Legacy LD5

Well, as is the style of weesaurs, I still haven't stuck in an actual Dinosaucers tape in that machine, but...I will soon! I think I'll just do it in high quality and deal with the after-effects later (e.g. use multiple "2-hour" DVD recordings for the tapes).

So what ELSE have I done to delay the project, you might ask? Well, I saw what is possibly the sleaziest easiest way to do it all quick and ghetto like...I was in what remains of Radio Shack these days, and they were selling a $90 ION VCR thingy that you stick the tape in and it hooks up via USB to a PC and allows you to directly digitize your video. This is about as far from the professional solution I've had set up for, oh, six years or so now ('professional' grade SuperVHS [remember THAT?] deck and FireWire video capture device), but since I'm apparently never going to do that, I'll try the $90 ghetto solution. I think I'll hook that up to a laptop tonight and see how well it works. Regardless, I think I'll put the Dinosaucers tapes through both that AND the VHS/DVD deck so that I can archive the tapes to a solid media of some sort.

Sounds fancy Dino! Hopefully it captures a good quality video for yah. :3

I wouldnt be all surprised if there's not even anything worth digitizing left on those tapes after all those years.

Okay, I put in one of my later Dinosaucers tapes (recorded off the USA network around...1993 or 1994, I believe, it was just after Jurassic Park) and fired it up with the ION VCR device USB thingy contraption. Worked pretty well! The software is not ready for Windows 7 and claimed as much, but all that failed to work was some "monitor" application that apparently was just useless anyway. The main program fires up, and it's very, very simple, but at this point I don't care. Can't even change capture settings...just records the video with mono soundtrack (presumably) to an MPEG file...haven't seen what flavor, but the 21 minute episode, "Scales of Justice" was done at around 650 megs. *looks in Media Player Classic* Looks like an MPEG2 file, and...huh, is doing stereo audio, that's cool. Only has a mono audio input...not that the source is stereo anyway or anything. Here's what MPC says:

MPEG Audio 48 KHz stereo 224Kbps (MPEG-1)
MPEG2 Video 720x480 (4:3) 29.97fps 6Mbps

It's pretty much raw capture, full of interlacing and whatnot, but is certainly "good enough" for cleaning up with whatever vidya editor is in style at the time. I think I will just feed tape after tape into this thing and make vidya files, and then edit them up in whatever I have around.

Hey, it's time for my bi-yearly update! Believe it or not, I still have that ION tape deck sitting on my work/office desk at home, ready to digitize stuff...but more recently I've been using the desk to modify Xbox 360's so I can flash the firmware and play arr-maytey games. But considering the amount of hard drive space I have laying around, I can certainly throw all those tapes through both the Sony DVD recording deck and the ION digitizer thingy.