VHS to OBS audio out of sync

J

Jeff Kaufman

New Member
There are multiple posts about this problem, but no clear answers that I can find. Can anyone help?
The audio is in sync or very close at the start of the captured video, but gets farther and farther behind as time goes on. After an hour it's several seconds out of sync.
I'm coming out of the VHS line out (red, white, yellow) into a KKF USB 2.0 Video Capture Card; card out to laptop via USB-A; processing with OBS.
Running Windows 11. Battery on "Best Performance"
OBS audio sample rate set to 44.1 kHz.
I have tried capture card audio FPS at "match" "NTSE" and "fastest"- same problem with all.
Log file attached.
I appreciate any help and am happy to provide any other helpful information to get this solved. Thanks!
 

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A

AaronD

Active Member
Is it a cheap capture card? As you may have seen with the other threads, those are anyone's guess as to what you actually get or how well it works.

I have a pile of cheap HDMI -> USB captures, from before I figured that out, four of which were supposed to be identical. Those four were always out of sync *with each other*, and by different amounts and directions each time! Good luck chasing that! A single PCIe card with 4 simultaneous inputs fixed both that and the picture quality that I didn't really notice until then.

That's not your exact problem, but it's an example of just some the weirdness that cheap captures often have. My audio has always been separate, so I never had a problem with that directly, but other people have reported pretty much every possible set of symptoms that could possibly exist, in regards to audio from a cheap video capture device. Yours is relatively mild by comparison, but still not really usable.

---

Since you're on a laptop, you should also be aware that laptops are generally bad at this anyway. They might have awesome specs on paper, but those specs only last a few minutes at *constant* load like OBS does. The cooling system is nowhere near enough to handle that, and so it slows way down to prevent itself from overheating. Then the stream or recording suddenly falls apart.
They're really designed to load something quickly, and then sit and cool off while you look at it. Not for live media production or recording.

If you can possibly use a desktop tower for this, DO!!

If you must use a laptop, look at the "Mobile Workstation" class of laptop. They're thick, heavy, and somewhat expensive, because there's a much smaller market for an ACTUAL COOLING SYSTEM that can keep up with a *continuous* load.
 
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
Jeff Kaufman said:
Thanks a ton for your reply, Aaron!
Click to expand...
Hi Jeff. I had some problems with a capture card at one time. I solved it by capturing only the video with the usb/converter and running the audio out from the vhs player directly to the mic/audio input. I used obs video input capture along with the audio input for recording. Worked fine. Hope that helps. I recorded over 12 hour long vhs tapes that way with no problems.
 
A

AaronD

Active Member
bcoyle said:
...running the audio out from the vhs player directly to the mic/audio input...
Click to expand...
If it works, it works, but you're technically running a line-level signal into a mic-level amplifier. I've done that myself, early on, and had it work too, but it's more likely to clip/distort because raw mic signals are usually smaller than that and need to be amplified. If the mic input just blindly applies that amplification, then you simply trade one problem for another.

And, mic inputs are pretty much always mono (a mic that has a "stereo" connector actually uses that other wire to power itself, not to provide a second signal), whereas some VCR's are true stereo. Because of how the connections end up through the adapters, you end up just dropping one side of the stereo image and only preserving the other side by itself. (and pushing a small amount of power into the VCR's audio out) If your VCR is only mono, then you don't have to worry about that, but it's another thing to consider.

Actual stereo line inputs are not expensive. For example:
As far as I can tell, those are the same thing in different colors - don't know why they did that - and one comes with some other stuff too.
 
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
AaronD said:
If it works, it works, but you're technically running a line-level signal into a mic-level amplifier. I've done that myself, early on, and had it work too, but it's more likely to clip/distort because raw mic signals are usually smaller than that and need to be amplified. If the mic input just blindly applies that amplification, then you simply trade one problem for another.

And, mic inputs are pretty much always mono (a mic that has a "stereo" connector actually uses that other wire to power itself, not to provide a second signal), whereas some VCR's are true stereo. Because of how the connections end up through the adapters, you end up just dropping one side of the stereo image and only preserving the other side by itself. (and pushing a small amount of power into the VCR's audio out) If your VCR is only mono, then you don't have to worry about that, but it's another thing to consider.

Actual stereo line inputs are not expensive. For example:
As far as I can tell, those are the same thing in different colors - don't know why they did that - and one comes with some other stuff too.
Click to expand...
I of course had the audio inputs attenuated as needed. I was recording a mono vhs tape , so stereo didn't matter. The idea was that the audio from the player took the direct route and you didn't have to depend on the video convert muxing the signal together.
 
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