Tape?
I'm not really sure tape of any kind is the answer to a problem in 2016.
I suppose I could be convinced, but with discs being so cheap why bother?
Japanese company Funai will stop making VHS devices this month, marking the end of the road for the venerable video tape standard. But the company has told The Register that low demand is not the reason for VHS' demise, despite being cited widely based on a brief Japanese language report. Funai told us it sold 750,000 VHS …
Maybe not for saving new content, but what about playing old content? I saw a Facebook post from a friend of mine yesterday who was moving and said she found a box with a whole bunch of old Disney movies on VHS she forgot she had. She thought it would be nice for her young son to see them, and wondered if anyone had a VCR they didn't need anymore. I have had one gathering dust on a shelf for over a decade, not needed since I got a Tivo in 2003 or so, so I am going to drop it by her new place sometime next week.
I know some of her Disney movies have never been released for streaming, and while they might be on DVD, why should a single mom who works as a teacher (i.e. not a lot of money to throw around) want to buy movies she already has, when she could play the ones she has?
Or they have 'awkward' moments subsequently erased from distribution. Living in the US while my children grew up, I still have a copy of Aladin, where the street trader (for anyone who knows the film) has the immortal line 'where they cut of your hand if they don't like your face' in the song introducing his home. Deleted from the US version and I presume not released outside the US I believe. Priceless.
Can't imagine why they decided to delete it :-)
For exactly the same reason tape has always been useful, just go read the whitepapers :
low price : a 15TB LTO tape (6TB native) is a lot cheaper than either 15TB or 6TB of hard disk, although granted, the upfront cost of an LTO 7 drive is high
resilience : whilst tape isn't designed to be abused, it is a removable media. Hard disks are not.
encryption and compression by default
WORM capability
Long term storage : Any drive above about 3TB is helium filled. I'd have to check the lifetime on this, but wouldn't want to bet much on a drive that's been sat on a shelf for years.
Archival and storage. At the really high end, thousands of tapes available for retrieval by robot, with truly staggering amounts of storage.
I don't think DAT was ever 8 track certainly the only DAT tapes/drives I ever saw were stereo.
There was ADAT which used a full size S-VHS tape to record 8 channels of digital audio. You could chain loads together to get more tracks. The optical interface they used for the digital audio signal lived on long after the tapes were forgotten about.
Yup, DAT was like a little VCR... and I think I still have a HP tape drive in an external SCSI box and some tapes still in shrink wrap lying around somewhere... At that time the very first CD-ROM burners were on the market, but the blanks were so costly that DAT was a sensible backup solution even for relatively small amouts of data.
There also were boxes (some of which you could assemle yourself from a kit) that would turn any old VCR with a SCART plug into a tape drive for data storage. Looked great on paper... Let's just say that it did work better than a C64's Datasette.
turn any old VCR with a SCART plug into a tape drive for data storage
In the days before DAT and HDD recording, a similar device made by Sony was used by some recording studios to record digital audio onto VHS. We had one at the radio station I worked at. If I remember correctly it could do 16bit / 2 channel / 32KHz or 14bit / 2 channel / 48kHz. It worked well enough if you used good quality cassettes and stored them sensibly, but was obviously an evolutionary dead end right from the outset. Looked pretty on the monitor though :-)
We had people using tape right up to the moment the machines were retired, and long after HDD recording had become affordable - we had one of the first Soundscape machines, which was a 2U box containing some electronics and 2x IDE hard drives which used a bog-standard PC ('286 or higher I think) for control. It was a small fraction the price of competing systems which relied on fast computers with specialised sound hardware and SCSI discs.
The problem with VHS is that it is analogue. I had an interesting discussion with my 14 year-old just yesterday who had dug out some old Thomas the Tank Engine tapes (first series) and tried to play them. Yes, the VHS player is still working, yes I have connected it up correctly to the new TV we bought last Christmas, yes the sound works but no, the TV won't sync to the slightly wobbly signal off tape - the sound continues but the picture blanks every few seconds. Feeding the VHS output through an external re-sync device sorted that, but now he's talking about buying DVDs of all the tapes he has, and what I want to know is why can't a modern multi-standard TV lock on to a slightly wavery signal from an old VHS tape?
I think it's time I started transferring all those old Hi8 tapes to the computer. I have enough storage now, and I still have a working camera. What I don't have is a video capture device for my Linux machine. Any recommendations? My boss at work has a Blackmagic H.264Pro I could borrow, but it only comes with Windows and OSX software and as far as I'm aware it doesn't work under Linux, though I have only spent 30 minutes testing it.
At least my DV tapes are easier. With a working camera and a Firewire connection, it's as simple as an incantation to dvgrab.
M.
"the TV won't sync to the slightly wobbly signal off tape - the sound continues but the picture blanks every few seconds. Feeding the VHS output through an external re-sync device sorted that...what I want to know is why can't a modern multi-standard TV lock on to a slightly wavery signal from an old VHS tape?
That sounds similar to the effect produced when doing a simple tape to tape copy of a copy protected tape. Macrovision??
"total shit for reliability as one would expect from helical scan"
Old Exabyte 8mm helical scan format (up to 5 GB) was OK in reliability terms. But yes, later Mammoth format drives were awful, quite on par with DDS-4. Might just as well have used /dev/null for a backup - much faster & about the same chance of recovery.
Old Exabyte 8mm helical scan format (up to 5 GB) was OK in reliability terms. But yes, later Mammoth format drives were awful, quite on par with DDS-4.
I had (ahem, still have few) quite a few Exabyte 8mm drives (EXB-8500). Never has any issues with them (unlike 4mm DDS which never really worked reliably). In fact even the EXB-8500 XL was better although the 160m tapes were bit iffy. Sticking to 112m tapes and all was well.
You've forgotten Metrum drives that used a VHS style cartridge. I used them for high bandwidth data transfers (air courier) in the '90s because the transatlantic ISDN line wasn't up to the task. There were also Ampex and Sony digital drives, also in the '90s, that used 1" tape cartridges. What else have el Reg readers come across?
Ah yes I remember those days - you would look up the program you wanted to record in TV Times, lie on the floor to set the clock, spend five minutes getting the cellophane wrapper off a new E120 cassette and finally press "timer".
Later you would return to find that:
a) You had recorded the programme you wanted*
b) You had recorded a completely different programme
c) The TV station was running late so you got 20 mins of snooker and the recording ended just as Miss Marple was about to expose the murderer.
d) That was last week's TV Times
* In this case you would usually overwrite the tape before remembering to watch it
I remember buying a smart VCR with teletext programme guide programming. And the half day it took to decide it was quicker and easier just entering the time manually! When plus codes turned up programming got a lot easier and the machine was quite good at noticing time changes by itself, something the teletext version was supposed to do but never quite got right.
When plus codes turned up programming got a lot easier and the machine was quite good at noticing time changes by itself
That was down to the broadcaster though - they had to transmit a matching code for every programme, which the VCR looked for and used to start / stop the recording. Generally speaking the BBC got this right, ITV sometimes did (I used to wonder if the codes had to be triggered manually at their end because they were often late or early or just didn't happen), but I had problems with S4C and Channel 4, though the latter was almost certainly down to a weak signal; you couldn't reliably get teletext from C4 either. Don't know about Channel 5; didn't get that until digital TV came along.
M.
In the professional realm VCRs still exist, particularly as an archival and programme exchange format.
VHS, which originally stood for "Victor Helical Scan", was just one of the low cost consumer formats in the 1970s. Apparently the big point why it existed for so long is that the licensing was rather open and the build quality was OK.
The obvious successor to the VTR in home use is something I like to call "computerized television". Essentially you have a computer with an array of DVB-S2 cards. You enter search words into that computer and whenever a show which matches one of those words, it'll record it and present you with a video file of the recording. You can then do anything you want with that file.
The VCRs in profrssional use were Beta though, never VHS.
And disappearing fast, as HDD based video archives are now so cheap that it's just not worth dealing with large numbers of tapes.
I don't think any UK broadcaster now uses Beta for new programming, though they probably still have a large library of tapes sat in storage.
The other industrial derivative was Hawkeye or M-Wrap.
While the Hawkeye uses the same size cassette as VHS, it incorporated new circuit technology, etc. The wrap had at times been referred to as “M” wrap.
Also, VHS is short for "Video Home System"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
hence, "I'll record that on the VHS"
(in the USA, they seemed to use VCR - Video cassette Recorder?)
>And at some time in the future they'll have a big panic because they find they've got a large library and nothing that can read it. How many times has that happened?
Here's the most famous one that I know of... 1500 tapes, no working tape drives, so took many years to find and repair them, even after they were stored in a Chicken shed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project
"Essentially you have a computer with an array of DVB-S2 cards."
Or one DVB-T card with a couple of tuner modules on it. As it can take several streams from a single physical tuner you'd be hard pushed to find enough simultaneous watchable programmes to exceed its limits. In fact, I'm not sure mine uses the second tuner very often.
I never did understand why Freeview boxes never seem to have been intelligent enough to figure out that a "clash" on the same multiplex wasn't actually a barrier, given it ought to be able to extract mutilple channels from a single stream.
From memory, using a single PCTV nano tuner and Me-TV, I did once manage to record 5 channels simultaneously - admittedly only as a proof-of-concept - none of the shows I actually wanted to watch...
Well outside the UK there is virtually no DVB-T, so DVB-S(2) is the way to go. And yes you can get cards with 4 tuners allowing you to record 4 transponders simultaneously. There's an advantage of recording "everything": You can just get any programme from the past. For example recently there was a German comedian sued by Erdogan. There was lots of discussion about what he said, but nobody published the video of his show. If you recorded it yourself, you could form your own opinion on what exactly he said. You would also find out that most of the people talking about it obviously have never seen it.
there was this computer called the "Amiga" and there was a cracking little bit of kit that allowed you to back up onto VHS. A small circuit board costing a few pounds, a bit of software and you could back up your amiga HD to it in a few hours. Yes, by modern standards its laughable but THEN it was the bollocks and i made a decent income making and flogging them....
Hmm just like Sony then, bought in their Vhs rubbish rather than make their own.
As I have a few Sony and Sanyo made decks, the build quality of the 1980s decks was so much higher.
I managed to avoid the Vhs era, I did have one, but only for duplication. My work horse was a Sanyo M40 (still working) a Beta Hifi deck, my special machine a Sony SL-HF950 Superbeta deck.
Timeline was, watched Beta rentals, lost job, new job, mortgage, got some money, oh look brand new format called DVD. All along recording TV using those 2 Beta decks.
I have no pleasant memories of using Vhs, it was always that crappy format other people bought.
I still remember seeing someones edit master Vhs-Vhsand wondering why it looked worse than my final copy Beta->Superbeta->Beta
Anyone else had one of these?
An ISA card with video composite in and out sockets on it. Used a standard VHS recorder to store data.
It was a fine idea, and incorporated a load of error correction to deal with grotty VHS recording. However, I found that it was only 2D error correction, so while data errors in each data frame were corrected, the loss of a complete frame stuffed the data. And of course, a crease in the tape would produce an interference band that passed up the picture, which when it reached the sync pulses would kill the frame.
I remember when I saw a demo of the Philips 1500 in Mackross (sp) Cardiff when I was 11 - 1972
http://www.rewindmuseum.com/philips.htm
When I asked my dad when we were getting one, he said "no chance".
Fast Forward (see what I did there?) to very early eighties and I was home for christmas - either Dec 1980 or 1981. My cousin worked for DER and my dad had managed to 'borrow' a Fergusson 3v22 from him (purple clock, big piano keys, tapes £15/E-180.)
We liked it so much, we went shopping at the weekend and came home with an Hitachi VT8000 vhs. It had nice silver touch-solenoid controls and the air-damped eject tray 'sighed' when you ejected the casssette.
so, for a while, we had 2 VHS recorders! the bees knees or what - one in each lounge.
You had to leave a £50 cheques as a deposit when you rented a film from one of the VHS rental boutiques. I think the first one we rented was Carrie! happy days
Mackross (sp) Cardiff
Maskreys on Whitchurch Road?
Image on Google Streetview (never tried to send such a link before - not sure if it will work).
I remember going in there in the late 1980s or early 1990s to buy a carpet with my mum only to find that the carpet salesman was the original owner of my mum's house. We had to be very careful speaking to him because the carpets he had fitted were absolutely dire 1960s turquoise/black/purple "Paisley" type pattern. Mum and dad had got rid of those as soon as they could afford to.
M.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_2000
I briefly contracted to PYE TVT in on Coldhams Lane, Cambridge in 1984 (a real-time video editing suite for the 1986 Mexico World cup). Pye was a sub-division of Philips and the company shop sold Video 2000 recorders at a substantial discount, so there was a significant number in the area. Later I heard tales of the stock management system of e.g. Dixons sending equal numbers of cassettes to each branch, and the manager of the Cambridge branch having to call around to get them sent on to his.
VHS - many fond memories.
Top loaders - learning to dismantle them to align the heads that so often fell out of alignment long before they put the tracking on the back. If you can take one of those apart and put it back together you had the skills to dismantle anything.
Remote controls - On a wire, it was the future.
Nicam VCR - Getting excited plugging it in through a sound a system.
Piracy - Working out that if you put your VCR through the TV and back out again to another VCR it removed copy protection. RGB through scart also had the same effect if I remember correctly.
Renting - The blokes that used to come round once a week in vans with loads of films.
Setting the timer - Something nobody above the age of 16 at the time could accomplish.
Piracy - Working out that if you put your VCR through the TV and back out again to another VCR it removed copy protection. RGB through scart also had the same effect if I remember correctly.
Yes, been a while but as I recall Macrovision messed with the AGC and was present in composite and S-Video and going via RGB worked fine.
There were also quite a few hobby and commercial solutions for filtering out Macrovision.
going via RGB worked fine.
But you don't get RGB out of a video recorder.
The best way to get rid of Macrovision IIRC (where it did interfere with AGC) was either to find an old VCR which had manual gain controls, or to invest in a "Syncblaster". Or those into home video might have had a video mixer with a digital frame store which had the same effect.
M.
I had this:
"There was a Philips Matchline S-VHS machine (VR813) from the early nineties that could be set to output RGB in the setup menu. The picture in RGB wasn't that great as it tended to enhance the flaws in the VHS format (such as poor blue colour reproduction and dot crawl etc).
It was quite a feature packed machine in its day, as it also had an on-board Fastext decoder, which meant it could record and play back subtitles and teletext pages from S-VHS recordings. You could even use it to set timer recordings via Ceefax by selecting the desired program with a cursor"
which was able to supply RGB to my Philips TV
It also had the 'S' connector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video
Earlier this year I finally got around to converting VHS to digital. It was a real eye opener. Most of the 3hr tapes had stuck together so I was having to wind the tapes end to end before I could play them back, but quite a few snapped.
The small camcorder ones I was able to recover most of the kids when they were little. School plays, holidays, birthdays etc, however due to the age of the tapes and the VHS machine, the quality is somewhat lacking but at least I have something.
So, if you have old tapes, get them transferred asap.