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

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.

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.)

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?