[h2odragon]

Tangential but cool: in 1998 there were commercial, 50GB data VHS tapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS

about a decade after that someone asked me for help reading a crate of these tapes that had been flooded then stored in a shed for several years. Couldn't help them at all but it was an amusing diversion figuring out what the hell they had.

[drmpeg]

Linus Tech Tips just did a video on D-VHS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=papQ8xQxizA

When I was at LSI Logic, I developed the IEEE1394 interface for the second generation JVC D-VHS decks (the HM-DH40000U and HM-DH5U). I worked directly with engineers in Japan and I used to get them to bring me copies of the Japanese ham radio magazine "CQ ham radio" when they would come to visit us in Milpitas. I can't read Japanese, but it's just a wonderful magazine about 300 pages thick (like the old Byte magazine).

https://www.w6rz.net/IMG_0103.jpg

[h2odragon]

Very cool! Thank you for sharing that.

When I was hunting information for that client; I found a deck and interface card on ebay for some fairly trivial amount, $200 or so. I was really tempted to grab it just for the "neat weird gear" pile but couldn't justify it. The tapes they wanted read had been submerged for some days and were crusty. The media might have been recoverable but it would have meant pulling it out and putting the tape into new cartridges.

Am I correct in remembering that standard VHS tapes were usable in these drives?

[xattt]

Just want you to know that those particular DVHS decks were an object of desire for a geeky teenager wanting the latest and greatest!

I had no practical use for them as my family didn't have an HDTV for a few more years, nor lived in an country where 1394 was enabled by default on cable boxes. However, the very idea of having a MPEG TS captured on a commodity tape was alluring in being able to have a perfect copy of whatever was on TV.

[PaulHoule]

I think of how most of the established ham radio brands are Japanese like that ICOM on the cover.

[jinto36]

There are other weird VHS-based formats, such as WVHS, which was used to store HD-ish analog video on VHS- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-VHS

Alesis also developed an 8-track digital audio recorder based on VHS, ADAT, which used SVHS tapes and could record 20-bit 48khz. ADAT was pretty popular in smaller studios, and was great for the time before multi-gigabyte hard drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT

[Hackbraten]

Also, ADAT has been immortalized in the first verse of the lyrics in The Prodigy’s _Diesel Power_ [1].

[1]: https://genius.com/The-prodigy-diesel-power-lyrics

[greggarious]

There's a store in Pittsburgh that does this for people as a paid service.

OP's project is cool but it's my understanding the specialized hardware is the big barrier to doing this at home, for most folks, especially if you don't want the tapes routed through a third party for the same reason people invented the polaroid so you don't have to send everything to the Ritz as the mall.

[Bluecobra]

There was also a hokey VHS tape backup card for the PC around the same time that used standard VHS tapes:

https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU

[BuildTheRobots]

Around 1998 I had some awful cable, which if memory serves connected to the Parallel port on one end, SCART on the other and some very unreliable software in the middle.

[scraplab]

I had one of these. It was a terrible mistake.

[actionfromafar]

Very cool. This could have been an excellent backup medium in a different timeline.

[matheusmoreira]

Magnetic tape is an excellent backup method even today. LTO cartridges already have tens of terabytes of capacity. The problem is there are no consumer tape drives, only expensive enterprise models.

[apaprocki]

Well, there used to be. The early QIC drives that hooked up to a FDC connector like the 3.5" were pretty ubiquitous in the prosumer world. They eventually transitioned to better tapes/standards, but all worked well and even Windows eventually had native support (via Microsoft Backup). I restored my files off of these tapes 25 years after recording them, so I'm grateful they existed at the right moment in time when drives and floppies would have otherwise failed me. I naively assumed in modern times LTO must be dirt cheap due to decades of competition, but it never came to be.

[adrian_b]

The LTO tapes are dirt cheap.

Only the tape drives are extremely expensive (thousands of $).

If you have hundreds of TB of data, LTO, including the cost of the drive, becomes cheaper than HDDs.

The QIC tape cartridges had the problem that the rubber belt which moves the tape disintegrates after a number of years, making them unreadable without special equipment.

The LTO tapes have a much longer lifetime.

[userbinator]

LTO is expensive because it's enterprise-oriented, and despite the O in the name meaning "open", seems actually a proprietary standard since you can't just go to their site and download the specs.

[amelius]

It would be great if someone could blog about the reverse engineering of such a tape drive here.

[esrauch]

Tape is a backup medium in this timeline though, just not exactly vhs form factor.

[nuxi]

VHS was also used for backups, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid.

And - if I remember correcly - GRAU and/or StorageTek robotic tape libraries also had support for VHS devices.

[SoftTalker]

It was. I remember people doing it.

[actionfromafar]

DVHS?