![[Mark] shows off footage from a D1 master on the repaired deck](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Reboot_saved_feat.png?w=800)
Do you remember ReBoot? If you were into early CGI, the name probably rings a bell, since when it premiered in 1994 it was the first fully computer-animated show on TV. Some time ago, a group found a pile of tapes from Mainframe Studios in Canada, the people behind ReBoot, and the computer historians amongst us were very excited… until they turned out to be digital broadcast master tapes. Exciting for fans of lost media, sure, but not quite the LTO backups of Mainframe’s SGI workstations some of us had hoped would turn up. Still, [Mark Westhaver], [Bryan Baker] and others at the “ReBoot Rewind” project have made great strides, to the point that in their latest update video they declare “We Saved ReBoot”
What does it take to revive a 30-year-old television project? Well, as stated, they started with the tapes. These aren’t ordinary VHS tapes: the Sony D-1 tapes, which were also known by the moniker “4:2:2”, are a format that most people who didn’t work in the TV or film industry will have never seen, and the tape decks are rare as hen’s teeth these days. Just getting a working one, and keeping it working, was one of the biggest challenges [Mark] and Reboot Rewind faced. In the end it took three somewhat-dodgy machines long past their service lives and a miraculously located spare read/write head to get a stable scanning rate.
The uncompressed digital output of these tapes isn’t something you can just burn to a DVD, either. The 720 × 576 resolution video stream is captured raw, but there are minor editing tweaks that need to be made in addition to tape errors that have cropped up over the years, and those need to be dealt with before the video and audio data gets encoded into a modern format. The video briefly glosses [Bryan Baker]’s workflow to do just that. At least they aren’t stuck with terrible USB video capture dongles VHS lovers have to deal with. Even if you don’t care about ReBoot, this isn’t the only show that was archived on D1 tapes so that workflow might be of interest to media fans.
We covered ReBoot Rewind when they were first searching for tape decks, so it’s great to have an update. Alas, the rights holders haven’t yet decided how exactly they’re going to release this fine footage, so if like this author you have fond memories of ReBoot, you may have to wait a bit longer for a reWatch.
As a (pre)teen when this show was airing, and was heavy into computers and programming, I absolutely hate(d) this show. I tried but never got it. I suppose the lingo they threw around/repurposed was clever but to anyone who knows what the words were and had an understanding of how computers worked, none of it made any sense.
Anyway good job on the technical aspects of recovery!
As an adult when this show was airing, and was heavy into computers and programming, I absolutely love(d) this show. :-)
The Hexadecimal character was amazing in every way; her story, her design, her unhinged (fragmented) personality.
As the kids these days would say, it was a very cringe show. It wasn’t hamfisted like Captain Planet, but it was up there. I think most countries/TV-networks only ever bought the first season and then canceled it.
Yeah, it was “cringe,” especially in the first season, but seasons 3 and 4 were properly good. I’ve rewatched everything from when Enzo loses the game to the end several times, and enjoy it every time.
I am happy that we will soon get the original quality video soon. The person recovering the video also said he got a few alternate versions like at the end of Medusa Bug episode, the tree turned to stone. It was aired only once, the reruns and the DVD issues had the ending replaced with game cube finally showing up and everyone’s surprised reaction.
There’s no guarantee we’ll get the original-quality video soon. This is apparently being done in conjunction with Mainframe in order to get a high-quality re-release, presumably on blu-Ray or other media.
I love what these guys are doing, but I have very little faith that the full-quality masters will somehow end up falling off the back of a proverbial truck. Sad to say, whatever we get is highly likely to end up being in some kind of compressed format with macroblocks.
Still with it being what it is, it may be easier to clean up.
Long story, but each episode has a few versions in 90% of the cases:
1) “Master Dub” (Usually without commercials, international dubbing support, and textless elements)
2) Alliance / international version
3) YTV version (Mostly in Season 1, and are either earlier cuts with errors corrected in #2, or special versions like the YTV robot in Talent Night)
For the “Trias Effect”, we’ve found master tapes with the alt ending and Interstitial #5, but the remaining segments haven’t popped up with a master tape. We acquired a VHS recording from an amazing individual in Newfoundland, and we were able to clean it up and release it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHA9jkaQenA. Sadly, it was recorded in SLP so even vhs-decode wouldn’t make much of a difference. At least the audio was in good shape…
We are processing every episode, then every tape (200+ in total). This ensures we don’t miss anything while the machines are working.
For release, Mainframe determines the best means of releasing it as they are the license holder. For each tape, we’re delivering the raw captures along with my remastered pass. For YouTube, we do some magic to ensure the bitrate doesn’t get crippled. We’re not using any LLMs / “AI” to ensure the detail isn’t faked or modified. We play with some of the algorithms to see how things are going, but they’re far from production-ready.
SD Blu-ray is the ideal target, but we need to finish the remastering first. Upon completion, we’ll start doing some mastering tests to BD to ensure the format doesn’t degrade the quality. There are two BIG hurdles:
1) Retaining PAL if possible (Including BT.601 colorspace, PAR:DAR, and framerate)
2) Avoiding chroma subsampling degradation when going to 4:2:0
We’ll try and cover all this in a future update.
-Bryan from ReBoot ReWind
Why you even mentioned vhs-decode complete bullshit? Are you serious guys or simply deep amateurs that use every open-source bullshit like vhs-decode? Serious professional don’t care and don’t mention this absolute shitty amateur “software”.
If it’s a ‘lost episode’ mentioning any available copies is interesting. Some shows have complete missing seasons.
Great job!
D1 VTRs are indeed some of the most difficult video tape machines to maintain in working order nowadays, so congrats to them! Finding brand new video drum is an absolute miracle.
I have witnesses some cases were D1 tapes were found but finally dumped because finding a way to play them back was too complicated, and so other lower quality formats (compressed digital or analog) only were preserved and digitized. What a pity!
I hope they will document every technical details they had to deal with when troubleshooting their decks, since this would be very useful to other people all over the world trying to preserve such tapes. The service manuals should also be digitized and made available. Electronic schematics, theory of operation, maintenance and alignment procedures are absolutely a must have to repair these decks.
Even more difficult nowadays is to have alignment tapes. They were extremely expensive (thousands of dollars each), you needed several different one for various adjusments (tracking, audio, video…), and even different ones for different standards (PAL, NTSC, and even SECAM for analog for example) or digital format (HDCAM, Digital Betacam, SX IMX, Betacam SP and Betacam for a multi-format player for example). They were wearing out or could be damaged. And they were used only by maintenance companies or department, so quite rare. So finding some still usable ones by today is a real challenge, and correct alignement is either very difficult or impossible without them.
And wearing out heads (video, audio, and servo signals) is the another nightmare. Spare parts stocks are non existing, except some very rare units appearing from time to time, quite often at high prices (they were already pricy at the time). Some companies were able to refurbish heads, like videomagnetics.com (but their website is dead since the end of 2021 apparently).
There are countless over dead stops, like dead proprietary chips or microcontrollers with proprietary firmwares (mask rom, or factory only flashed), leaking capacitors…
I often think that with todays technologies, being able to rebuild parts like heads or recreate alignment tapes should be more easily doable than in the past. But knowledge is quite often also lost when people are retired or have left this world… And big companies like Sony, Panasonic or others, have no interest in publishing all their internal technical informations, documentations, tools… for the sake of technological history and memory.
The video also talks about some kind of defaults that went unnoticed at the time. There are some examples of video field shifting, which was indeed something that could happen at that time, but was not visible on analog CRTs. It is not field inversion, in which case some stuttering default would have been visible with movements. Other problems could have happen, especially with old analog formats, like bad color framing (not respecting the continuity of colour burst phase at an editing point), …
Preservation of audiovisual magnetic media is a passionnating job, but also very difficult and sometimes a little exhausting and desperating…
Self reply: http://www.aheadtek.com/video.php seems to still be in business and able to provideo video heads/drums/scanners. But they don’t list D1 as supported format.
We have A LOT of documentation and notes. When it’s all said and done, we’ll try and find a good way of sharing it. Maybe Hackaday.io is a good place for it…
Hexadecimal awoke something in teenage me.
It’s said that Mainframe actually toned down their original character designs at the behest of network censors. I can’t imagine what Hex started out as to end up with the design she did; maybe it just slipped through.
Bryan here from ReBoot ReWind! Thanks for writing up a blerb on the video. We hope to share much more technical breakdowns and learnings in the future. This was the workflow update the fans needed, so we didn’t go into a full technical dive. We’re looking at the best ways to document our BTS adventures, along with the janky code I put together to get us logging.
I have the imax ride projection film and dts audio cd for it in my garage
First or second ride? We got a scan done of the first ride. If you’re able to rip the DTS disc for us, send us an email at rebootrewinddoc@gmail.com!
-Bryan from ReBoot ReWind
Only watched reboot cause it came on before Freakazoid. Now that was a cartoon I tell u what.