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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."
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?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
One might assume that there is a reason for these holes.. Perhaps SVHS media is not as high quality as DVHS?
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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
Some people are only alive because it's illegal to kill them.
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.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
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.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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...
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?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
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.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"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>
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