Alternative recording system - many advantages

dowtchaboy

Folks are complaining about USB PVRs - here's a system that has certain advantages:

Sam Russell

dowtchaboy wrote: »

Folks are complaining about USB PVRs - here's a system that has certain advantages:

What are those things you have pictures of? Where do they come from? What do you do with them? Are they HD?

dowtchaboy

They are only available in an elite selection of shops at the moment.

Another advantage is they don't get lost down the back of the sofa or in between the drivers seat and the handbrake.

Sam Russell

dowtchaboy wrote: »

They are only available in an elite selection of shops at the moment.

Another advantage is they don't get lost down the back of the sofa or in between the drivers seat and the handbrake.

Do you think they will catch on?

MACHEAD

Scoff all you like at those old tapes. I remember our first VCR, a Panny 333. We thought it was the dogs bollo**s at the time. And many broadcasters still use Betamax to this very day!

Sorry children, a long long time ago the old people people used to have to record their TV shows on these little plastic boxes containing o roll of tape covered in rust. There were two rival types of tape, "Betamax The Good" and the evil "Very Hard Sell". History records that unfortunately Good does'nt always win in the end.

watty

I have and S-VHS and a DVD Recorder. Both are more reliable than the PC recording, but when the PC recording works it's perfect. No mysterious lip sync issues.

Peter Rhea

MACHEAD wrote: »

There were two rival types of tape, "Betamax The Good" . . .

Yeah, I can remember when my cousins got one of those & I was all excited till I went to the local rental place to get something to watch and . . . you probably know the rest.

Gerry Wicklow

What about the early Phillips system? You could flip the tapes over like an audio cassette and get up to 8 hours on one tape. It also had perfect, noise free, pause. Like many other Phillips innovations of the time, it also lacked the right marketing to succeed.

Johnboy1951

I now have a bunch of those cassettes ..... with various family events recorded (usually badly but that is the charm) ..... but no player to view them. The last couple of players I had began to chew up the cassettes

I might have to get a new player (don't need a recorder) to digitise the videos using the PC ..... but suspect I won't ever get around to it ....

Hotblack Desiato

Gerry Wicklow wrote: »

What about the early Phillips system? You could flip the tapes over like an audio cassette and get up to 8 hours on one tape. It also had perfect, noise free, pause. Like many other Phillips innovations of the time, it also lacked the right marketing to succeed.

The Philips system where you could flip over the tape (wouldn't it have been better to have 8 hours on one side, instead of 4 hours on two sides?) was Video2000, it was actually too late into the market to succeed when VHS and Beta were already established (and there was really only room for one format in the market...)

The early Philips system was imaginatively called 'VCR'. It had a weird looking square cassette with stacked reels and was pretty unreliable by all accounts. Saw a real one in the flesh once but wasn't allowed to turn it on to see if it was working