Digitizing analog video for the price of a large cheese pizza

[luRaichu]

I bought one of those generic "ezcap" shaped USB dongles to get started on digitizing my tape collection. In my game of Russian roulette, I received a device that identifies as the following:

534d:0021 MacroSilicon MS210x Video Grabber [EasierCAP]

Linux kernel 2.6.26 and newer supports this device, so on my computer I can just plug it in and it works.
I currently use the following command to record video and audio from the terminal:

ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -f alsa -i default -ac 1 out.mkv

I record the audio with my computer's built-in sound card, since the ADC on the dongle seems to have some weird DC offset issue. It's set as the default input in ALSA. The -ac 1 option tells ffmpeg that we are recording in mono, since I am archiving monaural Betamax tapes at this moment.

The problem is that this dongle is not very good at locking on to chroma from video tapes. It will work fine with video from my Hi8 camcorder, but so far not with many of my Betamax tapes.


Sample recording: https://youtu.be/Zh7PM-sGGn4

Will a video stabilizer fix it?
https://static.anarchivism.org/techt...zer/index.html
Or do I have to count my losses, return the dongle. and order a pizza instead?