Do you live in the UK, have a VCR and capture card, and an interest in Teletext? [James O’Malley] needs your help! Teletext was, for many people around the world, their first experience of an electronic information system. The simple text and block graphics were transmitted on rotation as data bursts in the frame blanking periods of analogue TV broadcasts, and in an era of printed newspapers, they became compulsory reading. The UK turned off its old-style teletext over a decade ago with the switch to digital, but fragments of the broadcasts remain and can be painstakingly revived from period video recordings with the appropriate software.
This is where [James’] problem begins. Having recovered a very large archive of 1980s and 1990s VHS tapes, he’s come to the realisation that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, and that the archive needs to be in the hands of an individual, entity, or organisation which can give it the resources necessary to archive both the teletext and the programming that it contains. Can you help? Give the article linked above a read.
Meanwhile, you can wallow in a bit of nostalgia by browsing the archive of recovered pages, and while you’re at it, take a minute to envy the French.
Stick into a deck that transfers to recordable DVD.
The problem isn’t figuring out to do, it’s how to handle the huge workload. And it’s mostly the teletext that they’re interested in, which only survived the recording process thanks to modern signal processing techniques, and definitely won’t survive a second generation transfer to a medium that explicitly crops out the non-image area.