The last VHS machines

[ppppenguin]

For much of the history of video recording it was usually a case of pushing technology to its limits. From the first Ampex quadruplex 2" in 1956 through to Betacam SP it was always only just about good enough, or bulky, or expensive, or any combination of these. It's relatively recently that recording video has become easy.

On the semi-pro/industrial side Umatic held sway for a long time. It worked well enough but was hardly compact. VHS was a reasonable compromise for its time. Betamax was fundamentally similar. Both could give adequete results, neither was wonderful.

I still marvel that for a ridiculously small amount of money you can shoot and record video at higher quality than was possible by any means 25 years or so ago.

[Murphyv310]

 If you knocked an MD machine when recording, that would send the laser off in the wrong direction, and if the TOC failed to write, that would trash the entire disc.

Hi.
In fact doing that wont trash a disc.
Here is the way we did it in Sony.
But a blank disc in the recorder and record for the full length minus 30 seconds, at the point of 30 seconds before the end of the disc remove the power. Unwind the mechanism and remove the disc, Insert the "trashed" disc and manually wind the disc in till fully in with the over-write head in the "record" position. power up and press eject, this will write one continuous track to the disc. You can then read back in a continuous stream what is on the disc. The disc will then be usable for new recordings by erasing the TOC and will then be a normal blank disc.

[ppppenguin]

For better or worse, MD was never more than a niche product except perhaps in Japan where it saw greater use. The capacity of 1GB is tiny by modern standards.

[Murphyv310]

For better or worse, MD was never more than a niche product except perhaps in Japan where it saw greater use. The capacity of 1GB is tiny by modern standards.

Perhaps Jeffrey.
You can of course record with lower bit-rates, mono X2 (160 mins at full quality) Stereo X4 (360 mins) and Mono X4 (720 mins) This makes the format not as bad as you might think, with ATRAC the quality on first generation recordings is actually very good, better than some of the rubbish that's broadcast on DAB.

I'm disappointed that it was withdrawn. I still use Minidisk even now and one of my prizes from the Sony Service competition in Milan 1997 a MZR30 is still giving sterling service. I wonder how many first generation apple I-pods work faultlessly?

This thread is very informative http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showt...hp?t=70274

[hamid_1]

Only the last generation "Hi-MD" minidisc machines could use 1 gigabyte discs. Standard minidiscs were only 177Mb but a standard minidisc could be reformatted to 305Mb in a Hi-MD recorder. Hi-MD machines allowed the use of a minidisc for audio, data or a combination of both. However, minidisc was primarily an audio recording format. The vast majority of minidisc machines could not be used for data storage, only ATRAC-compressed audio, so the actual data capacity was irrelevant to the user. The 177Mb minidisc was intended to hold 74 or 80 minutes of near-CD quality stereo sound, and twice that recording time in mono. Later minidisc machines offered longer recording time at lower quality. Even then, there were restrictions on extraction of audio data and digitally copying ATRAC sound recordings from a minidisc, imposed by Sony themselves. I never really bothered with minidisc until it became almost obsolete, then I picked up a few units and discs for peanuts at car boot sales, just to "play with".

Actually one thing that interests me is obsolete or no-longer mainstream audio and video formats, along with the machines to play them. I have quite a collection, ranging from 1920s wind-up gramophone and 78rpm records, vinyl 33+45's , cassette and 8-track audio tape, VHS, S-VHS, Betamax and U-Matic video tape, CED (capacitive electronic disc - look it up!), minidisc, NetMD and Hi-MD, audio CD, video CD (VCD), DVD (inc. recordable DVD+/-RW, DVD-RAM), HD-DVD player and a DVD + blu-ray disc recorder with hard drive and high-definition satellite TV tuner (lets you record HDTV to blu-ray discs - this recorder is also technically obsolete, since Panasonic don't make them anymore.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the oldest and least complicated formats are still going strong. The gramophone, vinyl record player and 8 track cartridge player still provide entertainment from time to time. I've had no problems with pre-recorded audio compact discs other than damaged / badly scratched ones not playing properly. My oldest CDs are from 1987 so they've survived nearly 30 years.
I have a few recordable CD-R's from around 1998-99 which have gone flaky, but they were all from the same batch of discs I bought cheap in the USA. Likewise I had one bad batch of DVD-R discs with a high failure rate - about half actually failed to write as soon as they were used.

As for video tape formats, I think the weak point is the player rather than the tape itself. Early home video cassette recorders were complex and unreliable. They gradually improved, but the last VHS machines were very cheaply made and designed to be disposable. The danger is that there won't be any working players left. There must be enough VHS machines still around to last for many more years, though.

I 'm not sure that I'd trust hard drives over and above anything else. I've had them fail without warning, and when a hard drive fails you can lose a lot of data in one go. I have several hard drives, mostly pulled from Sky HD and BT Vision set-top boxes (these can be obtained for next to nothing secondhand from someone who has cancelled their subscription - the boxes are of no real use afterwards, other than salvaging the hard drives). I keep backup copies on more than one hard drive as well as DVD copies of films and TV programmes so that they can be played back in a normal DVD player.

Interestingly, the Panasonic DVD+HDD recorder instruction manual says that the hard drive should be used for temporary storage; DVD discs should be used for keeping recordings in the longer term. Given that flash memory is only supposed to last 10 years or so, and hard drives usually contain their firmware in onboard flash memory chips,they could have a point.

[ppppenguin]

There are 3 ways to keep an archive safe. One is inherent reliability, another is diversity, the last is regular maintenance. There is doubt about relaibility for all modern media though I'm pretty sure that recordable DVD isn't good. Flash certainly isn't good. HDDs can certainly fail, especially when worked hard.

Diversity simply means keeping it on more than 1 medium in more than 1 place. Maintenance means regular cloning before the media fail. For both of these HDDs are very suitable. Low cost means diversity is cheap while high capacity makes both cloning and diversity feasible. Who's going to bother to clone hundreds of DVDs?

This is a totally separate matter to being interested in older media. All of us here at GVR are in some way interested in older technology.