https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=papQ8xQxizA

When I was at LSI Logic, I developed the IEEE1394 interface for the second generation JVC D-VHS decks (the HM-DH40000U and HM-DH5U). I worked directly with engineers in Japan and I used to get them to bring me copies of the Japanese ham radio magazine "CQ ham radio" when they would come to visit us in Milpitas. I can't read Japanese, but it's just a wonderful magazine about 300 pages thick (like the old Byte magazine).

https://www.w6rz.net/IMG_0103.jpg

Alesis also developed an 8-track digital audio recorder based on VHS, ADAT, which used SVHS tapes and could record 20-bit 48khz. ADAT was pretty popular in smaller studios, and was great for the time before multi-gigabyte hard drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT

OP's project is cool but it's my understanding the specialized hardware is the big barrier to doing this at home, for most folks, especially if you don't want the tapes routed through a third party for the same reason people invented the polaroid so you don't have to send everything to the Ritz as the mall.

https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU

You can also get laser turntables - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable which look intriguing

I'm rather curious about these microscopes - https://matesy.de/en/products/magnetic-field-visualization/m... which can visualise magnetic fields, they're very expensive though.

https://www.windytan.com/2020/12/plotting-patterns-in-music-...

0, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71mbsPXPhzL._AC_SL1500_....

If you can get hold of a Digital8 deck that works (and well) then you can hook that to your PC with a FireWire card, and do a direct digital capture of analogue tapes. The DSP in the D8 deck will do an excellent job of decoding, far better than an analogue deck, and you'll get a really clean output without all the "convert down/convert up/convert back down" thing you get using composite jacks.

You'll need to convert the raw DV files into something suitable for editing and distributing, but I guess - since you're on here - you already know about ffmpeg.

Here's an example of a very old - 2000/2001 or so! - tape that I had lying around in a box in the shed for the past 20 years. I shot it with a hand-held Sony Video 8 camcorder when some power station chimneys were being demolished near where I worked. This would (of course) be the day I forgot to throw a tripod in the car, "Oh I don't need to pack that, I've got one in the workshop, I'll leave mine at home..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmCygZIjio

It was a pretty grey and drizzly day, as I recall. I could have got the colours up a bit in editing but I didn't feel like it, and this is pretty much how it came off the quite-badly-damaged tape.

Stuck tapes sometimes are stuck because of moisture. In that case, the tapes are "baked" at a certain temperature to get the moisture out. If the tapes are in really bad condition, you get only one chance to capture what's on them, but the flip side is that one run can be of pretty high quality.

Edit: if your tapes are DV or Digital-8, get a camera with firewire out.

If your tapes are Hi8 analog, get a digital-8 camera which can play analog tapes with firewire out. You won't get a better quality without going the VHS-Decode way.

If none of that is an option, get a decent composite to HDMI converter, than capture the HDMI from that into a PC with a HDMI ripper.

Or one of those "HDMI to SD card" rippers floating around.

if the camera is working and has RCA plugs

Also, how is it not clear what the project is? First thing I see from the submission link:

> Software defined VHS decoder

> A fork of LD-Decode, the decoding software powering the Domesday86 Project

Which links to https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode and https://www.domesday86.com/

> Software defined LaserDisc decoder

and

> Domesday86 is a project that aims to recreate the experience of the original BBC Domesday project using modern hardware and software

Which leads me to searching what BBC Domesday is, as I didn't know:

> The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers, Philips, Logica, and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th-century census of England. It has been cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage.

Not sure why everything has to be made for/explained as it's made for literally everyone. Some software is for a niche section of programmers/developers/$niche-group, that's perfectly fine. If you're curious, use a search engine like the rest of us.

For ex. my situation: cheap upscaler bought before covid had really high saturation and turned small areas of similar colours into one color squares no matter the bitrate chosen in OBS(this type of artefact is very obvious in 140p youtube video). After getting into it again in present day the upscaler stopped working and bought another one of the same kind. Guess what, it ships with a different chip and different settings, this time it has almost no colors and presents weird glowing around dark regions when the camera moves around fast. Now I'm in a pickle and I'm really considering going the above route.

You can also ignore macrovision if you have an older deck with manual gain.