

She sent me the link… and it was a long interview of a friend-of-a-friend who passed a few years ago. I tweeted about finding Kodi's video and one of my followers said she was digitizing some old VHS tapes that night as well. It just gets extremely dusty and slightly rusted in my garage.- Geoffrey Morrison February 20, 2022 Chances are, if it looks the same as one you see here, it almost certainly is.Ĭurrently watching 22-year-old 8mm recordings on VHS via a 22 year old VCR connected via HDMI converter dongle to a 4K laser projector on a 100-inch screen. There are countless more options available online. None of these do a particularly good job of deinterlacing - taking out the jaggies and black lines - but that's the least of your problems with old video content. One converter I tested, the Azduou, has an aspect ratio button.
HDMI DIGITAL TO ANALOG TV CONVERTER 720P
Depending on the age of your TV, it might only let you adjust the aspect ratio with 720p and not 1080, but all the converters I tested have that resolution adjustment. This might be on the remote, or it might be in the menu. To watch on a modern 16x9 TV you'll need to find the aspect ratio adjustment on your TV. This turns out to be surprisingly relevant, as you'll soon see.Ī few important things to mention.
HDMI DIGITAL TO ANALOG TV CONVERTER FULL
I also had, I have no idea why, two paper bags full of VHS tapes that somehow made the trip from college in upstate New York, through two apartments in LA, and finally, totally forgotten in the back of a closet in my house. It even still had the Circuit City Open Box sticker from when I first bought it. I was able to find an extremely dusty and slightly rusty VCR hiding in the back of my garage. Unless you're sure you need S-Video, composite will work just fine. It was better than composite, worse than component. S-Video was found on LaserDisc players and a handful of other products. In addition to composite I also tested one model that has S-Video. Vastly smaller TVs helped reinforced this impression as well. Your nostalgia is going to remember far better picture quality than the reality of what we had pre-HD. Unlike what movies and TV shows tell you, you can't just "enhance" this to look like HD or 4K. Your 4K TV has 3,840 x 2,160, or nearly 54 times VHS. VHS, for example, has a resolution that is, at best, roughly 320x480. Your TV will do this automatically, and old video gear is never going to look as good as any modern video source. Those exist but aren't what I'm testing here, nor will these work for that.Īll the models I tested could convert to 720p or 1080p, though you're unlikely to see a difference.Īll of these adapters will upconvert the standard definition signals to HD, but as I'll discuss, don't get your hopes up. These are also not HDMI to RCA, aka taking an HD source to connect to an older, analog TV. Component-to-HDMI converters exist, but I didn't test them for this guide since they're more niche. DVDs, for instance, are playable on Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray players. However, there aren't many products where you'd need to convert component to HDMI. These are not component video converters, the red, green and blue connections found mostly on DVD players and early Blu-ray players. There are devices that do that, but that's not these. Even if your laptop has an HDMI connection, that is an output only. These converters won't let you record those signals, only watch them on your TV. The devices below convert these analog signals to HDMI, the ubiquitous connection on all modern TVs.

So that means VCRs, the Nintendo Wii, older game consoles like the GameCube, LaserDisc and many camcorders. With one exception which I'll discuss in a moment, that means the yellow, red, and white RCA connectors. These adapters are solely to connect and play older, analog video sources to your modern TV. Here's a look at what you need to get converting composite to HDMI. The most expensive one I tested, which includes the fancy-for-the-90s S-Video connection, was only $40. Fortunately, there are a ton of analog RCA-to- HDMI converters on the market, and they're extremely cheap. Many modern TVs have, at best, one analog input. Want to watch some old family movies on VCR? Having a craving for some GoldenEye on N64? Maybe you found some LaserDiscs at a yard sale - they may look like huge CDs, but they're analog! Then you notice that your shiny new TV doesn't have the right inputs.
