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I have just bought, built and successfully used a Velleman K8036 Video Signal Cleaner kit.

I have some old, poor quality VHS tapes that I want to transfer to a PC for editing and eventually for burning to DVD. They were (second-generation?) copies of videos made on old analogue video cameras. In particular, two tapes had sync problems that caused my Hauppauge TV/capture card to make the recorded picture jump all over the place.

When I used the K8036 with the really bad one, the recording went from unwatchably bad to quite reasonable (albeit with a low picture quality due to the source). Interestingly, the second one was just about watchable in the original Hauppauge capture, with a few annoying but not disastrous jumps; for this one, using the K8036 seems to actually make the jumps slightly worse!

Before buying the kit, I tried to find a review, but this post was the only one I could find, so I've registered here and replied to tell the next person searching for a review that, yes, the kit works for 'normal' video signal cleaning, and is not just for copying Macrovision tapes.

Product: K8036 VIDEO SIGNAL CLEANER
Manufacturer: Vellaman
Product type: Electronics kit
Price: around 35 Euros
Produt home page: http://www.velleman.be/common/product.Aspx?lan=1&id=348080
Manufacturer home page: http://www.velleman.be/

Manufacturer description:
- digitally cleans the video signal / removes unwanted distortion in video signal
- stabilises picture quality and luminance fluctuations
- S-video and composite video in- and output (S-video and composite video signals can not be mixed)
- led indication when distorted video signal detected
- for PAL / NTSC video
- warning: only use to make personal backup copies from original video material from which you are the rightful owner (DVD, VHS, VCD, ...)
- power supply: 9Vdc / 100mA min. (adapter required)

Comments:

This electronics kit is actually a Macrovision video protection removing unit. Macrovision is that annoying video copy protection that tries to make the recording look like crap of you try to record Macrovision protected video material (from VCR or from DVD for example) to the VHS video tape. This will annoy some home users, because causes problems with some video viewing equipment and messes up recordings. Macrovision has never stopped any video professional or video pirates from copying the material....

This kit tries to remove that macrovision crap from the PAL and NTSC video signals, so that you can view the signal wihtout problem or copy it if you want. This kit seems to work to do this.

This kit is build around one pre-programmed PIC12C508A microcontroller that does all the controlling... There are just one LM1881 sync separator, few transistors, few analogue switches, etc... that for the circuit.
The kit is quite easy to solder together.

Velleman seems to have similar product also as a ready made module product VM106 VIDEO SIGNAL CLEANER MODULE shown at
http://www.velleman.be/common/product.Aspx?lan=1&id=348654

Here is picture of the kit:
[img]http://www.velleman.be/images/products/0/small/k8036.jpg[/img]