Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
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.
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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...
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
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
It might just have more sensitive read/write equipment than the other recorders.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.)
Would this not be a precedent against branding the same tapes with different qualities?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Troll me if you will, but I think it's a money question!)
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.
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.