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The domesday project is much more important IMHO for VHS and Beta captures, than for console captures. Consoles tend to have a stable timebase. Tapes tend to,

The domesday project is much more important IMHO for VHS and Beta captures, than for console captures. Consoles tend to have a stable timebase. Tapes tend to, especially if copies were made tape-to-tape, be very jittery. These could be almost flawlessly fixed in the domesday software, much better than any TBC. Since the capture is at the "almost RF" stage early in the tape player, the overall quality is very good too. There is the potential to view VHS in better quality than anyone has ever seen it, even back in the day.

bscphil 7y ago
Is there anyone using this hardware for VHS or Beta captures? Seems the original project itself is very targeted, and I'm having difficulty searching up different uses of the project. I'd considering purchasing one to do high quality VHS transfer, but I'd want a community I could turn to with problems.
- jacobush 7y ago
  One of the committers have submitted VHS patches, so there is a community of one so far. :-) Currently it can decode to black and white I think. I am very interested also. I bought a high end consumer JVC deck unopened in box, just for this purpose in the future. But the thing is, only the mechanical transfer needs to be good, and the heads OK, the rest of the machine need not be high end at all. It really has the potential to get better VHS rips than any pro lab today in existence can achieve.
codys 7y ago
I think you may be misunderstanding what I'm referring to as "RF" in my comment. In the specific case of old consoles (and VCRs and other equiptment, though this isn't really relevant), there is a built-in or external "RF modulator" which takes the video (composite in this case) & audio signals and modulates them such that they appear as a TV station on channel 3/4 (typically). This is an additional signal conversion from the unmixed and not-modulated-with-a-carrier-frequency signal that is composite + audio, and tends to have additional losses when restoring it to the RGB/YCbCr signal that we actually care about vs going from plain composite to that representation. The "almost RF" you're referring to here is a different end of things, the end dealt with by domesday, etc, which is the analog signal stored to the medium in question (whether tape, laserdisc, or something else). Using that signal is, as I think we agree, a very reasonable choice for constructing reasonable archival copies.

bscphil 7y ago

Is there anyone using this hardware for VHS or Beta captures? Seems the original project itself is very targeted, and I'm having difficulty searching up different uses of the project. I'd considering purchasing one to do high quality VHS transfer, but I'd want a community I could turn to with problems.

jacobush 7y ago
One of the committers have submitted VHS patches, so there is a community of one so far. :-) Currently it can decode to black and white I think. I am very interested also. I bought a high end consumer JVC deck unopened in box, just for this purpose in the future. But the thing is, only the mechanical transfer needs to be good, and the heads OK, the rest of the machine need not be high end at all. It really has the potential to get better VHS rips than any pro lab today in existence can achieve.

codys 7y ago

I think you may be misunderstanding what I'm referring to as "RF" in my comment. In the specific case of old consoles (and VCRs and other equiptment, though this isn't really relevant), there is a built-in or external "RF modulator" which takes the video (composite in this case) & audio signals and modulates them such that they appear as a TV station on channel 3/4 (typically). This is an additional signal conversion from the unmixed and not-modulated-with-a-carrier-frequency signal that is composite + audio, and tends to have additional losses when restoring it to the RGB/YCbCr signal that we actually care about vs going from plain composite to that representation. The "almost RF" you're referring to here is a different end of things, the end dealt with by domesday, etc, which is the analog signal stored to the medium in question (whether tape, laserdisc, or something else). Using that signal is, as I think we agree, a very reasonable choice for constructing reasonable archival copies.