I bought a Sony capture card for $12 off fleabay, model no. BTF-PA401Z. It is supported by Linux under the ivtv driver and is reported as
"Sony VAIO Giga Pocket (ENX Kikyou) card (cx23416 based)"
This card provides an MPEG2 stream which can be captured just like this:
Code:
cat /dev/video0 >> recording.mpg
Uncompressed video is available at video32 but it's in a weird format that I haven't figured out how to record yet.
This card captures video with better color, clarity, and smoothness over the ezcap dongle, but it's more sensitive to horizontal sync than that or a real TV. On some tapes the picture wiggles horizontally (and that's what a TBC is for).
I made this GIF to show differences in picture between two VCR/DVD combos I tested.
So, to get a better picture on those imperfect tapes I'll either need to find a VCR with a built-in TBC or modify one of my VCRs to capture the FM signal from the tape head and do TBC in software with the vhs-decode project