A More Versatile Video Recorder?

[AndiFlatland]

This idea is way beyond its sell-by date, but I thought I'd ask this one anyway, as I always wondered why VCR designers didn't seem to have thought of it.

During the 90s, I was working weekend evenings at a cash-in-hand job, from around 6pm to 4am. I was - and still am - keeping a colossal private archive of audio and video recordings from radio and TV. The schedules I compiled to allow me to maintain continuity of many different programmes and series were furiously complicated, and were very often almost impossible to set reliable timer programmes for, even with 3 VCRs running E240s (and occasionally, E300s) end-to-end - as well as 3 audio recorders on auto-reverse. I often had to come rushing back home to change a tape, or reset timer programmes if sport like snooker or tennis were overrunning. Up to a point, PDC could sort that out - but it was not always 100% reliable.

It always occurred to me that the companies who manufactured VCRs had missed a trick which would have made the machines far more versatile in the amount of material that could be recorded on to one tape.

Would there have been some way of designing a machine so that any 4 channels could be set to run at one time on the timer, in order to avoid late-running shows on one channel being cut off by a programme on another channel starting at the same time the first programme was due to finish, and many other anomalies thrown up by all the channels cramming everything together in the same slots, sometimes requiring 5 machines to be recording at once?

I had envisaged that on playback of the recordings, the channels selected would each appear in one quadrant of the screen, and you could then select which quadrant you wanted to zoom in on, to bring it up to full screen.

I appreciate that this would involve some loss of quality and clarity - but I was never too concerned about that. My philosophy was that most programmes were less important for their visual quality than for their information content, and so if copying from such a source led to reduced visual perfection, it wasn't too tragic, as long as I could put a copy of some sort into the archive.

So the question I'm wondering if anybody can answer is: Would such a machine have been possible? I've never heard of such a great piece of technology, but to be able to extend the maximum recording time from 4 hours to 16 (or double on half-speed) would have been a fantastic solution to the many problems I had in trying to gather in hours and hours of clashing programmes with such limited facilities.

[RATTER15]

Yes I am sure it would have been possible. but so few people are so obsessed with watching all these programmes would have made such a machine impractically expensive.

[Jackdaw33]

In 1991 I treated myself to a VCR. It cost me £316. I thought I was at the cutting edge of technology. In 2009 I bought a DTR for £90. Far superior. How times change. I omitted the DVD stage.

[Fitzer]

It could have been done, although some of the features would have to be down to the TV rather than the video. The video would have required 4 tuners to receive the four channels and four sets of recording and playback heads to match, these would then have had to record to one quarter of the tape onto a strip roughly an eighth of an inch wide. Standard video machines suffered from tracking problems when using the full width of the tape so with this set up the alignment problems would be a nightmare. An eighth on an inch was about the width of a standard audio cassette and the quality of those was legendary, even recording at top quality the quality of the recorded programmes would be unwatchable, as we can see when digitally recording video pictures take up a vast amount of space compared to audio and the space on the tape wouldn't be up to the job. As regards playback you'd either had to have four streams playing back and the TV would have to be able to segment them or... now I come to think of it I can't see another way! All in all the complexity and lack of quality and lack of prospective buyers meant that no-one wanted to develop such a machine.

[Old_Geezer]

The antenna receives just one signal that is a mix of all possible frequencies; why couldn't it just record that and split out single channel data at playback time ?

Recording multiple channels at lower visual quality would take a heck of a lot of powerful real-time processing.

[Hymie]

Old_Geezer; When I first became interested in electronics, I considered such a system for recording FM radio (88-108MHz). However the bandwidth required, made design of such a thing virtually impossible in those days.

Now that things have moved on, I see that it is possible to purchase such a device, however the hard disk space recording the signal uses approximately 1TB (1,000GB) per hour , I suspect the price of such a device to be upwards of £10,000.

[Old_Geezer]

Wow, that's some Cloud storage. Any place offering a free year's worth ?

[Hymie]

The device I looked at had 16TB of storage, not enough for a days worth of radio signals.

[Buenchico]

Every channel watched or recorded requires a separate tuner circuit and tuner circuitry was expensive in those days, so a 4-tuner recorder would have cost a fortune to make.

Further, the VHS video system didn't record straight along the length of the tape, as audio-recordings did. In order to achieve the actual physical length of tape required to make the recording, the head moved in bands across the full width of the tape. So, unlike audio tape, it couldn't be split into two or four tracks.

Further, are you aware that it was (and remains) illegal to record programmes off-air other than for short-term time-shift purposes? You're meant to watch the programmes once and then delete them. Long-term storage is technically illegal!

[gingejbee]

....and the biggest problem is finding the time/ motivation to watch hundreds of hours of old ***.