On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 06:29 -0400, Tod Thomas wrote: > I remember reading some time ago that VHS was a proprietary standard > and without special equipment it was difficult to transfer it to other > media. I'm pretty sure I heard within the last couple of years that > the VHS standard was retired, or its patent ran out, or something. I > expected someone would eventually pick up on that and develop an open > source process for transferring old VHS content to DVD. Is there > something likes this? Am I dreaming? If I recall correctly, it was a licensed system. Manufacturers paid a royalty to be allowed to sell VHS equipment, and it had to adhere to certain specifications. Some of the more crapper imported equipment, from certain countries, didn't adhere too well to standards, and consequently didn't play too well. For dubbing your own tapes, the simplest solution is to get a combined VHS player and DVD recorder, or cable two standalone units together. To copy something that's technically protected (e.g. using Macrovision), the simplest solution is a separate VHS player connected to a separate DVD recorder, with a de-macrovision device between them. Likewise, to copy a tape that's in poor condition, the simplest solution is a standalone VHS player connected through some black box to repair the signal, to a standalone DVD recorder. In the broadcast world, that black box would be a time base corrector. In the toy video world, there's any number of gizmos for allegedly improving the picture quality, commonly called video stabilisers. You can use a computer to capture analogue video, instead. But then you have the fun and games of capturing sound and video separately. Made more difficult if the video is in a very poor condition, or deliberately distorted with Macrovision. You may not be able to overcome those problems within the computer, it would depend on how well your capture device handles out-of-specification video. Then you have to go through transcoding to MPEG, and authoring a DVD. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
