Videonics: The Dawn Of Home Video Editing, Revisited

November 11, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 3 Comments

Here’s a slice of history that will make any retro-tech fan grin: before TikTok and iMovie, there was a beast called the Videonics DirectED Plus. This early attempt at democratizing video editing saved enthusiasts from six-figure pro setups—but only barely. Popular Science recently brought this retro marvel back to life in a video made using the very system that inspired it. Picture it: 1987, VHS at its peak, where editing your kid’s jazz recital video required not just love but the patience of a saint, eight VCRs, three Videonics units, two camcorders, and enough remotes to operate a space shuttle.

The Videonics DirectED Plus held promise with a twist. It offered a way to bypass monstrous editing rigs, yet mastering its panel of buttons felt like deciphering hieroglyphs. The ‘Getting Started’ tape was the analog era’s lifeline, often missing and leaving owners hunting through second-hand stores, forgotten basements, and enthusiast forums. Fast forward to today, and recreating this rig isn’t just retro fever—it’s a scavenger hunt.

Once assembled, the system resembled a spaghetti junction of cables and clunky commands. One wrong button press could erase precious minutes of hard-won footage. Still, the determination of DIY pioneers drove the machine’s success, setting the stage for the plug-and-play ease we now take for granted.

These adventures into retro tech remind us of the grit behind today’s seamless content creation. Curious for more? Watch the full journey by Popular Science here.

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2View: The Self-Erasing VHS Tape With Paperclip Hack

October 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

The back of the 2View VHS box. The instructions are all in Dutch, as its (sole) launch market. (Credit: Techmoan, YouTube)

Over the decades the video and music industries have tried a wide range of ways to get consumers to buy ‘cheaper’ versions of albums and music, but then limit the playback in some way. Perhaps one of the most fascinating ones is the 2View, as recently featured by [Matt] over at Techmoan on Youtube. This is a VHS tape which works in standard VHS players and offers you all the goodness that VHS offers, like up to 512 lines of PAL video and hard-coded ads and subtitles, but also is restricted to just playing twice. After this second playback and rewinding, the tape self-erases and is blank, leaving you with just an empty VHS tape you can use for your own recordings.

As a form of analog restrictions management (ARM) it’s pretty simple in how it works, with [Matt] taking the now thankfully erased Coyote Ugly tape apart for a demonstration of the inside mechanism. This consists out of effectively just two parts: one plastic, spring-loaded shape that moves against one of the tape spools and follows the amount of tape, meaning minutes watched, and a second arm featuring a permanent magnet that is retained by an inner track inside the first shape until after rewinding twice it is released and ends up against the second spool, erasing the tape until rewound, after which it catches in a neutral position. This then left an erased tape that could be safely recorded on again.

Although cheaper than a comparable VHS tape without this limit, 2View was released in 2001, when in the Netherlands and elsewhere DVDs were demolishing the VHS market. This, combined with the fact that a simple bent paperclip could be stuck inside to retain the erase arm in place to make it a regular VHS tape, meant that it was really a desperate attempt that quickly vanished off the market

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A home-made tape robot that stores VHS tapes

VHS Robot Swaps Tapes, As Seen In Hackers

April 23, 2023 by Robin Kearey 27 Comments

Tape robots are typically used in places that store vast amounts of data – think film studios and government archives. If you’ve seen the 1995 cult movie Hackers, you might remember a scene where the main character hacks into a TV station and reprograms their tape ‘bot to load a series he wanted to watch. It’s this scene that inspired [Nathan] over at [Midwest Cyberpunk] to make his own tape robot that loads VHS tapes.

[Nathan] has thousands of tapes in his collection, but the robot is not built to manage all of them. Instead, it’s meant to help him run his VHS streaming channel, saving him from having to physically go to his VCR every time a tape needs swapping. For that, a ten-tape storage capacity is plenty.

The main parts of the tape robot are a grabber that holds the tape, an extender that moves it forward and backward, and a linear rail that moves it up and down. The vertical motion is generated by a hybrid stepper motor through a belt drive system, while the grabber and extender are operated pneumatically. Once the grabber reaches the VCR, a pneumatic pusher shoves the tape inside. All of this is nearly identical to the robot seen in the movie, which was most likely not a commercial machine but a custom-made prop.

The whole system is controlled by an ESP32 running FluidNC inside the robot as well as a handmade cyberdeck next to it that manages the overall process of loading and storing tapes. Although [Nathan] is currently using the robot for his streaming channel, he’s planning to also use it for digitizing part of his massive tape collection, which contains a few titles that were never released on newer formats.

Working with old tapes can be tricky: some types of tape degrade over time, while others might come with primitive copy protection systems. But moving information over to newer media is a necessity if you don’t want to risk losing it forever.

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VHS-Decode Project Could Help Archival Efforts

December 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 47 Comments

Archiving data from old storage media can be a highly complex process. It can be as simple as putting a disk in an old drive and reading out the contents. These days, though, the state of the art is more complex, with advanced techniques helping to recover the most data possible. The VHS-Decode project is an effort to improve the archiving of old analog video tapes.

The project is a fork of the LaserDisc-focused ld-decode, started by [Chad Page] back in 2013, which readers may recall was used for the Domesday Duplicator — a device aimed to recover data from the BBC’s ancient Domesday LaserDiscs. VHS-Decode is designed to capture the raw RF signals straight out of a tape head, which are the most direct representation of the signals on the physical media. From there, these signals can be processed in various ways to best recover the original audio and video tracks. It’s much the same technique as is used by floppy disk recovery tools like the FluxEngine.

Despite the VHS name, the code currently works with several tape formats. VHS, S-VHS and U-Matic are supported in PAL and NTSC formats, while Betamax, Video8 and High8 tape capture remains a work in progress. Using the code requires a video tape player with test points or traces that make signals from the head accessible. Capturing those signals is achieved via a Domesday Duplicator hardware device, or alternatively a Conexant CX2388x analog-to-digital converter, often found in many old PCI TV tuner cards. Various techniques can then be used to turn the captured signals into watchable video files.

We love a good archival project, and VHS-Decode is clearly a useful tool when it comes to salvaging old video tapes. Continue reading “VHS-Decode Project Could Help Archival Efforts” →

Featured image of Aladdin's Castle Arcade

Retrotechtacular: Raw Video From Inside A 1980s Arcade

February 14, 2022 by Drew Littrell 42 Comments

It was just this year that Sega left the arcade business for good. A company synonymous with coin-op games for over a half century completely walked away from selling experiences you can only get on location. No more Outrun or Virtua Fighter machines, because arcades these days tend to resemble The House of the Dead. Arcades still exist to a degree, it’s just that headlines like that serve only as a reminder of an era gone by. Which is what makes raw footage like the video [Jon] posted of an Aladdin’s Castle arcade from the 1980s so compelling.

scan of Aladdin's Castle Arcade pamphlet ad — Aladdin’s Castle ad brochure circa 1983. Credit: John Andersen

The raw VHS footage starts with a sweep around the location’s pinball machines and arcade cabinets. There’s an extended shot of a rare TX-1 tri-monitor sitdown cabinet. The racing game was the first of its kind to feature force feedback in the steering wheel, so it’s no wonder it received the focus. The arcade’s lighting tech was also a point of pride as it allowed for programmable lighting cues. A far cry from the flickering fluorescent tubes no doubt in use elsewhere. Eventually the employee filming takes us to the back room where it the owner has made it abundantly clear that they are not a fan of Mondays, judging by the amount of Garfield merchandise.

Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle was a chain of arcades and had nearly 400 locations across the US at its height in the mid 1980s (at least according to their brochure seen above). Those neon red letters were a mainstay of American shopping malls throughout the decade. Namco, the Pac-Man people, acquired Aladdin’s Castle in 1993 and the brand faded away soon after. Although there is a lone location in Quincy, IL that is still open for business today.

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3D Printing With VHS Tape Filament

December 16, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 53 Comments

If you have a pile of old VHS tapes collecting dust in your attic or basement that you know you’ll never watch again, either because all of those movies are available on DVD or a streaming service, or because you haven’t had a working VCR since 2003, there might be a way of putting them to good use in another way. With the miles of tape available in just a few cassettes, [brtv-z] shows us how to use that tape as filament for a 3D printer.

The first step of the build is to actually create the filament. He uses a purpose-built homemade press to spin several tapes into one filament similar to how cotton or flax is spun into yarn. From there the filament is simply fed into the 3D printer and put to work. The tape filament needs to be heated higher than a standard 3D printer filament so he prints at a much slower rate, but the resulting product is indistinguishable from a normal print except for the color. It has some other interesting properties as well, such as retaining its magnetism from the magnetic tape, and being a little more brittle than PET plastic although it seems to be a little stronger.

While the VHS filament might not be a replacement for all plastic 3D prints, it’s still a great use for something that would likely otherwise head straight to the landfill. There are some other uses for this magnetic tape as well, like if you wanted to build a DIY particle accelerator.

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Vlogging With Vintage 1980s Equipment

June 28, 2018 by Adam Fabio 8 Comments

[Dan Mace] decided to try vlogging 1980s style. To do this, he built Pram Cam — a one-man mobile video recording setup using vintage gear. [Dan] is a YouTuber from Cape Town, South Africa. His goal for this project was to motivate people to get out there and make videos. Smartphones, action cams, and modern video equipment all have made it incredibly easy to create content.

[Dan] reminds us of this by grabbing a vintage 1984 video camera – a Grundig vs150 VHS recorder. He couples the camera with a sturdy video tripod, blimp microphone, CRT TV as a monitor, and everything else needed for a period-accurate recording setup.

In a build sequence even the A-Team would appreciate, [Dan] tears down a rusty old three wheel pram, or baby carriage for the Americans out there. He then mounts the video setup to the pram frame using duct tape, zip ties, and a few odd pieces of wood. The result is a proper hacked off-road rolling video studio.

He then uses Pram Cam to film some of the great scenery in Cape Town — beaches, rocky cliffs, and even a helicopter ride. To say the pram was a bit more cumbersome than a cell phone would be the understatement of the year.

The video quality from the camera looks quite a bit worse than we would expect. Some of this may be due to Dan’s digitizing system though the chances are it’s from the camera itself. The Grundig captured video using a Saticon, which was Hitachi’s version of the video camera tube. That’s right, this is a tube based camera – no CMOS sensor, nor CCD. Tubes might not have Jello effect, but they do have all the blooming, motion blur, and other problems one might expect from a 34-year-old device.

What becomes of the Pram Cam? You’ll have to watch the video below to find out. Dan’s message is clear though: get out there and film something. Of course this is Hackaday, so if we’ll add that you should build something — then film it!

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