My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes

Re:My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes by interestica on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @03:52PM (#24851369)

Agreed - just letting the tape run for the duration is best. It's a shame that it has to be done in real-time. I don't see why (from a technical standpoint) the process couldn't be done at a faster speed. It's just that the hardware isn't made for it and there's not market. The analog-to-digital processing could be done by a faster chip or even software at this point. Something akin to the high-speed dubbing of analogue audio cassettes.

And it leads to that other challenge worth mentioning: Even though DV is technically a lossy format, it results in really large files.

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Re:My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes by pontifier on Thursday October 22, 2020 @12:32AM (#24854897)

Funny... I've been contemplating a SLOWER than realtime tape digitizer. Something that would make multiple passes and reconstruct the magnetic domains on the tape with very high certainty.

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Re:My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes by jacobush on Thursday October 22, 2020 @07:48AM (#24857018)

Yep. Especially a hacked VCR could be made to do this. If one taps the data from the spinning head directly, instead of relying on the VCR to process it into a proper composite signal, I'd say it's even realistic to do this.

Just run the tape at half or a quarter of the speed. The spinning helical head should still produce data. Then it's a matter of assembling it in software.

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