VCR war 2

 

https://growmane.blogspot.com/2025/05/kass-sounds-like-dave-fry-did-15-years.html

Attempt 2 of the VCR affair began.  It was a good thing the last attempt was a fail & lions didn't attempt to resend it.  It was mono only.  The big problems with VCR's are mono sound & no remote.  If they don't have a remote, they're usually locked into showing an onscreen display. 

Attempt 2 was from hifiphilly.com.  He only had 2 useful VCR's.  It's possible that refurbishing obsolete gear is now a good business.  

skylabsaudio.com

There seems to be a growing number of junk stores & gootubers refurbishing obsolete gear but their prices seem too good to be true.  They're marked down from the new price, 25 years ago.

They might subsidize the cheap stuff with the expensive stuff.  Guys like to load up & save on shipping.

Helas, the VCR had no rewind, though it played forward.  Neither was there any way to completely hide the onscreen display.  It always overlaid a few seconds.  The internet said broken rewind was usually because of a worn belt, but the belt looked new.  It might have been 1 size too large.  It would be quite difficult to replace.

Verified it winds 90% of the spool, then the motor side starts slipping.  

The transport comes out as 1 piece, with many carefully aligned connectors on the bottom.  The belt is 230mm inner circumference - 23mm for stretching.  Thickness is 2mm.

Wiped the pulleys with alcohol & washed the belt, which bought it some time.

 

The mane focus was 9 minutes of Pete Giddings in 1992.  Tried upscaling to 1440x1080 to preserve more data on the gootubes.  This blurred it slightly.

 

The only other way to preserve more detail might be not scaling each field separately or converting to 1440x1080 60fps. The tube downscales 1280x960 to 960x720.

As the lion kingdom discovered in 2024 when transferring Hi8, the video4linux2 driver needs 4 buffers to capture a full 29.97fps.  2 buffers only go at 15fps.  

The driver codec was set to YUYV & the file codec was set to ffmpeg HEVC 422.

 

That was recorded over 6 hours of EP Jane Fonda.  Stopped after 2 hours after deeming it would never be watched.  libsndfile can only decode 2gig of the wav file, but all 2h20m are in there.
 

It was never watched by anyone & never will be.  Still pondered a parallel universe where mother lion really did watch those.  It would have taken some doing to find anything with just the tape counter of those days.

Young lion originally really did use EP to record some bits of Robotech.  Frame stepped it on the 19" TV, which puts the 19" TV lasting until 1986.

In 1991, he discovered pro gear only supported the highest quality mode & only recorded SP from then on.  It was rather pointless to use anything lower than SP with a 45" TV but old lion still settled on LP for everything.

ffmpeg can losslessly trim recordings with -ss & -to arguments.  That has basically replaced past attempts to write lossless copying in Cinelerra.

 Other tapes had many hours of news in EP.  The business of backing up hours of footage which will never be seen & what to surrender to landfill made lions ponder the plight of all those guys backing up the full Jane Fonda anthology from 2" quad tapes.

 

The VCR doesn't have a counter like the 80's.  It reads timecode from recorded parts of the tape when it's winding.  That's why it has to wrap around the head during winding.  There's no way to know where it is in the blank parts without looking inside.

As far as recording on VHS for shits & giggles, the only composite video sources in the apartment are an old DVD player with a very small assortment of DVD's, some old camcorders, & some old raspberry pi's.  Cinelerra wouldn't run very well on the raspberry pi's, with composite video for its GUI.  A command line video player might do the job.  It could also record a still image.

The only point might be comparing quality of different VHS speeds with a pristine source.  VHS was pretty good in SP.  It was better than any of the analog video examples on gootube, but that might be because no-one knows how to capture analog video anymore.  S-VHS was kind of a flash in the pants like laserdisc.

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