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.
That won’t help you recover Teletext…
Cool!
I didn’t see this one coming as I always believed the lines containing the data weren’t saved to tape at all.
The website of this archiving project describes the recovery as magic and mentions some gibberish that spread more confusion, all that needed to be done is to copy (or link) the real explanation, which you can read here: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext/blob/master/HOW_IT_WORKS.md
That description makes a lot more sense. Impressive piece of software.
It was kinda there. I recall garbled Teletext on VHS recordings, and was impressed i could record it clearly when I got a svhs recorder. All long gone now though…
It was sort of a byproduct and was a bit hit n miss, some VCRs would record it well, others not so much and then there was playback too, some VCRs could play back the ‘hidden’ lines well, others not so much.
Then it depended on the quality of the Teletext decoder in the TV as well but I guess a digital capture card with post processing would do a lot better.
I can’t imagine there being an archive that can achieve this without a volunteer effort.
I wonder if corporate sponsorship could be sorted? ITV and BBC? With the goal.of producing a documentary as well as archiving the tapes?
I think his best bet would be asking his local Uni with media courses if they could help. Because students are still the best free labour.
If they just had 5 VCRs and capture cards that’s turning 90 minutes swap outs into 20 minutes of the tapes are staggered and all run 90mins.
I rather suspect UK politician [Count Binface] will be extremely interested in this project!
Why?
We don’t necessarily have to archive everything there has been so we need to think about the purpose.
Yes and no. It’s not so much about “us”, but future generations.
It may seem unimportant to many of us who have lived through these times, but people in 2100 may think different.
They may want to know how it all began, how our world used to be. How we lived.
It’s similar to some of us watching early motion video from late 1800s and early 20th century on YouTube now.
That’s same thinking why archive.org does archive “shovelware” games (Win3, DOS) from the 90s.
It seems unnecessarily and superflous at first, but there are enough young people out there already who never experienced that time.
But yes, it’s not “necessarily” in the stricter sense, that’s right. It’s more like a project that tries to do future generations a favor.
In my home country, Germany, we had (have) Videotext aka Teletext, too and there are many VHS tapes out there who may contain similar material.
It’s not being archived yet, sadly. However, some individuals at BTX Museum do collect BTX pages, which also had used CEPT pages.
BTX was an former online services that looked a lot like Videotext, Austria and Swiss had a similar service.
It belonged to Videotex (no t) family of services, like Minitel/Teletel (France) and Prestel (UK).
Did the Adult Channel have teletext too? In which case I have an extra archive of tapes to add to the job.
That sounds like a hand job to me.
Yeah, but I imagine it was just a lot of “Ooooh”, “Aaaah”, and “Mmmmmmm”. ;-)
https://discord.gg/a39g6a8D
Check out the teletext group on discord, they’re interested in allmof this type of thing- from archiving, to building kit.
If you enjoy Teletext and got some time, you can even play ~30fps games:
Doom: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rIgQV4ClmQ0
(source code and detailed info: https://github.com/lukneu/doom-teletext )
Worms: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o7CEFwl-1Vo
(Detailed info: https://heckmeck.de/demoscene/worms-vbi/ )
vhs-decode would be good for this.