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This Guy Is Digitizing the VHS History of Video Games (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: UK-based gaming journalist and blogger Chris Scullion is on a mission to preserve his collection -- and maybe your collection, too -- of these old video game VHS tapes. In the 80s and 90s, video game companies and trade magazines made these tapes to accompany popular titles or new issues with bonus material or promotional footage, giving a glimpse into how marketing for games was done in the industry's early days. Scullion has 18 tapes to upload so far, and plans to provide accompanying commentary as well as the raw video as they go up on his YouTube channel. Scullion's first upload is a promotional tape for Super Mario All-Stars, given away by Nintendo UK in 1993. It's hosted by Craig Charles, who played Lister in the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. Digitizing his collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He's capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing -- a higher frame rate than many standard commercial digitizing devices that capture at 30fps -- so that no frames are missed. Some of the tapes he's planning to digitize have already been converted and uploaded to YouTube by other people, he says, but most are either poor quality or captured with less-advanced grabbing devices.
I have some old VHS tapes I'd really like to digitize, but don't know where to start, and I'd really have no problem spending the $$ to get the right stuff to do it right like it sounds like this guy is doing.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Nintendo's DMCA Takedown in 3... 2... 1...
Nice try if they think they have a claim. That "D" stands for Digital, remember? Nintendo only ever released hte material in analog format. There may be other copyright grounds upon which to base takedown notices, but DMCA won't be one of them.
Are you kidding? This is one of the nerdiest posts I've seen on Slashdot in a while. I'm re-reading the passage from TFA below, and I cannot imagine how it could be much nerdier.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The My Life in Gaming guys and some others in NA have already done this to some extent, can find things on Youtube.
Considering he's using an HDMI upscaler just to get the framerate right, I'm not so sure it's a perfect setup. Though it might be a cheap trick that works well, I don't understand the advantage over capturing 480i video at 50Hz. Upscaling is really only going to help force Youtube to allocate a decent amount of bandwidth, but that can be done with a software scaler in post-processing.
I think because, as nerds, we've all actually... DONE IT.
I have. i transferred several old VHS tapes of various shows and such that aren't produced anymore as well as some old recordings I made way back when on my parent's VCR. I had the actual original airing of the first Borg contact on ST:TNG. Ironically, i decided to digitzie it not because it was ST:TNG (I can get blu-rays for that) or the first airing but because of the commercials!
Before that I digitized my old Laserdisc copies of Space Ace and Dragon's Lair.
I had a buncha old CD's from NextGen that I tossed though but those were all windows based and probably wouldn't have worked anymore.
I also scanned all my grandfather's slides using an actual film/slide scanner. (Something I thought would be a few months' of weekends that stretched into 4 years)
>I think because, as nerds, we've all actually... DONE IT.
So long ago, too. I've actually forgotten what my setup was, though I doubt it was archival quality (not that you can tell with VHS's sub-broadcast quality to start with). I probably just had a coax connection to a capture card and manually trimmed the raw file before leaving it to encode over the next few days.
It was the kind of thing I did once, to preserve a family video, and then after the experience vowed was not worth the effort and I'd rather pay a conversion service in future.
Oh yeah - you know who made me mp3s from mix tapes?!
YOUR MOM!
Why?
VHS only has about 333x480 (NTSC) or 335x576 (PAL) resolution in luminosity, much lower color resolution. There is no point capturing it at higher resolution - you're just wasting storage space with duplicated or made-up pixels.
The framerate thing I can sorta understand - both NTSC and PAL were interlaced. So for example, the actual resolution of NTSC VHS was 333x240 @ 60 fps interlaced, which when deinterlaced (the alternate lines of video interpolated) created 333x480 frames @ 60 fps. While modern computer video formats do support interlacing, I've noticed annoying artifacts when they're converted badly (you'll see horizontal lines during quick panning or quick horizontal movement). So I can understand.capturing at 333x480 @ 60 fps when it only contains 333x240 @ 60 fps of information.
Maybe if he had access to the original Betacam tapes I could understand capturing in HD. Those had 720x480 or 720x576 resolution with 10-bit 4:2:2 chroma compression. But if your source media is plain VHS...
DMCA, section 1201k :
Effective 18 months after the date of the enactment of this chapter, no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any— ...
(i) VHS formatanalog video cassette recorder unless such recorder conforms to the automatic gain control copy control technology
(B) Effective on the date of the enactment of this chapter, no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in—
(i) any VHS formatanalog video cassette recorder or any 8mm format analog video cassette recorder if the design of the model of such recorder has been modified after such date of enactment so that a model of recorder that previously conformed to the automatic gain control copy control technology no longer conforms to such technology; or
(ii) any VHS formatanalog video cassette recorder, or any 8mm format analog video cassette recorder that is not an 8mm analog video cassette camcorder, if the design of the model of such recorder has been modified after such date of enactment so that a model of recorder that previously conformed to the four-line colorstripe copy control technology no longer conforms to such technology.
Manufacturers that have not previously manufactured or sold a VHS formatanalog video cassette recorder, or an 8mm format analog cassette recorder, shall be required to conform to the four-line colorstripe copy control technology in the initial model of any such recorder manufactured after the date of the enactment of this chapter, and thereafter to continue conforming to the four-line colorstripe copy control technology. For purposes of this subparagraph, an analog video cassette recorder “conforms to” the four-line colorstripe copy control technology if it records a signal that, when played back by the playback function of that recorder in the normal viewing mode, exhibits, on a reference display device, a display containing distracting visible lines through portions of the viewable picture
Of course, these tapes were promotional and probably not copy-protected and they were transferred and converted in the UK, where the DMCA would have no bearing.
IIRC, standard PAL VHS tapes record video at 25Hz instead of 50fps, and in doing so, somehow merge two 50Hz interlaced frames into one 25Hz non-interlaced frame.
For movies, 24fps film is generally sped up to 25fps during the telecine process. While they could use basic frame doubling to get 50Hz out of it, it would be better to cram in extra vertical resolution from the film on the alternate field. I don't know which is standard.
Either way, that wouldn't apply for video/broadcast content or content generated by an actual SNES (which some of this is).
If someone has a 720p monitor, they will end up watching a down-scaled version of an up-scaled video..... but for some reason, his device insists on upscaling everything to 1080p.
He already said that he did this to get 50 fps (which doesn't make a lot of sense, because plenty of analog capture equipment can capture fields). And you can even see on Youtube that he gets a 1080p50 output in the end. Just saying 1080p typically means 1080p30. 1080p50 would be similar to 1080i50 but with some extra interpolation to fill in the rest of the resolution. Which is just a much bigger leap when VHS doesn't even carry a full 576 lines (or at least it's pretty lossy, noisewise).
This crazy amount of interpolation doesn't do much for video quality, but Youtube allocates way more bandwidth to high resolution video. If he did 576p50 or 576i, it would look far worse after Youtube compressed it - even if you viewed it at full-screen.