Philippines

The bulk of my content come from VHS. They are surprisingly robust and last many years as long as you store them properly. If you lose your digitized copies, you can just go back to the tapes and re-convert. Due to the age of the technology, you're also almost always guaranteed that the content is going to be old.

I use a Panasonic AG-1980p S-VHS player to get the best possible quality out of the tapes. I also have a backup Sharp S-VHS player hooked up to a Panasonic DMR-ES18 to serve as a line TBC passthrough. I recently acquired a working Sony betamax too, but I don't use it as much due to fear of breaking it. All tapes are captured losslessly through Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle so I can upscale it a bit using Virtualdub to 960x720 and retain the 4:3 aspect ratio. All videos are then compressed for storage using Handbrake.

While my uploads purport to be 60 FPS, this is merely placebo and the default setting on my encoder that I didn't bother to change as it has no bearing on the filesize anyway. The broadcast standards in TV before 2009 is 29.97 FPS, so my records are 30 FPS at best. Anything above that is unnatural and is not how it was intended to be viewed back in the day. Heck, even on my TV I turn off any setting that artificially gasses up the picture (aka. soap opera effect).

Your definition of "smooth" is just you being used to all the 4K/60 HDR10+ quality videos today of real life footage.

Around 2006 or 2007, I stopped using VCRs and transitioned to TV tuners. It was the worst decision of my life, but had no choice as my VCR broke down and it has fallen out of favor with the rise of DVDs. On one hand, this was the peak of my recording years as I recorded all kinds of channels from the usuals to something like early boring QTV, TV5Monde or RAI International, lmao. On the other, hard drive space was expensive so I had to capture at 240p and burn them on DVDs. Little did I know that discs had a astoundingly bad lifespan, leading to several recordings being lost.

I completely stopped recording after 2008. Therefore, you won't see me post anything beyond that date. It would be inauthentic and clearly not from my collection. I did have one short clip from Balls in 2011 as I was still watching volleyball during those years, but that's it.

In the future, I plan on learning about VHS Decode having seen its potential to successfully retrieve video out of damaged tapes. But that's a long ways ahead due to how technical and intensive it is. Learning QTGMC to deinterlace captures is probably next in my list, and the most realistic.