2024, that we have no solid and easily accessible ADC’s outside of super expensive game console upscalers. Hopefully the market changes with more people turning to Analog formats for aesthetics-sake.

Wow, that Nintendo ad at 9:21 is really cool! I'd never seen it before.

“He was Remington Steele, wasn’t he?!” Anyway, great video! Keep the series coming!

They were doing harddrive based digital video editing professionally at full broadcast resolution in the mid-90s, in those days mostly Mac based I think (which I know due to documentations I watched then, not from personal experince). You would digitise your raw video to MJPEG using cards that had a built-in MJPEG compressor chip, then edit in software, and play the resulting video out to analogue to a VCR. But at that time it was very expensive, because the capturing hardware wasn't cheap, and you needed ridiculous amounts (for the era) harddrive storage fast enough to read and write the MJPEG data stream in real time. Authoring to DVD wasn't a thing yet in the mid-90s. That is why capture devices of that era also had video out. In the late 90s that technology had already trickled down to "prosumer"/"semi pro" price points. In 1997/98 I was working with a miro DC30 card doing mostly computer animations, and the resulting video would be played out to a S-VHS VCR for presentation in a museum. Those devices were typically multistandard NTSC/PAL/SECAM/PAL-M/PAL-N. I was doing PAL being in Europe. They were using the MJPEG format because as opposed to MPEG, because changing one frame does not require recomputing a sequence of subsequent frames, so it's ideal for editing. Sequences of frames where no change had been applied were simply passed through as is, so no quality loss . Hardware MJPEG compressors were needed because the main CPUs of the era were too slow to compress video in realtime.

All solid caps, well designed and made hardware. Looking forward to seeing how that Firewire device performs. A lot of people would have wanted to archive at the highest practical MPEG2 bit-rate supported by DVD, and still do I guess (whatever its limitations MPEG2 is still better suited to analogue/interlaced SD video than newer codecs), certainly I would.

19:45 - OMFG, Been looking for that game for decades. Could never remember what it was called. Thanks a lot.

Staying tuned in for that little 1998 box. I have ideas in my head how I would think it works, kinda want to compare notes.

Many years ago, my great aunt's late husband gave me the predecessor version of this Dazzle capture device; it was light gray in color, and the software was designed to run on just Windows 95 and 98, but I got it to work on Windows XP through compatibility mode. Its max capture resolution wasn't spectacular by any means, but it could capture VHS tapes and make them look decent~

Tempo awesomeness with a Riptide commercial. Who could ask for anything more?

I love 2000s tech and also this channel. Keep up the good work!

I've found a number of the Dazzle DVC-100's at thrift stores for cheap, and they (knock on wood) "just work" on Ubuntu and Linux Mint with the guvcview package. They'll sometimes default to PAL format, though, so I wrote a script to switch back to NTSC. I should probably move on from composite video, but I'm just grateful that a decent image can be captured and recorded using these devices. Thank you, Pinnacle!

Great to see this is full resolution capture 720x480 (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL) unlike the Elgato which quotes 640x480 resolution. I bought a Dazzle DVC100 about 4 years ago and that seems to be working fine on my older Windows 7 laptop, and I usually run that around 10Mbps (MPEG-2) which should be similar to a DVD recorder running in the 1 hour mode (XP on Panasonic and HQ on Sony).

Keep this going. This is so amazing you’re doing a great job.❤

I love your vids VWestlife! I fall asleep at night to them almost every night. Keep them coming!

21:31 ooh that looks to be built quite well; looking forward to seeing it

Nostalgia commercials captured on a vintage video capture device is why the internet exists, as far as I'm concerned. Edit to say thank you for including QAF clips at the end :)

Finally I understand all these old VHS tapes you keep presenting, and they don't scare me any more.

I still use the slightly newer "teardrop" white Dazzle capture box. It's pretty reliable and easy to use.

riptide remington steele.. i watched those shows every tuesday back in 85......good days...oh and that poor Michael novotney....😢

I was enjoying the video but then saw the misspelled month on the silkscreen (14:02), and spent the next ten minutes saying the word "Arpil" over and over, fixated on it like Jon Lovitz saying "tartlets" in an episode of _Friends_ 😅 But having overcome my own weirdness I returned to enjoy the rest of the video. Thanks, Kevin!

Wonder if vwestlife will ever delve deeper and use vhs-decode

I wish my thrift stores had as much interesting stuff as yours. All that my thrift stores have is baby clothes, mismatched pieces of pottery and old shoes.

This really reminds me when I went to Fry's Electronics specifically to buy a Hauppauge video capture card.. in probably the same year.

You have the best thrift stores. The only electronics I ever find are old DVD & bluray players.

There's a video here on YT where a guy completely reverse engineers a TV guardian box. Its really fascinating!

Sweet a new video just in time for breakfast you're the best Kevin! I love video captures videos. Very interesting

18:19 it’s nice to find the driver…_driver program_ as it were…to test out the various parameters to the underlying hardware. This seems like some premium hardware for that time period. I remember that timeframe well enough to know that stuff like that seemed pricey and premium back in the day!

Maybe a weird comment, but I was surprised how immaculate that box was given it was 22 years old. Not even the corners seem damaged.

Thank you for your very interesting and useful videos.

USB1.1 was meant for mice and keyboards. For more serious video archiving I'd recommend an internal PCI drop-in card like the Leadtek WinFast PVR 2000. I had that card some 20 years ago, it also has MPEG-2 decoder chip made by Conexant (meaning far less CPU usage, no drop-outs). And it's also a TV tuner. I've recorded VHS, Cable TV and from handycam (it has FireWire port as well). Image quality is excellent.

What an insane quality piece of hardware. Wowzers!

Holy hell seeing Chuck Scarborough from just before i was born was a trip. I am so close to starting to get lots of OTA recordings just to start preserving news bumpers and commercials.

The quality is kinda good, indeed and its funnny to see this Cannondale Bike Video ... talking about "us made bikes". Since 2010 production moved to asia. :D

Great video! I got some flashback memories of the 90's when you played the Sony Handycam video showing a bunch of video at a beach. I was a bench tech back in the 90's and fixed lots of them. One of the most common failures were sand and corrosion from a day at the beach. One grain of sand is all it took to jam up the mechanical loading mechanism.

I always had issues with this stuff, when tapedropouts occured, the audio went off synch. This was noticable after longer video recordings. Thanks for your videos.

I enjoyed this video Please continue with this VHS capture series test all USB capture cards then USB3 then firewire then HDMI. The dazzle 200 had very good results only problem mpeg2 on encoding better than elgato.

Another great video. I hope you get a chance to take a look at the Matrox cards from back in the day as well. I remember the Matrox G400TV series, with its dedicated graphics card and breakout box (for AV connections, etc). The only thing was that they supported MJPEG (motion JPEG) which I don't believe was very common at the time (or ever), but it could encode/decode in hardware. I wonder how that compares to these other solutions. Edit: Loved the old school videos! Used to love RipTide. NBC had that great 2 hour block with the A-Team, followed by Riptide!

I had the Dazzle thing which you had to plug into your parallel port. Also used an external power supply. Had some quirks and could only capture MPEG-1, but it was a joy to capture realtime instead of painstakingly waiting to encode from other sources. Capturing live was something unique. I miss those days. *nostalgic sigh*

Good to see Mario Cipollini represented on tech tube as well.

Also had a Dazzle device back in the early 00s to record off our for the time compact tape video camcorder, the device was pretty easy to use and the results were basically the same as watching it directly off the camera, had a lot of fun in WMM editing those clips! Recently I found some of those old videos and the quality still impress me especially for the time period.

This looks great, I love the 1985 TV continuity

7:20 Did some research. Cannondale bikes are primarily manufactured in Taiwan. However, Cannondale announced plans in 2021 to open an assembly facility in Savannah, Georgia, to meet US demand for their bikes. This facility is expected to open in the third quarter of 2024.

This seems to be a precursor of the DVC130 and DVC170 released in 2006. The former compresses into MPEG-1/MPEG-2, the latter can also compress into MPEG-4/DivX.

That was a great find... much better than most of the modern capture devices. I loved the "Arpil" date on the board. ;-)

The 1st of Arpil, 2002. Happy Arpil Fool's Day, everyone!

Looks like a great addition to an older computer/video setup! Even though it’s older than modern alternatives, it still outperforms many because it was made when analog video was still widely used. It’s exactly why I’d “upgrade” to one of these with a similar era Windows system or PowerPC Mac for this. Not to mention FireWire would give an even better result, yet this is still great for USB 1.1! Can’t wait for the upgrade to DV, perfect for one of those new PowerMac G3 Macs!

Thank you for this. Foundational information! Also, kudos to your manicurist.

Nice! Video quality is indeed great for the tech that was available WayBackWhen, should be perfect for vintage computers and gaming consoles. I have fond memories of BlockOut (as well as Arkanoid) on a PC XT and amber monochrome monitor back in the early '90s. Never thought this Polish 3D Tetris counterpart would spread out to the States. Interested in seeing that '98 grabber someday. Fire to the wire!

I think Dazzle is now owned by Pinnacle studio. I have the DVC100 USB capture that I got for just $4 which works like a charm. I also still have from brand new a 2004 Pinnacle AV/DV PCI Capture card with Bluebox Breakout box. Came with Studio 9. The card still works fine with Windows 10 but I think I only remember getting it working with a 32 bit operating system and not 64 bit, drivers install but the system freezes on trying to start the capture. The USB DVC100 I got working on both 32 and 64 bit.

Man I remember these old Dazzle products. They were so great. Their DVD menu creation software was SO cool. I had (no idea where now) a compilation DVD of all my youtube Halo 2 "machinima" videos.

I used a VCR connected to an internal TV card from Hauppauge 22 years ago and recorded with VirtualDub running on Windows XP.

back in the day I had a similar model of this and I used one of those radio shack video mixer boxes between the vcr and the capture devices to fiddle with the brightness and contrast. Converted a lot of home video's to mpeg2 for the family (and some of those were vhs tapes of film conversion heh)

7:19 "we're extremely proud of the fact that in an industry dominated by bicycles imported from the Far East we're proving that American ingenuity and innovation can compete. We're equally proud of the fact that Cannondale bicycles manufactured here are exported to more than 60 countries around the world." Well that aged like milk. In 2009, Cannondale's parent company announced that it would be closing their USA factory, moving all manufacturing to Taiwan, also known as the "Far East".

QaF segments are my favorite part of these videos

I think you created a tear in the time-space continuum when you had the VCR recording itself.

That 1985 bit looks satisfying, not much chroma shift visible.

Really interested in the FireWire capture box.

What a superb device!

Fully enjoy the analog capture series. Regarding bitrates, it would be nice if broadcasters used 6Mbps+ for their MPEG-2 SD channels.

I still have the same computer however i have put one of the adapters in it to put a later P3 in it . I find this computer very useful for old things like this and its also a very high quality machine.

I'm glad you made this video. This is what I was talking about in the last video. I had a Dazzle device like this and I loved it. Are the new ones worth buying?

I still use a Dazzle DVC 100 Rev 1.1 to capture from VHS.

This is so fascinating! I just got a Hi8 Sony camcorder from a local access tv station, works perfectly, but ran into the conversion problem, Love this information. Be a great way to get higher quality rips from hi8.

I still have my Dazzle FireWire bridge that I got in 2001. Same form factor - it’s fantastic.

Incredible!

8:51 My inner @NmeshTV is having fun with this segment.

Did anyone else burst out laughing at the product key?

7:17 The music on that tape sounds like a 12voltvids video with the music from Music Bakery

Wow, I think I've still got a cracked version of Pinnacle Studio on a CD somewhere. I'm impressed with the deinterlacing and clean frames! Especially around 9:58 that spinning newspaper is captured perfectly.