VHS Input Settings

If you've done any video work in ComfyUI, you know VideoHelperSuite (VHS) - the pack that loads videos, filters frames, and turns clips into image sequences. Its input nodes are powerful but spread-out: load caps, skip counts, sampling, previews, crop settings all scattered across widgets. VHS Input Settings gathers the whole input configuration into one node and emits it as a pipe you can feed into VHS loaders. Set it once, reuse it everywhere, and stop re-typing "load cap 20" in three places.

How it works

It's a pure settings collector - nine widgets in, one pipe out. Nothing runs on your video; the node just packages values into an ordered list that the pack's pipe consumers (and VHS-compatible loaders) unpack. The fields map directly onto what a video-input workflow needs:

• load_cap (default 20) - maximum frames to load. This is the big one: it caps how much of a long video you chew through, and it's usually the first thing you tune when a workflow is crawling.
• skip_first_frames (default 0) - chop frames off the start.
• select_every_nth (default 1) - sample every Nth frame; set 2 and you halve your frame count.
• overlap (default 0) - how many frames to carry between chunks when a video gets split for processing.
• images_in_previews (default 10) / images_in_filter_previews (default 1) - how many frames show in ComfyUI's preview grids.
• preview_crop_pos - center/top/bottom/left/right, for how previews are cropped.
• crop_interpolation - lanczos, nearest, bilinear, bicubic, area, nearest-exact. Lanczos is the quality default; nearest is the fast-and-fuzzy option.
• frame_rate (default 30) - the fps the downstream pipeline assumes.

The output pipe is RvTools' own list format, so it plugs into the pack's pipe-based video/sampler settings nodes. This is very much a "for the RvTools-pipe ecosystem" convenience rather than a standalone tool.

Why you'd reach for it

The pitch is consistency and one place to look. When a video workflow is misbehaving, the usual culprits are exactly these knobs - a load cap that's too small, a skip that eats the interesting part, a preview count that makes the UI grind. Having them in a single labeled node means you tune one panel instead of spelunking through the whole graph. It also keeps the values in one spot when you're iterating on the same settings across multiple VHS loaders.

Installing it

Part of the RvTools v2 pack - no model files. ComfyUI Manager → search RvTools → install ComfyUI-RvTools_v2, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI-RvTools_v2

Restart and check for RvTools v2: Version 2.5.x in the console. Extra deps (opencv-python, pilgram, pynvml, piexif) come through Manager automatically.

Troubleshooting

• The pipe is RvTools-typed, not VHS-typed. This node formats values for the RvTools pipe system - it won't snap directly into a stock VHS node's sockets. You use it with the pack's pipe consumers, or as a tidy reference panel for values you then set by hand.
• It doesn't load anything itself. If you're expecting a preview or a loaded video out of this, that's not the node's job; the loaders do the work.
• Old v1 RvTools references fail in Manager because the original repo was deleted; v2 renamed all nodes to fix that. The author has since moved development to ComfyUI_Eclipse, the successor pack.