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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?
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One might assume that there is a reason for these holes.. Perhaps SVHS media is not as high quality as DVHS?
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.
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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 ...
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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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.
Upgrade your Betamax tapes to D-Betamax with a toothbrush!
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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...
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
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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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.
"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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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.
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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.