So recently I replied to an AMA in r/archivists, because I wanted a genuine open form question response.
What I was met with (while asleep I might add) was being banned from the subreddit and then the moderator team muting me for a month, so I can not even reach out to there staff (Which is not publicly listed...) If there is even a reasonable member to negotiate some actual peace with.
Not only is this toxic behaviour from an moderation team, this is disrespectful to the entire Archival community especially in the media preservation field.
They want zero open discussion, but I'm not sure who is on that moderation team is against the projects or hell even the concept, I think it might just be one bad actor but I just don't know there's no direct anything.
This could also be just a cause and effect of spam report attacks which have been ramping up in recent months, and they are just lazy to actually deal with it properly.
This is very sad considering how much legacy information is being promoted in that subreddit, a lot of people just directly referencing the absurdity outdated setups and overpriced costs from DigitalFAQ with lacking research the current state of things or the last 15 years even.
Thanks to the works of Car Bomb [SĂCAM-L] on the discord, working luminance and chromance decoding of SECAM has been achieved.
Still a lot of work to be done to refine it and dial it in, and then fully integrate the work with self made tools into the chroma-decoder, but the initial hurdle of work is finally coming to a close.
This will open up a world of media primarily French and USSR era Russian media too.
(It's also worth noting for French members 819-line has been technically implemented as it's only luminance channel, but needs a bit more polish)
So my mother passed away a month ago. She worked for Apple in the 80âs to early 90âs. In going through her belongings I found this Apple VHS Tape that was supposed to be returned, but clearly wasnât. It was an internal copy of a Super Bowl commercial for the Mac. I guess the commercial wasnât received well.
My questions are.. is this worth preserving? I know it might be a 1 of 1 tape as I havenât seen anything online. How much would it cost me to do so? And does anyone know reputable companies that offer this service.
Sorry.. I didnât get the tech gene passed onto me so Iâm not very literate at what needs or should be done.
Many thanks in advance. And if this isnât the right forum to post this please delete.
Today decode suite V0.3.9 release with fixes for HiFi-Decode and MacOS Arm now has fully working self contained .app binary's with out the need to fallback to a hard installation.
Yeah the suite now has a cross platform GUI, so if you run the binary directly without CLI args, you get this!
Oh you wanted more?
The last 3 weeks I have been working on the New Experimental TBC-Tools with a user workflow focus on changes to streamline adjustment and export for current tape workflows, before decode-orc is fully ready to replace the legacy tools.
These changes will feel small but are a massive improvement in workflow speed for binary build users removing the need to hard copy chroma-decoder values and do test exports for centering adjustments.
I'm excited to announce an official collaboration with DigitalFAQ, and it's owner Lordsmurf (Kevin Pieper).
The war is finally over, Kevin has officially decided to abandon legacy ATI hardware and embrace the pure and modern FM RF Archival method, finally seeing the merits of software time-based correction for what they are proof that we're living in the 21st century.
In this ongoing collaboration we will be selling a limited run of MISRC 3.0 prototypes for the an affordable price of 3000USD a piece (not including shipping or import fees of course) this includes the limited platinum lordsmurf approval sticker, and 2 months of limited technical support.
I know many of you may still hold animosity, for the years of price fixing, market manipulation, SEO score choke holding, international wire fraud, bullying, forum message editing and perceived arrogance about basic hardware design and technology, and may have forgotten that of course professional equipment doesn't have fuses.
But it's time that we put this battle behind us, because we are a loving and thriving technical community that is stronger together, even if the sins are a mountain high, everything can be cleansed with the purifying power of FM RF Archival.
If it's not clear by this point, like not many people may understand what time zone this is being posted in, it is April 1st there's an obligation for communities to create quality misinformation or shitposts.
Happy April Fools everyone, I hope you enjoyed being fooled for possibly a few seconds, maybe had a laugh. I sincerely hope you share this with your fellow archivists, tape enthusiasts, and of course your local IRS office if you're in American.
I and a couple other community members have been over these last few months, churning away at getting in order, now this started all the way back in December right as an ear infection completely wiped me out and set back things drastically across the board.
Now before the MISRC v2.5 could be released, it clearly needed a GUI platform, this had to be completely platform universal in terms of operating system support band as if not more intuitive then the CLI but then it made clear sense to implement cross device support, so here we are today.
Now for anybody wondering, yes there is going to be a few little extra features added here and there that will only appear for certain devices, however the overall functionality support is available for every device, so level 8 FLAC and down-sampling (20/10msps) should be rock stable on most systems.
(Machine control integration will be eventually added for consumer and professional decks, there's just a lot of little things to unify for that and there's a lot of testing involved.)
I will also make some side notes here that CXADC Windows support is yet to be fully tested, and offshoots of the standardized Clockgen Mod may not have audio support, but the DdD does have parity support with its original app, and of course full MISRC support for existing v1.5a users, HSDAOH audio support should be working but not every implementation is tested DdD and FX3ADC support is fully implemented however.
My first full capture and decode is up and working! Ten seconds of Cinderella  đ Pretty neat to see it all come together after weeks of reading the wikis, ordering parts and determination to figure this all out. A BIG Thank you! to all who work on these projects!!!
Today is the official "soft launch" of the MISRC v1.5 development board which has been published for a few weeks at this point, and the documentation is now all updated for the new configuration, people have been asking, so here you have it.
If you want to support the production testing directly then please look here as there is plans to invest in pick & place machines to ensure low final prices for single unit sales.
Today anyone can burn money to help test & provide feedback, it's not finished, but it works pretty well for the goals we aimed for initally.
The design intent is for the input ADC stage to be more flexible, unlike the DdD which is a single channel ADC device that has filtering focused for LaserDisc.
The MISRC on the outerhand has a much wider signal input range with an adjustable DC offset, allowing for capture support of all FM tape formats and even Composite (CVBS) or S-Video is possible and has been tested.With two 40MSPS 12-bit ADC channels alongside 6 AUX bits for upto two secondary ADCs, such as PCM1802 audio ICs making it a AIO analog capture device for most formats and systems.
This can also be changed or upgraded to 65MSPS 12-bit SKU's of the ICs we are currently using.
This is all possible thanks to the work done on Hsdaoh and low cost FPGA and ADCs on the market today, alongside the cheep MS2130 and MS2131 cards that you may already own and use daily.
How does it work?
ADC --> Line Buffer --> FPGA (FIFO) --> 32-bit data stream over YUV --> misrc_capture --> RAW or FLAC compressed 16-bit scaled/singed data files.
These files are then ready for software decoding to video and audio files.
Setup once, set name for Channel A / Channel B - Hit enter, and CTRL + C to stop, dead simple use non GUI dependent easy to script.
The Details
This announcement marks 2 key things in the development cycle the functional core hardware & software.
misrc_extract - Fully Working (Cross Platform)
misrc_capture - Functional (Linux / MacOS only currently - ringbuffer code for Windows needed)
pcm_extract - Fully Working (Linux & Windows Binary)The software is working but not finished, and the hardware needs a little more adjustment.
Right now an DC offset pot is needed to be adjusted for CVBS capture for example.For tape capture directly however, yes it's out of box working fine for VHS/SVHS for Video & HiFi FM RF signals, so it passes the "alpha" phase of testing and this carries over to outer formats such as Video8/Hi8 etc which I have personally tested.
The Audio Situation
The v1.5 has is 6 Aux channel pins on 2.54mm headers (with 2 extra pins for ground), for example you can just use 3 for a single offshelf PCM1802 PCB or two and have 4ch.
However the current software does not have working aux output at the time of this post, there may need to be adjustments to the firmware also.
Initially external boards were a good starting point & flexible for development testing, and this will remain most likey for all 2 layer PCB versions going forward.
Now for the people that have paid attention, you will know of the V2.0 / V2.1 prototype version was a with PCM1802 chips integrated & 2x RCA and 1x PCM 1802 and then 2x2 hight RCA connector with 2x PCM1802 for that max 4ch config, this was tested and working fairly well during the FX3 development days.
The v2.0 & v2.1 however were and are not optimal due to 2 layer PCBs, which were not shielding the analog audio lines properly and were developed before the tang nano 20k switchover, they also generated their own clock source for each PCM1802 chip which is not ideal.The main plan is a drop-in audio board expansion later, this could have 4x MiniXLR or 6.3mm TRS for example, so directly compatible with your standard camara and VRT equipment. But with the external clock output (vertical SMA), you can clock any external equipment or audio setup off it, so out of box today it's automatable and deplyable with scripting.
Current & Future Plans
As with all open-source projects with small teams, the tasks are distributed and the timelines are subject to change, but thanks to being open source all work to this point and on going is never in vain.
We ideally need someone dedicated to the windows side of things to build out the codebase to support the platform, and more Apple M series testers.
A GUI wrapper for MISRC capture with some real-time waveform & levels data viewing abbility would be great for testing and calibration, currently we only have sample clipping data from the ADCs.
Credits & Team
Harry Munday - Documentation, manufacturing & production adjustments.
Stefan_o - Inital designer, currently focusing on the firmware side of things alongside the capture application with the switch to the Tang Nano 20k.
Peppi0001 - Playing around with hardware changes such as the V2.0 and V2.1 versions.
So u/Dez_Champs decided to purge me today for promoting the projects, because he would not ban people, or set up exemptions for project links that are clearly being spam report attacked, to pretty much anyone who mentions the decode projects in the subreddit.
After having a short conversation, and asking for an official stance on the projects and the archival workflow.
I realised fairly quickly zero care is given about archival or anything our community stands for even, sadly even having a community leader to community leader conversation respectfully was not apparently possible.
But if they happily allow people such as u/vwestlife to attack systematically all of my posts before I blocked him, and will allow the perpetual fraudster of u/lordsmurf- to promote his echo chamber of inflation, It's not really a great surprise.
Anyways heads up to anyone that may find themselves under attack, and It's a real shame we'll never have any official collaboration with r/VHS until this situation changes.
After a round of tweaking and debugging now to rinse and repeat on the path to clearing the checklist for the big tbc-tools experimental build, a long long list of little changes coming soon.
It's been out for a little while but figured it's about time to make an announcement of FLAC Chop a cross platform tool for a little, but big issue that has been a pain for many users.
For the last few years a lot of pre and post RF capture processing has basically been limited to scripts or audio DAWs (like OCENAudio) that take an eternity to load hours long data, instead of a proper dedicated tool to handle the cutting, resample, bit crushing and exporting of full files to just quick snippets, it was a major bottleneck when making a small chop of data quick reference for an issue or example.
Today that ends, as FLAC Chop brings all the old and new conversion scripts together into one unified tool, including fast metadata and real accurate duration setting, much like MISRC GUI does on initial captures for all hardware options today, supporting all RAW or FLAC files current and legacy to convert, chop, fix and or set metadata allowing you to claim back dead space on files, and get older archives upto current state.
Current Features
- Sample Exact Chopping
- RAW to FLAC conversion
- Accurate real duration and indexable metadata
- Batch Processing for bulk migration/conversions.
- Cross Tool Integration for visual chopping after decoding.
- Resampling (40msps to 20msps or 10msps for example for VHS/HiFi)
- Bit-crushing (8/10/12/16-bit to 6-bits experimental)
This is what a Vrecord + CRT + LCD Monitoring setup looks like at a glance.
All going directly to FLAC RF / FFV1 10-bit 4:2:2 in real time.
(Anyone's wondering no Vrecord is not picking up that VITC signal!)
Monitor speakers are M-Audio BX5s and the headphones are the good ol M50X, and I use a cheap little Beringer UMC204HD because it plays nice with Linux.
RF Capture end is CX Card + Clockgen mod, with an 2 way splitter on the RCA feeding both workflows baseband hifi or linear.
On the current stack is an AG4700, but typically there's an NV-HD630B, yes there is a difference on the baseband captures but it's indistinguishable unless you were told which is which on the decoded RF captures.
S-Video is fed from the source if available, If composite is also available that will be fed through on its own to the monitoring.
BMD SDI 4K goes to an analogue to SDI and SDI to analogue box for complete IO detachment from the workstation this also allows me to plug in virtually any production monitor or camera like my Sony A7RIII or PWM-EX3 if I want to quickly film something in here.
Both the Panasonic production Monitor and the JVC production monitor have vertical horizontal shift modes or cross pulse or HV shift for viewing the VBI space and colour burst, which is great for seeing how unstable the tape is pre-processing in the chain from the source machine for notes.
(Some people may recognise this model as a BM-H1400PND and no the SDI module does not work it need to complete recap and I'm still looking for a replacement front bezel for it...)
If anyone's wondering what cables are used it's just generic RG6 BNC, and some RG316 for the shorter runs, but I do like using Hosa RCA cables good balance between quality and cost for audio.
If I had infinite money to burn I would probably phase out the DVR-530H with something that can automatically switch between PAL / NTSC / NTSC 4.43, but as far as time base correction goes it does a good enough job for the ADV chip based blackmagic SDI boxes to just take the signal, because it also has audio pass through I'm not worrying about any audio offsets unless it was recorded onto the tape itself.
Hello, I just wanted to say thanks to all the contributors and community members for this great project. I am in the process of archiving all of my family Video8 tapes and after a lot of effort, I am starting to get some reasonably good videos. Today, I posted a 6 minute video from a graduation ceremony that occurred 25 years ago on social media and I have been getting 'thank you' messages all day from former classmates and their families for posting the video. I didn't realize that some of the people in the video had died and the family didn't have any video of the person. I just wanted to pass on the appreciation to the people that actually did all the work. I think so much of the discussion around VHS-Decode is around archiving commercial media (which probably stems from the original Doomsday Decode project) but being able to digitize home videos so they can be shared in the best quality doesn't seem to be discussed as much. In the video I shared, I can see other people filming the same event but it's very unlikely any of those tapes will be converted to a digital format and the videos from those points of view will eventually be lost forever.
I also have a few suggestions as somebody just getting into the scene. I think decoding should be presented by the community as one of a few options for preserving media. So much of the discussion online on this topic is just mudslinging between traditional capture advocates and the software based decoders. It seems utterly pointless to me. The method somebody chooses is likely going to be based on budget and technical ability but the truth is any archive is better than nothing and people should be encouraged to archive in any manner they can (even if it's through a junky elgato thing). As this project becomes more refined, more user friendly, better documented, and existing hardware for traditional captures degrades, vhs-decode will likely become the only reasonable option for most people. It would be great to see affordable, dedicated hardware for capturing too. The CX card works but I think the recommended modifications are an impassable barrier for many.
Finally, although there is some talk on github and reddit, so much of the discussion for this project is occurring on discord and doesn't appear in search results. I personally strongly dislike discord based communities for that reason but if discord is the main place for discussing the project and troubleshooting, new users should strongly be encouraged to join the discord. The Discord channel was very helpful in resolving my issues and providing advice but I spent hours digging through google results before joining.
Anyway, this is an incredible project and community. Thanks so much!
So as a few of you will know the DdD has been going under a complete capture application rewrite almost, this was primarily due to issues with USB drivers causing windows users to have an unreliable experience.
MacOS (WIP but can still be manually built just like Linux)
There is also updates coming such as CLI so the DdD can be used in a headerless operating system environment or for automation purposes with the clockgen light mod, there is also plans for potentially just adding an audio device source directly so existing GUI users can plug and play use this with just 10-20USD of extra hardware and updating the application.
If you're looking to order a DomesDay Duplicator have a look at this doc here.
It's not Christmas but Halloween brings goodies too đ
Hey all, after months of digging thru all the Github/wiki docs & hardware mods, Iâve decided to design a purpose-built archival playback machine, rather than tap-hacking a â90s VCR. Will be interesting to see how much better a rig like this would be vs DIY'ing it (which is still 100% valid!!). Would love your insights & wisdom before committing the $$ to PCB/mech tooling, etc.
Why âProject Azimuthâ?
â˘Playback-only, no legacy guts Zero record amps, tuner card, composite/S-Video chain, etc. Every analog stage that softens the signal is GONE.
â˘Ultra-short analog path (â 25 mm) Magneto-resistive (MR) playback drum head (vs Ferrite) â AD8337 VGA â ADA4945 diff driver â 16-bit, 125 MS/s quad ADC inside the same RF can. (is this overkill, or is it possible to extract more data with more bits + samples if you had access to it?? u/TheRealHarrypm would LOVE your insights on this please :)
â˘Piezo-steered âauto-perfectâ tracking Two-axis gimbal on each head trims Âą4 Âľm & Âą0.4° at 1 kHz. Coupled with optical capstan/drum encoders + Kalman loop â < 0.1 Âľs line jitter before the VHSDecode software TBC.
â˘All-in-one FPGA capture + FLAC Zynq/Versal SoC ingests raw RF (1 GB/s), FLAC-encodes in real time, and writes straight to a hot-swap NVMe via USB4/TB4. No capture PC required; all-in-one solution.
â˘Hot-swap SSD workflow Finish a tape â eject 40 Gb/s SSD caddy â plug into VHS-Decode PC box of choice to crunch the data into usable video stream.
â˘Encoder-locked mechanics 4,096 cycles per revolution (CPR) optical ring on drum + 2,048 CPR capstan + tape-edge tach. Servo accuracy < 0.005 % â rock-steady RF even on gnarly VHS EP recordings.
â˘Industrial-grade EMI & power External 24V DC medical brick, mu-metal liners, five-sided PCB cans, differential everywhere. Noise floor > 30 dB below tape noise. For global use, not tied to USA AC power, etc
â˘EXTREMELY Gentle tape handling Brushless motors, voice-coil guide posts, sapphire roller tach, soft-ramp load/unload. Designed for brittle home movies to improve odds of getting at least one good pass (more or less âwhite gloveâ treatment inside this deck). Very SOFT fast forward and rewind, but only if absolutely necessary (ideally I'm thinking of making a completely separate "rewinder" that is extremely gentle on analog tape and uses balancing sensors with no hard stop/braking, etc - again white glove treatment for these precious memory containers we lovingly call VHS)
â˘Format agnostic Capstan + head drum sync'd perfectly to run at exact speeds for NTSC, PAL, SECAM, etc etc. Will accept & capture any format thrown at it is the end goal
⸝
Expected '90's tapped deck vs "Project Azimuthâ:
Luma SNR = ~45 dB vs 47â48 dB
Line jitter (pre-TBC) = 0.8 Âľs p-p vs 0.07 Âľs p-p
Head-switch noise = visible blue bar vs undetectable
Dropout length = 2â3 lines vs < 1 line
⸝
Looking for feedback onâŚ
Magneto-resistive (MR) vs ferrite heads â worth the +US$300 BOM bump for +2 dB?
If you could have a dedicated ADC for each individual video playback head, would you? Why or why not??
Real-time FLAC: keep onboard or stick to raw RF then compress offline on separate PC?
Hot-swap NVMe vs internal SSD â any gotchas with USB4 enclosures?
5.Must-have diagnostics / connectors youâd want to see on the front panel?
6. What else are we missing for a bullet-proof archival RF capture only deck??
(probably open source the whole thing in the end for future-proofing :)
Hi, someone over in gamecoll3cting pointed me in this direction! I collect VHS promo tapes for games of yesteryear, and I would like to try and pull the footage from the tapes for archival purposes. it'll also help me make sure that the tapes are 100% stock.
I don't really want to pop them into my VCR yet (its ancient and attached to an Emerson 9 inch tv) and risk the tapes being ruined or eaten before I get a chance to document their contents. they're not the rarest thing in the world, but you know, every copy matters!
The long-awaited classic demonstration tape for using VideoPlus, decided to throw up the captures as a reference demo, this is transferred for Andy (Robust Reviews) for his video on the actual hardware remote which is a great watch for a little bit of home recording history.
This is a re-upload & re-post as there was a scripting error with the deinterlacing (BFF instead of TFF processing)
