DVHS on a Budget

Kerhop writes "ecoustics.com has an article on how to convert SVHS tapes to work in DVHS recorders which is similar to modifying a floppy drive (like we did years ago) to double the storage. There's two holes on a DVHS cassette and a single hole on the SVHS tape. The hole common to both permits DVHS tapes to handle SVHS signals; the hole unique to DVHS is what we want to focus on. Just cut off the top four to five millimeters of the pin within the recorder itself."

Comments

Mod affects future products?

[fembots]

After reading several mods which are simply a case of bypassing feature restrictions, I wonder if these mods will force manufacturers to forgo the quick-and-dirty upgrade (i.e. same model with features disabled/enabled) and go for the more expensive redesign route?

So the question is, will you be forced to upgrade if you can't mod your current hardware?

Re:Mod affects future products?

[Murphy Murph]

After reading several mods which are simply a case of bypassing feature restrictions, I wonder if these mods will force manufacturers to forgo the quick-and-dirty upgrade (i.e. same model with features disabled/enabled) and go for the more expensive redesign route?

As long as the marketplace is as price-sensitive as it is currently, I think there is no reason to fear that manufacturers will do anything that will raise the price of their hardware.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot dupes on a budget!

Perhaps there is a reason...

[busonerd]

One might assume that there is a reason for these holes.. Perhaps SVHS media is not as high quality as DVHS?

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd actually guess the opposite could be true.
With a digital signal there's less reason to worry about noise, and thus less reason to use the highest quality media than there would be with an analog signal.
If they're smart, they might just be taking their cheapest-to-produce tapes and selling them at a premium as DVHS.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[dirty]

If you read the article you'd know that you're right, and that the author of the article tested several SVHS tapes and they worked fine.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe they're just not as expensive. You know it worked with floppy disks and there where people asking the same question back then.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[MerlinTheWizard]

Well, maybe so. Actually, I bet so. Just like the story of floppy disks (single sided vs. double sided vs. high density), the actual industrial process might be exactly identical, but the testing phase will allow different grades of quality.

I've read some people suggest that SVHS and DVHS might be exactly the same media, just sold as different to make potentially more money. Well, that would be actually counter-productive; products need to pass some tests before being ready to get sold. That wouldn't make any industrial sense to validate all the products for the highest grade, throw away the rest and sell those who passed as different products. So when you buy the cheaper product, you can almost rest assured that it is of lowest quality. And just because it seems to "work" doesn't mean that it's reliable. What you know is that there are great chances that they haven't been tested for the use you're trying to put them to.

Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.

Finally, some people would raise the question of "overclocking", which has become pretty "mainstream" amongst PC users. When you overclock, you know you're playing with the safety margins that have been validated in the factory. It's your choice, but it's pushing your luck...

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[neurojab]

Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.

Let's say there are multiple grades for a given product which are only necessitated by marketing reasons. Let's also say that having one manufacturing line is cheaper than multiple, and that manufacturing to the highest grade isn't necessarily more expensive than manufacturing to the lower grade. In that case you would want to manufacture just the one grade, and sell it at multiple price points. In fact this is quite common in the technology industry. Perhaps the end product (including packaging) hasn't been formally validated to the higher standard, but if it's the same product off the same line and not defective, it's just as good... especially when it comes to magnetic media.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[plague3106]

Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.

This is just bogus. Its much cheaper to produce one widget then it is two differnet widgets. Why do you assume they aren't doing the same level of testing on both? Film is film, they just throw it into a different casing. All the film is the same quality...they just wanted to say DVHS is better and thus justifies more money for the tape.

You know, kinda like the 'Music blank CDs' vs. the data ones. Either one will hold the same data or music...so there's never a reason to buy the music ones (unless you believe the lies that is).

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[MerlinTheWizard]

I did talk about the usual case, where indeed the manufacturing process is the exact same (so, no extra cost here), but the final products are graded through some kind of final testing before shipping. The testing can be the exact same too and just lead different results as to classify the end product. This is very often how the industrial process works. In that scenario, there is no extra cost; the different grades are just determined at the end of the fabrication process. Of course, there is also a batch of items that are even unusable and are thrown away, and/or recycled.

This is how it works for fabricating chips, for instance, and how it used to work for the fabrication of floppy disks (which were low-level formatted at the factory and graded according to their ability to retain some specific density requirements). For chips, they are tested thoroughly and graded according to the results of the tests. If you thought chips were just manufactured and shipped, you're really wrong. I'm willing to guess the exact same process applies to magnetic/optical media, because there is always a certain amount of failure during fabrication and a factory must ensure every product that goes out will work - or at least keep the failure ratio extremely low. For instance, how many CD-Rs that you bought have failed you and you know for sure it was because of the medium? Very, very few, I'm guessing. How many CD-Rs do you think a factory throws away after fabricating them and they don't pass testing? Probably much more than you think.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[Queer Boy]

Finally, some people would raise the question of "overclocking", which has become pretty "mainstream" amongst PC users. When you overclock, you know you're playing with the safety margins that have been validated in the factory. It's your choice, but it's pushing your luck...

In most situations it is not economical to produce multiple products. There's actually no difference in VHS and SVHS tapes, I learned around 93-94 that a simple mod was all it took. However the general concept at the time was that SVHS tapes were better quality than VHS tapes. That's simply not true. Within each genre of anything you will find varying degrees of quality.

Most CPUs are designed to run at a certain clock rate and then they are tested, ones that do not pass testing to run reliably at higher clock rates are sold as a slower speed. The tests they run to determine this are what is important. The CPUs that Intel or AMD or Motorola or IBM are selling are just as likely to be going into a government system as into a home PC. Once again, it's not economical to have 2 different products, it's much cheaper for a company to buy one lot of CPUs at a fixed price and change the clock rate than to be stuck with too many high end or too many low end.

Having said that DVHS is reminding me of DAT. Someone somewhere will find a use for it (like DAT did in recording studios) but for the most part, the VHS format is dead.

D ie
V HS
D ie

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[mikael]

Unless factories can afford to throw away a lot of material, there is absolutely no incentive to sell identical quality products as differents grades. I just don't see how that could be.

NVIDIA GeForceFX cards can be converted into use as professional Quadro cards.
Identical chips, but graded according to maximum clock speed and control circuitry on the circuit board.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm.. I would imagine that the ideal analogue tape would differ from the ideal digital tape in its magnetic hysteresis characteristics.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[stratjakt]

It "worked", but plenty of those failed. For one, floppies had felt inside the plastic casing, that would wipe dust and dirt off of the magnetic media.

Most single-sided disks had a cheaper felt, with all the grain lined up one way, to catch the dirt. This was fine, because the disc could only be expected to spin one way. Imagine rubbing a dogs fur the wrong way, dust and stuff getting trapped in the hair as it grates your hand.

When you flip the disk over and spin it backwards, the felt worked backwards too. That is, dust and dirt that was trapped, is pushed back out onto the media of the disk.

I used to nibble floppies all the time in my C64 days, and plenty of them failed. The more expensive dual-sided floppies we used at work at the time were much more reliable.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[zonker]

not quite the same i don't think, here's why i think this...

they are quite different uses. whereas the major benefit of dvhs to vhs is that it is digital and can record higher def picture the main benefit of the quadro vs. geforcefx is that you have tuned the card to render opengl better vs. rendering directx better.

that is more akin to tuning a truck to pull better than drive faster vs. turning a truck into a sports car...

forgive me for going off on a tangeant, however, i still think your point is relevant but not quite the right example.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[fordboy0]

"The more expensive dual-sided floppies we used at work at the time were much more reliable."

Yeah, but those pricier dual-sided floppies weren't meant to be spun backwards either. The drives just happened to have two heads...

I still have notched (I was too cheap to buy one of those $30.00 nibblers) floppies for my Atari 800 that still work after all these years. But that's really a moot point as I have brand NEW floppies that fail to format, even spinning in the proper direction. ;)

In the case of DVHS v. SVHS tape, I don't think there is any felt to worry about, and I would be willing to bet that the tape for SVHS and DVHS comes off the same 5000ft spools. But, that's just a hunch.

-FB0

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[plague3106]

Nothing you said here changes the fact that the SVHS tapes are likely only labeled different, and should be expected to perform fine as a DVHS.

Why would they bother categorizing lower grade items as SVHS? That would take time and cost more money. More likely they'll throw out anything that doesn't meet the DVHS standards?

Besides, if they are only manufactoring DVHS, how could they possibly expect to meet SVHS quotas? They'd have to adjust thier lines to garentee a certain failure rate (one that would pass SVHS but fail DVHS) to do so...and if they have too many 'failures' they miss their DVHS quota; if they make too many non 'failures' they mis thier SVHS.

Doesn't seem too likely to me.

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[zonker]

here's the thing tho, this hack is rather brutal the way the dude suggests to do it. a more elegant approach would be to take the pin circuit and solder an external switch so you can enable/disable the pin. while you have probably still voided your warranty, it isn't permanently modified, so if you were to sell it later the mod can easily be undone...

Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[imsabbel]

Er quite opposite: With analog media, you get slightly less fidelity if there in an error on the band.

With digital (especially REALLY compressed digital) data, you get drop out till the next resync, shit frames, ect...

BE CAREFUL

[brownblaket]

Be very careful doing this. I read about this on a blog a couple of days ago and tried it with some of the tapes we have an the archive here at work (i work for a local news station on boston). Out of the 5 tapes I tried 3 broke, 1 worked and 1 kind of worked. This is a neat idea but it needs a little more thought before it should be tried with anything that really matters to you.

Re:BE CAREFUL

[KiloByte]

It sounds exactly like the thing we used to do to 720 floppies back in the days by drilling a hole in the corner. A majority of them worked well -- but some did not.

But well, floppies back in the days used to be made with a decent quality margin over what was needed for their labelled format, and such "upgraded" old ones were a lot more trustworthy than the full-sized floppies you could buy a few years later.

Re:BE CAREFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds exactly like the thing we used to do to 720 floppies back in the days by drilling a hole in the corner.

That's not "back in the day"! Back in the day is gluing two punch cards together to double their capacity!

Re:BE CAREFUL

[FlopEJoe]

Whoa! Freaky flashback with hole punching floppies! And I remember moving my audio tape data to floppies and thinking that was the shiznit!

brrr... Now someone's gonna have to rock me to sleep tonight!

Re:BE CAREFUL

[evilviper]

it with some of the tapes we have an the archive here at work (i work for a local news station on boston). Out of the 5 tapes I tried 3 broke, 1 worked and 1 kind of worked.

What do you mean by "broke"? How in the hell would removing a pin in a player BREAK a tape?

I think you were reckless in the process of making a hole in the casing, and damaged the tape. Of course, this article explicitly tells you that making a hole in the tape doesn't really work, hence the modification of the player itself.

Re:BE CAREFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds exactly like the thing we used to do to 720 floppies back in the days

I remember doing this too. Actually, I remember taking 400kb floppies which really were floppy, taking a hole punch, and getting 800kb floppies. At least, I think these were the sizes. In my day, 800k was enough to fit an entire operating systems and some functional apps.

Cripes I'm old!

Re:BE CAREFUL

[mdv72lcm]

Would you please give directions on modding floppies. Sounds facinating an idea. I would like to try it, a great way of wasting my floppy collection.

Re:BE CAREFUL

[notAyank]

Did anybody else cut holes in the side of their 5 1/4 inch floppies for their 1541 drive to make them double-sided? It was amazing. From memory it turned 170 Kb of storage into a massive 340 KB OF STORAGE!!!

Re:BE CAREFUL

[KiloByte]

I'm afraid that what I'm talking about won't be of any interest to you. It's a technique to convert high-quality 720k floppies into 1440k ones by drilling a hole in the corner -- just compare a 720k floppy to a 1440k one to know where to drill.

Nowadays,

• I doubt your floppies are 720k.
• They're obviously bad quality ones unless you bought them earlier than about 15 years ago.
• What exactly would you want floppies for?

So, you'll fare better converting them into beer pads, gutting them to make a string of their insides for "decorative" purposes or just hanging them on a wall.
Hell, I still have a set of genuine Windows1.0 install disks that were nailed to a wall at my previous workplace.

What?

[Predflux]

Do people still use these? Less research improvements?

Good plan

[DavidRawling]

Ha! Now I've got you. Instead of purchasing $10 media validated to work in DVHS mode, I'll modify my $500 player! Let's ignore any fundamental quality, design or implementation differences while we're at it ...

Re:Good plan

[bani]

there arent any. there are even dvhs units which have the ability to record dvhs onto plain svhs tapes.

Re:Good plan

[Nik13]

Sounds funny, but that's pretty much what I had done with my floppy drives back then: instead of punching all floppies one per one, I put some switches on the drives, problem solved :)

Re:Good plan

[brainnolo]

While i agree with you that modify 500$ hardware may be silly, i think that if the signal is really digital in DVHS the chance that the signal can corrupt are really low and even a normal VHS could do. Analog signal is way more complex and subject to degradation while the digital signal composed by a binary stream of value can survive to natural degradation much more time. They maybe should try to drill the right holes right on the tape? He explained why he couldn't but i really couldn't get his point.

wrong for so many reasons

[frovingslosh]

Just cut off the top four to five millimeters of the pin within the recorder itself.

This makes lots of sense, just cut of a metal pin (in a video recorder that will not react well to any stray metal filings) rather than bypass the switch that the pin connects to.

Cut on the recorder?

[AnFraX]

Just cut off the top four to five millimeters of the pin within the recorder itself

Could you not just cut a hole in the SVHS tape rather than mess up a perfectly good DVHS recorder?

Re:Cut on the recorder?

[Murphy Murph]

Could you not just cut a hole in the SVHS tape rather than mess up a perfectly good DVHS recorder?

The article mentioned that drilling a hole into the SVHS tapes was considered a "bad idea" for fear of plastic shavings getting on the tape. It was also mentioned that using a soldering iron to melt a hole "didn't work" with the SCHS-->DVHS trick (though it did with the VHS-->SVHS trick. They didn't go into any detail on why it didn't work - I wish they had.

This is dumb...

[dirkin]

There is a reason for the two holes.. it's to tell the deck that there is a quality tape in there...

When your crappy svhs tapes don't work and have dropouts when recording in DVHS mode... don't complain to the company.. you bought sh*tty tape!

it was the same with floppies... I never trusted any floppy that some moron punched a hole in.

This is not feature restriction, the manufacturer is not trying to screw you... They put an extra hole in the tape to tell the player that this tape will actually work with the deck properly!

Cheers,
-ben

Re:This is dumb...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not feature restriction, the manufacturer is not trying to screw you...

I am not sure you understand Capitalism.

Re:This is dumb...

[Anonymous Coward]

You never known. When those famous gold colored Kodak CD-Rs hit $200 for 200, I bought some (ok, tons) and while rated 1x, they record 32x w/o any problem, better than some new media. There is no reason why you can't experiment and find tapes that are good enough quality.

Re:This is dumb...

[TheSpoom]

This reminds me of when people used a hole punch to make their 3.5" diskette format to 1.4MB (i.e. High Density) when it was really only built for something like 744KB. Hilarity and lost data ensued.

Re:This is dumb...

[bani]

hah. then why does panasonic advertise the PV-HD1000 as being able to record DVHS to bog standard SVHS tapes?

mods: +1 insightful? should be +1 funny instead...

Re:This is dumb...

[kamapuaa]

It might just have more sensitive read/write equipment than the other recorders.

Re:This is dumb...

[JohnnyBigodes]

.. or when you had an IBM PS/1 or PS/2 machine which had a particular floppy/bios that would let you straight out format a 720K floppy at 1.44MB without any need to punch a hole in the disk.

Oh, and it made sense, by the way, as long as you didn't carry anything vital in those "upgraded" disks. Buying a pack of HD diskettes still cost a bit at the time so most people (like me) reused the 720K ones at 1.44 capacity until they flipped out. And according to my experience, a pack of DD disks from a good brand was just every bit as good as an average pack of HD disks.

Re:This is dumb...

[loraksus]

with floppies, lost data ensued no matter if you punched holes in them or not...

Re:This is dumb...

[zakezuke]

it was the same with floppies... I never trusted any floppy that some moron punched a hole in.

This is why I put a switch on my drive so I could switch between HD and DD. This was circa 1989 when local stores within walking distance simply did not sell HD discs. The only one who did wanted $40+ a 10 pack. It was true that the DD media was sub par to HD media at the time, it was good enough to exchange files. I think I may have used as many as 30 floppies in this way. Later on we believed that they used the same media all around, but by that point it was easy to find HD media.

Circa 1994 (or so) the reverse was true, local stores with the notable exception of the military PX. If you needed DD one could tape the hole on the disc.

The IBM PS/2 486slc series stock Sony 2.88meg drive didn't pay any attention to the hole. You could format 720K / 1.44M / 2.88M on any disc you threw at it, with the exception of PX discs which were DD in terms of label, the hole, and the media.

This is not feature restriction, the manufacturer is not trying to screw you... They put an extra hole in the tape to tell the player that this tape will actually work with the deck properly!

There reaches a point in the manufacturing of media when it becomes more cost effective to produce one type rather than separate types if the one type will work for all.

mnb Re:wrong for so many reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

good point about bypassing the switch
to bad you didn't RTFA and see it was a plastic pin
still, good point about bypassing the switch.

Re:mnb Re:wrong for so many reasons

[frovingslosh]

I did read the article. I missed that it was a plastic pin. Do you believe that all decks will use a small plastic pin as a sensing pin, or do you think that some decks might end up using a metal pin for this function? Are small scraps of plastic a good thing to have inside an expensive video recorder? Personally, I would rather make a simple change that can be undone than one that cannot.

Re:mnb Re:wrong for so many reasons

[plague3106]

Well, lets think about this.

Plastic is cheaper then metal. They want to make the most money possible. So they'll buy plastic.

Yup, makes sense to me,.

Re:mnb Re:wrong for so many reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

We're already at the peak of oil extraction. From now on, we'll only see oil prices sky rocket, thereby also the price of plastic. Other substances will be used.

There's also the "high price" market for people who can afford to buy "the real thing". Those will use metals to increase durability, and the product will cost ten times as much as the Wal-Mart version, but there IS a market for it, so it WILL be there.

Re:mnb Re:wrong for so many reasons

[plague3106]

First, it seems scientists just aren't sure how much oil is left.

Second, do you think that a plastic pin has a higher failure rate then a metal one? Does using a plastic pin decrease the playback quality? Or do you think that they'd concentrate on making the heads better?

Also, lets not forget that the 'higher' end stuff may very well be the cheap stuff rebranded.

Modding it back then was stupid, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

You got temporary storage gains, but your discs would quickly fail. Not a good deal in the meantime.

Almost the same idea with 8mm tapes.

[Stonent1]

I bought some Data-8 tapes from used computer store cheap and was able to use them as 8mm video tapes with no apparent quality difference. I would have tried using them as Hi-8 but I didn't have any devices capable of recording Hi-8. The idea was similar, there are little holes in the bottom of the tape. It appears 1 hole for 8, 2 for hi-8 and 3 for data. (I may be wrong, but that's what I could remember)

Re:Almost the same idea with 8mm tapes.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hi8 tape has a hole in the upper right-hand corner of the back. The data 8mm tapes I've used in camcorders have a indentation you can just push through.

Re:Almost the same idea with 8mm tapes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to save money by using regular 8mm videotapes in my Hi-8 Camcorder. Just popped out the flimsy tab covering one of the holes. I always wondered if the "real" Hi-8 tapes used better quality tape or of I was just paying more for the plastic tab.

Re:Almost the same idea with 8mm tapes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where would you expect better tape quality, data tapes or video tapes?

Hint: Whats worse? Some wrong bits in your backup or some bad pixels in your video?

Read carefully

[LinuxGeek]

This article is about modifying the tape recorder, not the tapes. Surely you didn't break the DVHS pin off of the TV stations recorder, did you?

Re:Read carefully

[commodoresloat]

Huh? Looked to me like it was about modifying the tapes. Not that I read it or anything...

Re:Read carefully

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't even have to RTFA! it says right in the fucking blurb:
"Just cut off the top four to five millimeters of the pin within the recorder itself."

Re:Read carefully

[LinuxGeek]

Even if you don't go RTFM, the short description on /. has this:

Just cut off the top four to five millimeters of the pin within the recorder itself.

And in other news...

[geekboy642]

A hacker in New York uploads new firmware to his 40GB harddrive, and all of the sudden, it's a 400GB!

The quality of the media is what limits the tape, not a pin. A pin just tells the recorder what quality the media is, so it doesn't try to write more complicated data than the medium can store.

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, the data is less complicated.

Difference in quality?

[hashts]

Yes I did RTFM but the author didn't mention if there was a large quality difference between DVHS and SVHS?

He did state that when they tried the hack from VHS -> SVHS you could certainly notice the difference.
Any ideas or did I just miss this part?

Who has a DVHS?

[voidstin]

This is a great hack for all 17 people who have a DVHS recorder, have the time to do the hack, the willingness to modify their expensive gear, the money to replace it once it breaks, AND are too cheap to buy the recommended tape stock.

Re:Who has a DVHS?

[bani]

they're still the only consumer devices capable of recording full bandwidth HDTV in realtime to removable media.

Re:Who has a DVHS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trying to tell me they sold 7 more of those things in just the past month? Outrageous!

Soon to come on hackaday.com

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Upgrade your Betamax tapes to D-Betamax with a toothbrush!

Re:Soon to come on hackaday.com

[boarder8925]

No, you idiot, they announced it was dental floss, not a toothbrush! (Everyone knows the toothbrush hack is for upgrading vinyl.)

And I have no idea what I just said.

Good night, padded room. I go to sail on my bar of soap across galaxies of hard drives.

Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you get inexpensive D-VHS players/recorders?

Last time I looked they were at about $500 (couple years ago). Now I don't see them at the consumer electronics stores.

Do they still have the unusual case fan mounted on the back?

Having a large fan on the back on the VCR is the real reason I never bought one. Though if the price was right, I guess I would be willing to add one to my system.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Damnit. These things are still $500+. I don't see any reason to buy one of these when DVD+/-RW drives are so (relatively) inexpensive.

Re:Two Things

[bani]

because you can't record HDTV to dvd+/-RW.

well you could, but 1080i runs almost 4mbyte/sec which means you'd get ~19 minutes recording time on your typical 4.7gb DVD-RW.

do you really want to use 9.4gb dual layer dvd-r for all your recordings? you do know how freaking expensive they are... and there's no 9.4gb rw yet. not to mention that's still only 38 minutes.

Re:Two Things

[_avs_007]

That's what blue-laser DVDs are for. They can store up to 27gb per side. (54gb for dual layer). Toshiba and NEC are even proposing a blue laser standard that reuses existing DVD manufacturing technologies (for minimal transition costs), that will allow for 20gb rewritables, supposedly available sometime this year.

Re:Two Things

[bani]

thats nice, now show me where you can buy one, today.

i can show you were to buy dvhs, today. to record that hdtv program being aired next week.

and er, how much do your blue-laser drives and media cost?

Re:Two Things

[_avs_007]

Sure... Look here. They are priced right now, anywhere from $1000 US to $2000 US. Blank media is available right now stateside, for about $25 for the 25gb media, and $50 for the 50gb media.

I think I remember seeing somewhere that LG has one available, that will be closer to $900 US, which for right now seems reasonable, as they did just come out within the last year. Blu-Ray production is supposed to ramp up pretty fast this year.

I've seen DVHS recorders available right now for $300 to $900, so it looks like right now, BluRay is at the high end of the DVHS spectrum, but that could change quickly in the coming year or two.

Re:Two Things

[evilviper]

1080i runs almost 4mbyte/sec which means you'd get ~19 minutes recording time on your typical 4.7gb DVD-RW.

This is stupid. There is no reason to store the full-bitrate MPEG-2 HDTV stream. You can requant the MPEG-2 in realtime, and perhaps halve the bitrate, without significant quality loss... So, you're up to 80 minutes on a single DVD (dual-layer)... Besides that, you can get much more significant gains by re-encoding to MPEG-4 (or VP6, WMV, etc) which would at least double that, giving you 160 minutes on a dual-layer DVD without noticable quality loss, or 80 minutes on your single-layer DVD. Since most movies run under 100 minutes or so, you would just have to lose slightly more quality to get it to fit on a dirt-cheap DVD.

do you really want to use 9.4gb dual layer dvd-r for all your recordings? you do know how freaking expensive they are...

Yes, they are less expensive than DVHS tapes. Even if they were more expensive, I think most people have come to realize the serious advantages to random-access storage.

Besides, who need DVDs... USB2/Firewire hard drives are even better, cheap, and extremely high capacity.

Re:Two Things

[Glooty-Us-Maximus]

Um, for exchanging content? If I want to give a friend a copy of a movie, I'm not giving my external hard drive OR trying to send a 4.3 GB movie over the net.

But then again I guess my argument is worthless since both of those things would be illegal.

Re:Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

I share an external hard drive with certain friends on a regular basis. I suppose I must be a criminal in your eyes.

The future is now. You only have to trust.

Re: Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

no, just a moron.

Re:Two Things

[bani]

recoding sort of kills the whole point of recording a 1080i HDTV stream in the first place.

on a bigscreen TV, the quality loss is VERY noticeable. which is the whole point behind recording the original full rate HDTV stream.

of course if you don't care about video quality, watching it on some crappy NTSC tv or 21" PC monitor then you probably don't care, so go ahead and recode it into pixelated mushiness, compress the stuffing out of it and shoehorn it into those DVDs.

Re:Two Things

[glesga_kiss]

I'm not giving my external hard drive OR trying to send a 4.3 GB movie over the net.

That's pretty shortsighted. Within 10-15 years you'll be able to do that in just a couple of minutes and you won't bat an eyelid when doing it. You might briefly think back to the days when it took days to get a movie downloaded, but then your download will be finished and you can move on with your life...

Re:Two Things

[Glooty-Us-Maximus]

I think it will be a lot sooner than 10 years that we will be able to do that in just a couple of minutes. But the original poster said what do we need DVDRs for. And right now, I feel that we need them for things such as exchanging media with others.

Re:Two Things

[bani]

is that $25/$50 for rewritable media or write-once?

is rewritable blu-ray media even available yet?

Re:Two Things

[evilviper]

on a bigscreen TV, the quality loss is VERY noticeable. which is the whole point behind recording the original full rate HDTV stream.

You aren't really paying attention, are you?

When re-encoding to MPEG-4 or another modern codec, you can get about a 4X reduction WITHOUT ANY REAL QUALITY LOSS. No, it ISN'T noticable on a bigscreen TV. MPEG-2 is a very old and underpowered codec, and it's absolutely mind-boggling that they chose to use it in a new TV standard...

Re:Two Things

[evilviper]

If I want to give a friend a copy of a movie, I'm not giving my external hard drive OR trying to send a 4.3 GB movie over the net.

Clearly, you have never owned an external hard drive. Exchanging files with others is incredibly easy. You meet each other somewhere, plug-in the drives, copy files, and in a matter of very few minutes, you both have the files you want.

Personally, if I had to send a very large file to someone, I wouldn't have any reservations about copying it to a spare 40GB hard drive I have laying around, boxing it up, and paying a few dollars to ship it to them. You can get a older hard drive for $20 these days.

And finally, you can always span a video across several DVDs if you want to give someone a copy, but you really don't want your own copy stored that way if you can avoid it...

Re:Two Things

[Lije Baley]

Er, please point me to an example hardware/software configuration which can do this, priced within an an order of magnitude of $500...

Re:Two Things

[bani]

you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

you can't get a 4x reduction from 1080i without sacrificing something.

i've been encoding video for ~10 years now, i've extensively used all the various codecs. mpeg4 is great for low bitrate PC generated video (which is what it was designed for), but it is not significantly better than mpeg2 to get the miracle compression you attribute to it. mpeg4 scales down very well (eg think streaming video over dialups) but it does not scale up signficantly better than mpeg2.

i know you think your 4x reduced mpeg4 rips look "good" on a pc monitor, but they look horrible blown up on a bigscreen. artifacting all over the place. it's simple physics -- you can't generate detail from missing bits, mpeg4 is not so advanced beyond mpeg2 that it can pull off compression miracles.

mpeg4 in theory can get very high compression rates through object based scene analysis (again, PC generated video), but nobody does this yet. in reality its just another simple DCT motion vector scheme.

don't believe me? try this analysis by an mpeg expert.

Re:Two Things

[Glooty-Us-Maximus]

I actually do own an external hard drive. But when I want to give a friend a movie, I can simply hand them a DVDR and be done with it. I don't have to go to their house, plug in my external hard drive (and pray that they have USB2, since quite a few of my friends still do not), then wait ~5+ minutes for it to copy. And that's if I want to give them only one movie (or 1 DVDR worth of stuff), which often I do not.

Your idea of us meeting somewhere hinges on the fact that they have a laptop which a few of my friends still do not have, and that we have the time or wish to do these copy-fests (as copying ~4 DVDs worth of stuff over USB2 will have you sitting somewhere for quite a while. If you want to copy all 3 LOTR:EEs, be prepared to wait a while). So under given conditions an external hard drive may work better, but for the majority of users I feel DVDRs are preferrable.

As for spanning a video over several DVDs, the only videos that I have had to do that with have been DVD movies, which I wish to watch on my set-top dvd player. True another case could be that I would like to have a 16GB HD transport stream instead of 4*4GB files, but I'm not going to be capturing/downloading a raw transport stream anytime soon (~4 GB XviD encodes w/ AC3 work for me just fine).

Re:Two Things

[evilviper]

Er, please point me to an example hardware/software configuration which can do this, priced within an an order of magnitude of $500...

I must be missing something if you find this difficult.

Requant is open source, and now even included with transcode (tcrequant)... MPlayer/ffmpeg do very, very fast MPEG-4 encoding at higher quality than Xvid.

The hardware is whatever you can scrounge up... You could put together a $200 computer to handle all this, though it might be on the slow side if you are doing full re-encoding... Spend the extra $300 on a top-end CPU and faster RAM, and you're set.

Re:Two Things

[evilviper]

you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Quite the opposite, I know a shitload about what I'm talking about.

mpeg4 is great for low bitrate PC generated video (which is what it was designed for), but it is not significantly better than mpeg2 to get the miracle compression you attribute to it.

It makes no difference what the designers intended. In addition, it's clear you have experience with only a select few MPEG-4 codecs. I have don't extensive high-bitrate encoding with MPEG-4 codecs (primarily libavcodec) and I can say both from experience, and from theory, that MPEG-4 is capable of re-compressing MPEG-2 material down to approximately a quarter of the original size, with practically no noticable loss in visual quality. I suggest you try it yourself, either using ffmpeg or mplayer.

i know you think your 4x reduced mpeg4 rips look "good" on a pc monitor

This is ridiculous. You're making bullshit claims based on nothing at all.

you can't generate detail from missing bits

Funny, that's exactly what MPEG-2 is doing in the first place... Removing unnecessary visual information, and using complex mathematics to compress the rest down to a fraction of it's original size. MPEG-4 has many, many more features than MPEG-2, and despite your claims that it's only good for low bitrates, more advanced motion vectors, better quantization, better motion estimation, et al., are not partial to one bitrate over another, they improve picture quality/decrease size, no matter what the material.

they look horrible blown up on a bigscreen. artifacting all over the place

You're taking some crappy Divx encode, and treating it as if it's the best MPEG-4 can possibly do. You have never SEEN anything I have encoded, so your mindless attempts to discount my points are completely baseless.

don't believe me? try this analysis by an mpeg expert.

I'm more of an expert than most self-proclaimed experts. I'm not convinced by some mindnumbing press-release drivel, with absolutely no technical information.

Don't believe me? try some actual code, written by the REAL experts.

Re:Two Things

[evilviper]

Your points are really irrelivant, because this thread is entirely about HD, and has nothing to do with standard DVDs. You stand-alone DVD player won't play 1080i, even if you record it to a DVD, which completely eliminates the entire reason most people buy DVD-Burners.

Old Floppy Disks

[jpiggot]

This reminds me of the old days of 3.5" floppy disks, when you'd cut a notch to make it double sided. Everyone would laugh and joke at how they'd stick it to the man, and then save their "Wizardry" games or word processing documents on disks that would eventually crap out on them.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, you misspelled 5.25.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[ViXX0r]

All floppy disks eventually crap out, regardless of modifications. It was and is a poor medium in which to assume any amount of storage stability exists.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I've got double sided 3.5 disks fresh from a carten that died in a week. (and no, I don't keep them stuck to the fridge with magnets.) The fact of the mater is that floppies die, weather or not you modify them.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[bani]

notching them doesnt make them die any faster.

i've got 20 year old cheap-ass no-name-brand notched discs which still work fine. and "true double sided" from maxell, 3m and fuji which went bad in less than 3 days.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Dogtanian]

Apparently the newer 3.5" disks are far less reliable than they used to be; this also goes for the drives.

This is hardly surprising considering the way the prices for these things have come down. Even accounting for dirt-cheap Chinese labour and economies of scale, you can only go so cheap before quality/QA gets sacrificed.

However, combine the "price-beats-everything" mentality of the average consumer, with the unglamorous image of the floppy (know anyone who would pay more for a computer nowadays because it came with a "quality" FDD?) and the fact that they're rarely used now (except for emergency recovery and by clueless uni students who store the only copy of their thesis on them), and the simple fact is people/assemblers will almost always buy the cheapest FDD and disks. Even if that means buying complete ****.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, the disks really were meant to be double sided. The problem was the Apple ]['s drives were single sided drives. So to use the other side you had to cut the notch out to make them write-enabled when inserted upside down. Other drives (such as PC drives) had the hardware to read and write both sides at once. Which is why the same single density disks were 360K disks in PCs but only 144K disks in Apple ][s (Yes it's more than double, there were other differences in how they used the disks too)

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Dogtanian]

i've got 20 year old cheap-ass no-name-brand notched discs which still work fine. and "true double sided" from maxell, 3m and fuji which went bad in less than 3 days.

Yeah; but when did you buy the Maxells, 3Ms and Fujis? If it was recently, then they're unlikely to have the same quality as the older ones (see this comment).

BTW, are we discussing 3.5" or 5.25" disks?

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[operagost]

I think you have two different mods mixed up. As mentioned above, you could add a notch on a 3.5" 1MB floppy to make it HD 2MB (unformatted). The other mod was to add a second write-protect notch to a 5.25" double-sided floppy. This wasn't to increase its capacity, but so that its full capacity could be used in a single-sided drive like the Commodore 1541. Without the notch, if you flipped over the floppy the drive would think it was write protected. Why all floppies didn't just include this notch, I don't know. I used to get BASF floppies because they did, and I could easily use them in both my PC and my C64.

Again, if you lost data doing this it was definitely just coincidence, as you weren't trying to get something for nothing -- just trying to use the reverse side of the floppy which couldn't be utilized by the drive mechanism.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Anonymous Coward]

There were single sided disks (I have a couple of "Verbatim Single Sided Double Density 48 tracks soft sectored" in the closet next to the C64) and unsurprisingly the notch thing also worked with those.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[zakezuke]

This reminds me of the old days of 3.5" floppy disks, when you'd cut a notch to make it double sided. Everyone would laugh and joke at how they'd stick it to the man, and then save their "Wizardry" games or word processing documents on disks that would eventually crap out on them.

How would you be sticking it to the man? Those were 5.25 (not 3.5) inch disks and were sold as DD (double sided double density). Drives that didn't need to use the index hole could be nibbled and you could right to the other side. The media was writable on both sides but when you turned it upside down there was no write enable notch so you couldn't write to it. Drives which actually used the index hole couldn't be nibbled unless you you made another index hole on the other side.

Now single sided disks marked SS SD (Single Sided Single/Double Density) might only have magnetic media on one side. I.e. there was nothing to write to on the second side. The last time I saw one was circa 1983 at Toys R Us.

I don't see how one is sticking it to the man when they sold a disc that was labeled double sided but needed to be nibbled in order to flip the disk to be used in single sided drives.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Urchlay]

Apparently the newer 3.5" disks are far less reliable than they used to be; this also goes for the drives.

In 1981, a floppy drive was a maintenance item: you had to align it several times over the life of the drive, and clean the heads several times in between alignments. I've often wondered if the modern `floppy drives are unreliable' attitude stems from the fact that nobody *ever* does this any more. At what point did floppy drive technology change so that maintenance was no longer required? My theory is that it didn't... but I use floppies so rarely now that I haven't tested this theory.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[3vi1]

I remember that too, except the crapping out part. Out of well over 1000 that I double-notched, I think I only ran across maybe four that had any sort of problems (and I think all with problems were evident at the time of format). All these floppies were the absolute bottom-dollar ones, bought in bulk.

When the floppies were created, both sides went through the exact same manufacturing process. The only difference between the two sides is that the manufacturer tested one side successfully and never tried the other.

Double-notching wasn't foolish. Not double-notching and throwing away money was foolish. I often used the 'free' sides to backup other important floppies: That way, if you ever did get a dreaded bad track/sector (which happened as often on the good sides as the bad) or even lose a whole floppy, you had a backup at zero cost.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[bani]

the maxells, 3ms and fujis were not recent. something like 10-15 years ago.

i remember buying packs of 100 no-name (random colored, no manufacturer label) and they would all work fine notched forever. also buying a 10-pack of "1337" "supar" "extreme quality" vendor-branded maxell/3m/fuji/etc around the same time and they would go bad within a few months of light use.

and we are discussing 3.5" disks.

i still have the old no-name colored notched disks. they still work fine. i ended up throwing most of the maxell/3m/etc in the trash because they all went bad relatively quickly.

i haven't bought any 3.5" in ages, i still use the same notched no-name colored discs from 15-20 years ago.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[bani]

i never had to align my 5.25" or 3.5" floppy drives. don't know what computers you were using. i used apple II's, atari 8-bit, atari 16-bit, amiga and mac. never had to align anything -- ever.

head cleaning was another story.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Urchlay]

> i never had to align my 5.25" or 3.5" floppy drives.

Atari 8-bit, with 1050 drives. Also C=64 with the 1541 drive.

The 1050 drives would keep working if you didn't align them, so long as you kept formatting new disks on the same drive... your old disks would gradually quit working as the alignment drifted, and you'd discover that your friends couldn't read your disks most of the time.

Of course, once you got to this point, realigning the drive would mean you couldn't use disks you'd formatted within the past month or two.

Worst thing that ever happened to one of my drives back then: some genius lubricated his drive with Vaseline, and got some on the R/W head. Every disk he put into the drive after that would fail... and would get Vaseline on it, which meant when I tried them in my drive, I got Vaseline on *my* drive head. His head was toast (the Vaseline broke down the plastic parts), but mine I cleaned in time to save it. Had to throw out all the disks that had been in either drive, too.

Also fun was the time a gnat flew into my drive just as I was closing the door. He got squished between the head & disk, and smeared gnat-guts all over them both. Cleaned the head, no problem, but the disk was toast.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[bani]

that's bizarre. in the years of 8-bit copy parties, never had a problem reading anyone else's disks, nor anyone had problems reading mine. nobody ever aligned their drives.

fiddling with the drive alignment was frowned upon, because there wasn't any standard available for you to align your drive to! there were diagnostic 1050 disks, but they weren't easily available. i don't know of a single person who had one (or needed one, for that matter).

the two "bad experiences" you mention have nothing to do with alignment..

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[Urchlay]

the two "bad experiences" you mention have nothing to do with alignment..

Yeah, I know. I was in nostalgia/horror-story mode when I posted that.

As far as the alignment thing goes... I might have been getting confused. The 1050's track 0 sensor failed on me (on a couple different drives), but that's not related to alignment either. I do distinctly recall taking my 1050 drive to a local guru and him telling me he was going to align it, but I don't remember whether he actually got the drive working again.

Maybe it was only the Commodore 1541 that had to be aligned regularly. I didn't have one of those until later, and didn't use it as much. I remember people complaining about them literally getting knocked out of alignment when formatting and/or reading certain copy-protected disks. Something about the drive software telling the head to seek to some high-numbered track that didn't exist, and the head physically hitting some piece of machinery inside the drive... nothing I ran into personally though.

Bleah, this is way off-topic for an article about a DVHS recorder hack.

Re:Old Floppy Disks

[bani]

I never had a C64, so my experience with teh 1541 is nil. However a bit of googling shows you are correct, the 1541 required regular alignment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541

Apparently the 1541 was such a terrible design that it required this, and a whole mini industry of 1541 alignment tools existed at one time.

AFAIK, the 1541 was the only drive that ever required this. The apple II, atari 8-bit and anything else I have ever used never required alignment -- then or since.

next up...

[montypics]

Next up on Slashdot... How to get your old 45's to play in your CD player! Just buy better tapes, people.

Re:next up...

[TWX]

"Next up on Slashdot... How to get your old 45's to play in your CD player!"

They'd work better in your Laserdisc player or RCA Selectavision Video Disc player. The former has a hole about the same size as the 45, and the latter was a video disc player that used a vinyl media and a needle to play the movie.

Re:next up...

[nbert]

While it's not a hack I guess that you can't really get closer to the function of a CD drive than this turntable player.

I'd buy one if they wouldn't be so ugly and most notably they aren't exactly cheap.

This is not dumb...

[TWX]

When your crappy svhs tapes don't work and have dropouts when recording in DVHS mode... don't complain to the company.. you bought sh*tty tape!

it was the same with floppies... I never trusted any floppy that some moron punched a hole in.

This is not feature restriction, the manufacturer is not trying to screw you... They put an extra hole in the tape to tell the player that this tape will actually work with the deck properly!

Do you actually know the differences between SVHS and DVHS tape media? Do you know anything about SVHS tape at all even?

I pose these questions because people are increasingly finding that for marketing purposes companies are rebranding and ever-so-slightly modifying things, like casings in this instance, so that they can create different price points while using materials with no particular difference.

Smart people in this community have found out that they can change how their DVD drives work by reflashing the firmware, and some have figured out how to make their low-line burner drives work as the high-end product by similar means. I wouldn't be surprised if someone reflashed the firmware on a hard disk drive, low-level-formatted it, and found that the part was otherwise identical to the model with a quarter more capacity.

There is every reason to assume that "tape is tape" in this instance would apply, and that for the sake of manufacturing ease they've gone to using the same media for both SVHS and DVHS, simply using a different package for the newer, "better" standard.

Re:This is not dumb...

[PhotoGuy]

I seem to remember a contact lense maker (who I shall refer to simply as B&L, since I'm 100% sure it was them, nor am I sure how to spell their name), who lost a class action suit for selling the exact same product as daily disposables, and extended wear lenses. Simply different branding, packaging, use, but the ability to charge drastically different pricing, was frowned upon and judged against by the courts.

Would this not be a precedent against branding the same tapes with different qualities?

Re:This is not dumb...

[Nogami_Saeko]

It's an interesting theory, but it may very well be wrong...

SVHS tapes have a higher coercitivity than regular tape, which means that it takes a stronger magnetic signal to write the information to the tape. It also means that on tapes with a low coercitivity, the signal can be too strong and will not record properly.

This was the case for drilled or modified VHS tapes. Sure, they'd record, but you'd often get artifacts and degredation after time has passed. I have some drilled VHS tapes that looked perfect when they were originally recorded back in the mid 90s. Now they're riddled with dropouts and defects where the brand-name (and more expensive) SVHS tapes still look fine.

Sometimes you DO get what you pay for. If you want to be a cheapskate, you take your chances... (note that digital VCRs use a completely different recording technology than the colour-under heterodyne VHS system, so they may work better with modified tapes/pins).

N.

Re:This is not dumb...

[Queer Boy]

Bausch & Lomb

Re:This is not dumb...

[TWX]

I assume that higher coercitivity helps prevent SVHS tapes from experiencing the shelf life problems that regular VHS has in a given amount of time. What is really needed to confirm the DVHS/SVHS compatibility theory is for someone to analyse the media itself to see what differences really exist in the physical tape. If they are minor to nonexistent then it would be safe to assume that it'd work.

Re:This is not dumb...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if someone reflashed the firmware on a hard disk drive, low-level-formatted it, and found that the part was otherwise identical to the model with a quarter more capacity.

Won't work: capacities in one series differ by number of plates and number of mounted heads. And You won't be able to low-format a modern HDD w/o extra positioning hardware as the drive cannot position it's heads without data on the plates.

Re:This is not dumb...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is every reason to assume that "tape is tape" in this instance would apply

Who came up with this "tape is tape" maxim? I've never heard it. I read a newsgroup where lots of people hang out who record music, and they are always taking about the different levels of quality tape. Plus, my own experience from back in the days when cassettes were king is that there is a huge difference in quality of tape!

Re:This is not dumb...

[bill_mcgonigle]

That's correct. I was sitting with a sales rep in the optometrist's waiting room in the late 80's and he told me about it. It was actually a marketing point for the disposables so people didn't worry about the quality of them since they were a new market item.

So I bought the disposables and used them as extended-wear but tossed them rather than scrubbing them.

If B&L was trying to keep it hush-hush they forgot to send some memos.

Tape quality

[CPgrower]

I'd think the critical component here is tape formulation. Digital recordings are more sensitive to tape imperfections than analog, are they not?

Re:Tape quality

[iantri]

Well, if you do this to use a VHS tape as an SVHS tape, the quality will not be quite as good.

If you do this to go from SVHS to DVHS, if the 'tape quality' is not good enough, you should get no signal at all, or one with constant dropouts.

If you can find a tape that crosses that threshold, you should be good to go, but I would be nervous about integrity after sitting on a shelf for a few years. (Don't do it for anything important!)

Re:Tape quality

[CPgrower]

Off topic but I found an interesting link to videotape preservation

Re:Tape quality

[bani]

panasonic sells a DVHS unit which claims to be able to record DVHS to standard SVHS tapes. but what does panasonic know?

and i've got a JVC deck here which records SVHS to standard VHS tapes. indeed it is not quite as good as SVHS but it is visibly much better than standard VHS.

but DVHS is a digital format with error correction and such and DVHS tape spec is so close to standard SVHS that it may not matter all that much. Similar to the fact you can record Digital-8 onto regular Hi-8 tapes.

Re:Tape quality

[Firethorn]

Depends on how the digital recordings are set up.

While analog tends to degrade a little more gracefully, pretty much all digital media incorporates error recovery code. How extensive this code is depends on the media and how valuable the expected data storage is. Thus analog degrades sooner, and pretty much unavoidably. However, seriously degraded media is more recoverable than digital media. But as long as the error recovery method isn't overwhelmed, you're much more likely to get a perfect copy.

So small tape imperfections might actually show more with analog recordings.

The analogy to a floppy disk is perfect...

[gearmonger]

...they are both lame, outdated technologies.

Seriously, why bother with this when there are so many better, faster, more capable storage media available today?

--
One if by troll, two if by redundant...

Re:The analogy to a floppy disk is perfect...

[imsabbel]

er, dvhs has 1080i HDTV NOW, blue ray and hd-dvd are not here yet.

Re:The analogy to a floppy disk is perfect...

[evilviper]

blue ray and hd-dvd are not here yet.

No, but dirt-cheap hard drives are...

There are also dual-layer DVD burners as well, and with a modern codec, you can fit a couple hours of HDTV on it...

HD-Tivos are available... HDTV-PCI cards are available... HDTV recievers come with Firewire outputs... etc.

I tried recording TV shows to VHS tapes, and I can tell you, it's infinitely more hassle than a fully-digital system, that allows you to instantly seek, erase, overwrite, rewind, etc.

With VHS tapes, I usually wouldn't record a show even if I really wanted to watch it, because it was so much time and hassle... Now, I'll record anything at all, because it takes a matter of seconds to do so, and even less to remove it.

Re:The analogy to a floppy disk is perfect...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is totally wrong. There exists NO other method of generally permanently recording cable HDTV programming such as HBO, etc right now except using DVHS via firewire. The output is copy protected and there is currently no real way around it. The DVHS decks obey the copy protection protocol and thus can be used.

crazy simple hacks

[Fox_1]

I love it when simple hacks add value or allow us to do things we would normally have to pay for - and would make the designers sh*t bricks.
IE:
-using pencil to overclock processors
-clipping the floppy to double capacity
wiring a usb end to an xbox controller
-that firmware upgrade to the camera (Canon?) that made it as good as the super expensive model

I'm sure there are more cool hacks like that out there

Re:crazy simple hacks

[MSDos-486]

Actually if you notice the same applys to electric tooth brush heads. Lets say you but the Super CrossAction brush for $7, with a replacable head. The Super Dupper CrossAction Plus heads cost $9 for a pack of 2. The more expensive heads will fit on the less expensive motor. So theres no need to buy the more expensive motor.

Re:crazy simple hacks

[radish]

that firmware upgrade to the camera (Canon?) that made it as good as the super expensive model

It actually did no such thing. It activated a couple of modes which weren't normally available, but considerable differences remained between the two.

Re:crazy simple hacks

[Fox_1]

I guess the point of my post wasn't to create the definitive list of kewl hacks - those were off the top of my head and it should have been easy to infer that I hadn't actually tried the camera hack myself

- instead I was hoping to hear about others that qualified for the list - and maybe even find one that might be relevant to me - like making my legacy serial port equipment work in a USB-centric WinXP-plz anyone?

Anyways thanks for the clarification on the camera hack - I'm sure that were I in a position to try it I would have quickly realized the differences between my statement and reality.

Re:crazy simple hacks

[radish]

Fair enough, apologies if I came off harshly. I just wanted to clear up that misunderstanding - I have a lot of respect for Canon and am unhappy about the whole 300D firmware debacle and how people have used it to portray them as trying to con consumers.

Re:crazy simple hacks

[Fox_1]

I have a lot of respect for Canon too, which is why when I found the "List" of employees to be laid off while browsing the office network I borrowed the camera (Powershot A50) from the office and funny, when they laid me off the next day nobody asked for it back. Anyways now years later I'm dying because the camera won't hook to any machine I'm running but an old laptop with the display torn off, running win98. That laptop also runs the flatbed scanner that doesn't have USB either. All sorts of neat network access stuff and a switch to make it all work, but still it's so annoying.

Random-access vs. linear

[unithom]

I got tired of shuttling around on cassette tapes, way back when (either to listen to music or to load programs!); the CD and floppy were both improvements on these storage media, because they gave direct access to the information you wanted.

Along the same lines, we hardly use the VCR anymore, we just record stuff on the computer; once we got a HDTV, we just got another tuner capable of pulling in HD over-the-air programming. Considered getting a hardware appliance like a T*Vo but balked at the idea of paying a monthly subscription fee for something we could get for free (e.g. a two-week listings / scheduling service like TitanTV.com and the devices/programs it supports.)

So, given the choice between buying a DVHS recorder, a T*Vo, and a HTPC, I'll go with a HTPC. Disk space and burnable media are cheap enough (and take up less physical space to store.)

The up-front cost of a HTPC setup vs. a DVHS recorder may indeed be higher, and the cost of media is still higher, but it seems pretty competitive right now. (My thinking is, say a buck per gig on a hard drive, typical 1-hour program is ~8 GB. DL discs (8.5 GB, $6-$10?) here compete with the price of DVHS tapes, but only store half as much as a tape right now. But costs of DL discs will fall quickly (remember how much 4.7 GB DVD-R media USED to cost?) and Blu-ray or DVD-HD will even this out quite a bit more, soon enough.

More importantly -- what's your time and physical storage space worth? (I realize that a HTPC could end up being pretty large, and could also become quite the time-sink, but: in my case, I'm talking about a Mac mini and a ready-made eyeTV hardware/software package from ElGato.)

The one downside to my argument is the 5C flag nonsense. I'd just as soon *not* support yet another copy protection scheme by paying for a DVHS player made by one of those five companies. But the tradeoff is, I have no way of saving anything that is 5C flagged, ie for 'copy once' use. Though there are software based 'virtual' DVHS apps for streaming transport streams over firewire, I haven't seen any 'cracks' for them that disable 5C (yet.)

Dumb mistakes in the photos

[rwyoder]

Figure 2-10: Photo has two circles on the tape with one hole, and one circle on the tape with two holes. Figure 2-11: The circles are the screw holes instead of the sensing holes.

Summary is Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, this isn't a way to "convert SVHS tapes to work in DVHS recorders." It's a way to convert your DVHS recorder to work with SVHS tapes.

You can do the same SVHS signal VHS tape too...

[saitoh]

But it doesnt mean its a great idea. While the signal will take if you drill the first hole (or the SVHS hole) onto a regular VHS tape, the tape after repeated play will not hold the signal nearly as well as an SVHS tape of similar plays, and recorded on the same decks. Many SVHS decks, such as the commercial Panasonic VS4820 have a feature called SVHS-ET which will override the pin trick and just put the SVHS signal on VHS tape.

I used to work for VMS, and we used the VS4820s almost exclusivly along with broadcast-grade SVHS and VHS tapes baught in bulk (for archival, editing, and professional video selling). Did some tests to see how legit this was and the VHS tapes did fail sooner one summer. How much sooner as compared to the SVHS tapes wasnt recorded as we only went until one tape failed (in this case the VHS), compared the signal to the other (which was much better) and went back to work. The difference in tape is marginal for many, but can make a world of difference given a different application.

This has been done for ages, the forcing of various signals onto tapes not intended for them. Works great for transporting material from one location to another to be used once or twice, but its definately not ideal for long term use.

Re:You can do the same SVHS signal VHS tape too...

[TWX]

I have an SVHS deck with the "ET" mode, and I've never used it.

Something to consider is that since the SVHS market is rather small, the videotape manufacturers might have switched to making all of the physical tape as DVHS tape, and just placed it into an SVHS cartridge. This would mean that SVHS and DVHS tapes now made are identical media. If that is so, then this method would definitely work.

Re:You can do the same SVHS signal VHS tape too...

[ein2many]

I used to work for VMS, and we used the VS4820s almost exclusivly along with broadcast-grade SVHS and VHS tapes baught in bulk (for archival, editing, and professional video selling) I work for a Broadcast station and we would never use SVHS for broadcast. We only have SVHS for legel logs and previews. I think SVHS should be classified as Pro grade not broadcast.

The Unasked Question

[uncoolcentral]

What % of consumers use either of these barbaric formats? (i.e. who cares?)

Troll me if you will, but I think it's a money question!)

Been doing this for 7 years now

[NitroWolf]

I've been doing this for 7 years now on my JVC DVHS recorder. Never had a problem, and the tapes are readily available and cheaper.

I wonder how this is news, though, since this technique has been around since DVHS first came out.

Economy of scales

[stud9920]

Except in many (not all) cases, it makes more sense to only have one product to manufacture, the better one, and then to limit usage for the cheaper one. CPUs come to mind (486SX did have a unconnected fpu; different frequencies often mean no more than a resistor or switch)

DAT and Tape

[lxt]

I'm pretty sure I read ages and ages ago when I was using DAT to record things, that you could do a similar trick with normal tape and a DAT recorder...

Re:DAT and Tape

[demon]

That's a pretty interesting trick... seeing as DAT cartridges aren't even the same dimensions as a conventional audiocassette. Maybe you're thinking of DCC (Digital Compact Cassette), a competing digital-audio-on-cassette standard from some years back?

Never had a problem with modified floppies

[xtermin8]

Granted I didn't have critical data, it was always games and puzzles or school papers that had already been printed out- but I never had any problems with any... for years. The maunfacturers are trying to screw us, they are trying to maximize profit after all. The extra holes are generally help insure proper function -within certain parameters! It would be more useful to implement a more sophisticated mechanism for adjusting for tape quality- but that's not economically advantageous

Who has a DVHS? My Brother! pwn3d

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have full access to a machine that is not yours! Actually getting one of these things second hand can be a very dissappointing experience! and this IS Slashdot, after all, If you don't want to hear about pointless hacks stick with Google Sci/Tech News. http://news.google.com/nwshp?gl=us&ned=us&topic=t

You don't need to modify the DVHS deck

[bwooster0]

You don't need to modify the DVHS deck. When you put in an SVHS tape you can just press the "DVHS" button on the front of the JVC DVHS decks. Then it will treat the SVHS tape as a DVHS tape and let you record HD onto it. I have been done this onto more than 250 tapes. You DON'T have to modify the player and therefore you DON'T have to void your warranty.

Re:You don't need to modify the DVHS deck

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to modify the DVHS deck.
So JVC puts this button on all DVHS decks, even players made from other companies? Just because your model has that button does not mean they all do.

Re:You don't need to modify the DVHS deck

[K8Fan]

Thanks, I was going to post this. I have a Panasonic D-VHS deck, and have been recording on S-VHS tapes for years with no need for any mod. This is without a doubt the most out of date item I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Re:You don't need to modify the DVHS deck

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh! Burn! You got him!

You fucking tool. Go crawl back under your dad's ballsack.

I don't get it...

[gregorio]

What's wrong with drilling a hole in the SVHS tape? Why is this guy damaging expensive hardware instead of hacking the tape?

And why the hell is he not using DVD-R for his digital video needs?

Re:I don't get it...

[rs79]

The clue that you,
so badly need,
is in TFA,
you didn't read.

The article does not answer the question "what should I use" the article tells you how to save on tapes if you have a DVHS machine.

Re:I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with drilling a hole in the SVHS tape? Why is this guy damaging expensive hardware instead of hacking the tape?

And why the hell is he not using DVD-R for his digital video needs?

This guy doesn't want plastic shavings in his tape.

DVD-R isn't enough to record at 1080i.

Re:I don't get it...

[boarder8925]

And why the hell is he not using DVD-R for his digital video needs?

Duh: Because S-VHS tape is the ultimate in digital video!

Stupid is as stupid posts

[rs79]

"You got temporary storage gains, but your discs would quickly fail. Not a good deal in the meantime."

Did you actually try it?

Anybody that was used to day in day out 8" floppy operations knew a bit about what brands of media worked and what didn't. This data was applicable to 5" floppies and then 3".

My first box of low density 3" floppies cost me $50 US.

If you used cheap floppies and punchd them you'd get a certain failure rate roughly equivalent to the failure rate of unpunched floppies on low density drives. Crap is crap no matter how many holes you punch in it.

I've used hundreds of punched disks. After a year of 18 hours a day they'd start to get errors, punched or unpunched. Use good media. Duh.

<rant>
It appears only 2 people besides me RTFA and slashdot is beginning to make usenet look as credible as a peer reviewed scientific journal by comparison.

RTFA or don't bother posting. You may well be a clueless fucktard but posting here without reading no longer keeps this fact hidden. Spam waste less of my time than you nimrods.

And spare me the friggin dupe alerts. If that's all you have to say then STFU.
</rant>

mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, kinda like the 'Music blank CDs' vs. the data ones. Either one will hold the same data or music...so there's never a reason to buy the music ones (unless you believe the lies that is).

I agree with you 100% on the rest of your post, but I must nitpick this last paragraph.

CD-Rs labeled "Music" actually are different than data CD-Rs. They have some extra metadata pre-burned onto them that many(most?) stand-alone CD recorders look for, and won't work without.

Re:mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[plague3106]

CD-Rs labeled "Music" actually are different than data CD-Rs. They have some extra metadata pre-burned onto them that many(most?) stand-alone CD recorders look for, and won't work without.

Thats just flat out wrong. My main use of blank cds is to burn for use in my cars cd player. Its the burner that writes the proper format for a standard cdrom to be able to read, and i've never had a problem with a stand alone cd player playing a cd-r (even very old ones).

Re:mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[wik]

This is actually correct. The parent specifically said that CD _recorders_ look for this metadata. If you buy a consumer audio CD burner (i.e., not your PC's CD burner), they will generally only accept the "digital audio" or similar marking CD-Rs. These CDs will play just fine in any CD player or CD-ROM drive.

Re:mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

You will find that particularly Sony CD-players will refuse to play CDs that lack the license preburned into the music-CD-Rs. What everyone else does is a completely different matter, but the defined "standard" was that CD players (and recorders) were supposed to read/burn music from/to CD-Rs only in the presence of said license.

You may argue that, since you have a CD player that plays non-music CD-Rs well, there's no difference between the CDs to YOU. But they still are different products, as the one DOES contain a license, while the other one doesn't.

Re:mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[badfish99]

But all this just justifies the original poster's point. The "audio" CDs are different, but their quality is the same: the only difference is an arbitrary one that allows them to be sold at a higher price point. It's just the same principle as putting holes in the plastic case.

Re:mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[plague3106]

Hmm...do you not see how that is the exact same trick as this extra pin?

I bet if you could remove said check from the stand alone burner, it would burn on data CDs just fine. Since the check is done in software, its likely that its difficult / impossible to remove...but I bet there really wouldn't be any problem if the device allowed a plain data cd to be burned with audio.

I'm sure Nero could perform such a check too...but that doesn't mean that the data cd is inferior any way..its just a marketing tactic to get people to buy the more expensive media.

Re:mnb Re:Perhaps there is a reason...

[plague3106]

I have a Sony multi disc DVD changer, and it plays CDs that lack the license just fine. I got it only a year or so ago.

Remember when cd burners first came out, people didn't have audio blank cds nor stand alone cd burners, AND IT WORKED JUST FINE. If it doesn't work, its because they built the player to look for an expensive disc, that doens't provide any higher quality then the non expensive disc...just like they added an extra pin...but that doesn't mean that your SVHS tape isn't capable of doing the same job.

bad site

[appleLaserWriter]

How aboutreferencing a site thatknows how to use thespacebar?

Ya, but it doesn't work for everything...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried and tried to use a hole punch to double the storage
of my CD's but they just don't play as well with the extra holes...

Re:Ya, but it doesn't work for everything...

[zmollusc]

Your holes are too small. Drill tiny holes in the pattern required for a dvd spec disc ( this may take some time ).

Actaully

[Ironsides]

I work at a TV newtwork. A couple of the other engineers/techs there have purchased a few of these for home usage. They wanted a cheap way of recording HDTV currently. When the HD-DVD recorders come out, they may buy one of them. But in the mean time, they are using one of these.

I just saw them friday. The HD tapes video quality looks wonderful on an HD screen. "End of Days" looked great. Plus, you can record up to 35 hours of SD video to it (analog or digital SD) for those of us still on analog.

Re:Actaully

[iainl]

I'm sure it looks just spiffing. Of course, you're still watching "End Of Days", and so could be having more fun stabbing yourself in the forehead with a pair of compasses, but at least it's nice and shiny.

Still, there are some less horrifically bad films available too, so I'm probably being harsh.

Re:Actaully

[Ironsides]

Was using "End of Days" cause thats what we had available on DVHS. It also has some pretty good effects that show off the technology in HD. Kind of like using Star Wars to show off the special effects and cause "It makes the TV look Gooood". Here's a link to some that are available.

Right now I'd say that DVHS is about where VCRs were when they were still new. But when the HD DVD recorders come out, they're probably going to get blown away.

but...

[Anonymous Coward]

can it run linux?

longeity problems?

[Cryptnotic]

Have you tried playing tapes from 7 years ago? A few years ago, I went through a box of 1.44 floppies from when I was in high school looking for some old DOS progrmas I wrote. Most (but not all) of the "real" 1.44 HD floppies worked fine. None of the 720K punched and formatted to 1.44MB worked at all.

Good thing nothing I did back then was that important.

Re:longeity problems?

[NitroWolf]

I don't have any "archived" material on those tapes. I used them to record over regularly... so I don't know if they'd hold up sitting on a shelf for 7 years.

The tapes do wear out of after a time, like any tape (DVHS or SVHS) so who knows. It's not like tapes are (or should be) archival quality anyway. Anything that has one material sliding over another is going to wear out and be useless in the long run anyway.

DVR 4 l1f3, y0!

Cost of manufacture

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the tape vendors really going to retool and reformulate to supply a niche market? No, like B&L and most floppy manufactures, only the label is different. The media itself is spun from the same reel stock.

But then, some people pay for bottled water which came from a city tap.

People are sheep. The marketroids know this and profit from it.

Not just consumer gear

[dcm1101]

There was something similar when the news station I used to work for switched from Beta SP to Beta SX for acquisition - Sony pitched their very expensive SX tapes (with a 'special' yellow shell), but we quickly realized that any old SP tape would work just fine. In fact using an SP tape meant you got double the recording time (SX used a slower tape speed). I expect that this is mostly a case of JVC trying to make money wherever they can. Of course, there are differences in tape stock (thickness of the tape itself, oxide density, particle size, etc) so they could also be trying to limit calls from angry customers who try to use some crap tape they picked up at a garage sale that had already been recorded over a couple of dozen times.

This is an old hack

[DaveJay]

Actually, a similar trick can be used (and has been used for a long time) to use standard VHS tape in SVHS recording mode on SVHS VCRs.

The end result is a picture that's better than typical VHS, although whether or not you get the quality of a "real" SVHS tape depends solely on how good the quality of your VHS tape is.

The hack, IIRC, involved drilling an extra hole in the video tape. Easy peasy.

Re:This is an old hack

[bill_mcgonigle]

The hack, IIRC, involved drilling an extra hole in the video tape. Easy peasy.

Or on a JVC deck, press the "SVHS-ET" button.

It works fine unless you buy the absolute worst tapes you can get at the dollar store.

Re: Your holes are too small.

[zmollusc]

Too small? Surely you mean 'not small enough' or 'too big'?

Re: Your holes are too small.

[zmollusc]

Ooops! Yes, that is what I meant! Sorry!