Recording HDTV with Digital VHS like its 2002.
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- Опубліковано 16 гру 2018
- After years of people nagging me to make this video (*cough* vwestlife), its finally here. This video features new and exclusive content never seen before on UA-cam. Yes, we actually record something in HD to a Digital VHS tape. Back in 2002, this was THE setup to have in your home theater to record your favorite movies and TV shows in HD.
Excuse the roughness of the voice overs, I filmed it on one take and had some computer issues with editing (Hey its better then nothing!). Currently my best camera is a Samsung Galaxy S8. Doesn't look bad, but the audio could be better.
I'll add extra info here in the future that I might have forgotten in the video. Stay tuned.
Equipment seen in this video for the curious:
-JVC SR-VD400US DVHS VCR, this is the Professional version of the HM-DH40000U
-Samsung SIR-T165 ATSC HDTV Tuner
Want more Digital VHS information?
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS
Techmoan's Digital VHS video: • Remember when HD Movie...
databit's capture of the D-Theater demo tape: • How To Possibly Repair...
Yes, that is a Sony Super Betamax deck in the background. A SL-HF860D for the curious. - Наука та технологія
That's awesome. You can use a 1998 device to record TV in 2019, and the quality is fine.
The model shown is from 2004. JVC introduced HD recording to Digital VHS in 2002.
@@NJRoadfan Oh oh. Too bad you can't use this on cable TV like Comcast because of DRM...
@@KylesDigitalLab You can likely still request an older cable box from Comcast that has a Firewire port on it.
I know this is an old comment now, but you can also get a CableCard and probably use that in some similar device.
I have a HDTV tuner for my PC that takes CableCard, and I got one leased from my cable company; I've been making direct digital recordings of cable shows since 2012 and without needing a VHS tape to hold them!
Of course, you *could* write those to a D-VHS should you want to... it's the same ATSC stuff. Ironically, satellite now offers quality beyond what these D-VHS machines were capable of, I remember even like 10 years ago Dish and DirecTV were ragging on cable saying "we have 1080p and you don't"
Not sure when/if 4K cable programs are coming, but at least my own local cable provider still does ATSC-compliant feeds for every channel. It's technically QAM (nothing is ATSC unless it's being broadcast from a tower and picked up with an antenna) but I mean it's the same 720p or 1080i MPEG-2 quality that you can store on D-VHS.
I almost wonder if anyone made a D-VHS recorder with a CableCard slot in it. They had TVs with integrated slots, I knew a guy who had one and desperately wanted one but couldn't find any for sale by the time my family got around to upgrading to HD in 2009... you just pop the little PCMCIA card in, connect your coax cable, and you're getting decrypted digital streams without any box in the middle.
Content like this is underrated. Out of the blue I just decided to google "can you record high definition to VHS" and bish bash bosh, here we go, the perfect result! Thanks a bunch :)
This is extremely unlikely but hopefully someone out there has some early 00s commercials recorded on a DVHS or other Digital recorder.
That would be quite something. I wonder if any commercials where actually filmed in HD or just upscaled on the early HD channels?
Likely upscaled but I wouldn't know. I know that by the late 90s most of the commercials were digitally recorded but IDK if any were made in HD.(I'm not an expert in broadcast just my observations)
Also since I've posted this comment some DVHS recorded commercials from as early as 2003 have been uploaded (ENunn's channel is full of them mostly from 2004)
watch?v=mKQmt--elac
watch?v=si2SoqPEfO4
watch?v=wmRlge6rVX8
Wow nice, thanks for linking those. It's quite surreal to see that kind of quality from a VHS format, way beyond what DVD could do.
HM-DH40000U... having such a high model number must mean it's really good! I wonder if you can do direct dubs between D-VHS and MicroMV, since they're basically the same thing, just on different types of tape.
It should work, but I don't own a MicroMV camcorder to check. The DVHS deck can dub from my Canon HV-20 HDV camcorder in both HDV and standard DV modes (by transcoding DV to MPEG-2 in the VCR).
Of course JVC thought only the US market was deserving of that model number. The Japanese market deck was called the HM-DHX1
Unfortunately, they also thought that the European PAL market was not deserving of those VCRs at all. I really like them but I'm not sure I want one since it'll be crippled - not being able to record off the air, not being able to play my other tapes (at least not with TBC & DNR), and producing incompatible recordings with my other VCRs.
It was a bummer learning that these magnificent VCRs were only available in the US and Japan. I'm still secretly hoping that there was some sort of prototype European deck that they had before pulling the plug on D-VHS although that is very unlikely...
@@NikHYTWP If you were crazy enough you could probably do your own mpeg 2 encodes and send them to the deck over firewire. In the old days people used to post their TV recordings to usenet, you know, piracy, and some guys just recorded those untouched transport streams to D-VHS for archival. Made more sense than keeping those huge files on expensive hard drives and it was easier to play it on your TV that way. This minor piracy subculture lives on today with only a couple people still posting transport streams that are usually from higher quality sources like satellite feeds. When devices that could do hardware decoding of h264 video came around this was pretty much obsolete.
@@NikHYTWP JVC sold a DVHS machine in PAL markets, the HM-DR10000EU. It couldn't record HD that I know of.
Perfect device for HD CRT TV
Hi there. Would it be safe to say that the external TUNER didn't add anything good to the line up?
I have a Sony 2004 VCR/DVD-R with the internal tuner. Awesome machine that still plays and records videos without a hick-up. Believe it or not, this Sony records SD video on a smart TV using regular cable box!
I just change the source from Cable to TV and hit record. Just like in the old days!!!
I figure the Cable Box must have something like a Step-Down box "DTA" built in!
Trouble is I can't use the Cable Box to dubb any movies. If I use two extra cables in the set-up,
nothing works the way it should. The Cable Box knows!
So I bought a great little Plasma TV for $20.00, and a TV-Top Antenna which still won't bring in Channel 3 or 4, but gets a few other channels. TV will receive digital or analog signals, but there aren't any analog signals left around my Metropolis.
Trouble again... The Antenna signal isn't strong enough to thread through one VCR (my sony with the Tuner) and back out to the TV, so I am experimenting to build up that signal as a pre-amp before running it through two vcrs, the back to the TV.
LOL I gave that little TV Antenna a boost ---- just by putting an old power adapter beside it, and shifting the loose metal jack around the TV Antenna to a good spot. Not bad.
Over the air still could look better, so I added another old power adapter and things got better! I may add more.
If plugged in to electricity the adapters would be putting out almost 2 watts around the Antenna.
Remember, DO NOT PLUG Power Adapters into any electricity outlet! That electricity is meant for one of your electronic devices, not a TV Antenna.
I might even try using my old Laptop Battery to see what it will do. It's not good enough for any other device.
Still building my analog Platform. Hopefully I will be dubbing soon!
My dad had a D-VHS VCR in the TV room, but he wouldn't let me or my family use it until he got a Blu-ray player.
I have the later model with HDMI output and I couldn't get it to record from my computer using the fire cable, CapDVHS works fine in capture mode but not in write mode, The deck doesn't respond to the program to start recording, Could it be because I have 64bit Win7 ?
@Babu I installed a dual boot and added Windows XP, It works fine under XP.
Babu XP 64bit
I'll need to try out D VHS, since I've got some DIY movies I've been working on in Windows Live Movie Maker.
Thank you
So this method not work today with the new mpeg4 standard?
It was the only way to archive digital HD TV at the time.
Yeah, I really want to find some recordings that people did with D-VHS and dump the data... probably lots of unseen stuff in there.
Could japanese models with Dtheater logo play dtheater movies from US??
No, they are region locked. JDM decks were coded DTheater Region 2 while all US releases were Region 1.
I got one new in the box for $400. D-theater movies look amazing.
did you test the movies on hd crt tv ? is it better than blu-ray on hd crt tv
I've always been curious to know how good a Blu-ray movie will look on D-VHS tape. But I was very disappointed to learn that this VCR can only record HD video via FireWire port. I tried to find at least some AV-receiver with IEEE1394 but to no avail. Today I found two interesting devices that seem to be able to solve the problem. Roland VC-30HD Video Converter and Datavideo DAC-30R Bidirectional Converter are two converters that are able to decode the video and output it in the desired format through Fire Wire (IEEE1394). It's hard to find and probably quite expensive, but it seems to be the only solution that can make a D-VHS VCRs fully functional. But all this is just a theory because I do not have these devices))
So what do you think about that?
You don't need expensive and out of production video converters to record HD video to DVHS. Any computer running Windows XP and equipped with Firewire can do it (Windows Vista and later apparently don't work correctly for recording)
Here is the how-to: web.archive.org/web/20041009110710/www.webtc.com/DVHS/default.htm
and here is the software: web.archive.org/web/20160826011523/kgbird.com/DVHSTool/
Digital VHS only support ATSC standard video resolutions, so 1080i or 720p only. There is no 1080p support so conversion from the BluRay is going to have to done to both lower the resolution and convert to MPEG2 vs. the h.264 on the disc.
@@NJRoadfan The fact is that all this time I was trying to find a way to connect a D-VHS VCR to a blu-ray player) Anyway, very grateful for your help! Using a computer is actually a less expensive way to record. Also, I have a laptop with an IEEE 1394 connector.
By the way, as far as I know, Roland VC-30HD has an HDMI input and can convert the output signal to HDV, DV or MPEG-2. But it is really too expensive and rare device.
How did you connect the DVHS deck to your modern TV?
Component video.
is the tape inside the cassette actually different than a normal VHS?
To record hi-vision you need a S-vhs tape inside, which uses a special chrome formulation instead of the ferric material normal vhs tape is made with
6:40 that's just 2 seconds? How is that slow? Any modern smart TV or these crappy FireTV sticks are slower, despite having 1000x times the processing power.
This format really existed for industrial policy reasons, and it was probably more useful in Japan because it was tightly integrated with the ISDB standards and the Japanese BS/CS satellite system.
And D-VHS and the firewire output was often how the warez scene captured HD transport streams in the early 2000s.
The format was primarily marketed in the USA and is broadcast standard agnostic. Only one deck with a built-in digital tuner of any kind was sold(JVC HM-DT100U)..... and it was an ATSC tuner. Likewise, the only D-Theater tapes ever sold were coded Region 1 (USA). There was a Region 2 (Japan) and Region 3 (Korea), but no movies were ever released coded for those regions. (JVC only sold one model in those markets that could actually play D-Theater tapes).
@@NJRoadfan It wouldn't surprise me if people in Japan were using these though. I know for lots of 90s anime, people were recording that on S-VHS and we have some really nice looking transfers of it now, meanwhile S-VHS was a complete flop here in the US and I had never even heard of the thing until like 2007...
Japan has broadcast satellites, I'm not sure how many people actually use aerials (ATSC). Note that the original commenter mentioned BS/CS system, those are their satellite feeds. You *can* get channels with an antenna, but many people pay for the satellite feeds, and thus could record them to D-VHS.
I think the reason they sold these VCRs without the built-in tuner is just because of how many different systems were being used. I have the DH-30000U model, and it has a built in *NTSC* tuner, as did basically every other US-market VCR (whether standard VHS, S-VHS, D-VHS etc) but what they lacked was a *digital* tuner. Cable boxes typically required a CableCard to decrypt the digital streams, satellite is way more complex in that it has to actually aim the dish and lock onto the signal; JVC probably just thought it was easier to include a FireWire port and rely on the fact that the cable/satellite boxes had FireWire output, rather than trying to make VCRs that knew how to handle all that.
I've honestly never seen a stand-alone ATSC tuner and didn't know any existed back in 2002.
@@drfsupercenter This very deck was sold in Japan as the HM-DHX1.
@@NJRoadfan yeah, without a built in tuner. Because chances are the target market was using satellite receivers already
I realize this video is a few years old now, but maybe I'll get a reply anyway!
Hey, you mentioned those tapes you bought having recorded movies from HD cable channels - some of that might actually be useful, especially if they are formatted as 16:9 - stuff gets open-matte transfers often and the Blu-rays would be the original theatrical matting? I'd love to see those. Do you have the ability to connect the DVHS deck to a computer and rip the data off?
That Back to the Future you have, is that from HBO or a "TV edit" from a cable channel? I also take an interest in funny censorship of movies for TV airing, Snakes on a Plane is probably the most famous one but BTTF has some gold too. Your digital recording of it might put some of today's bitrate-starved cable to shame...
I guess what I'm asking is if you can rip those tapes for me, lol.
The movies are from various cable channels like Showtime, Cinemax, and HBO. I have Firewire capture capabilities, but really don't have any interest in ripping stuff that one can get on BluRay. The movies are all in 720p or 1080i anyway since broadcast TV didn't support 1080p at the time. I don't recall if its a 16:9 matte. BTTF2 & 3 were shot on 35mm and would be more likely to have an open matte transfer done. I know they screwed up the matting on the first run of DVDs .
The movies are from various cable channels like Showtime, Cinemax, and HBO. I have Firewire capture capabilities, but really don't have any interest in ripping stuff that one can get on BluRay. The movies are all in 720p or 1080i anyway since broadcast TV didn't support 1080p at the time. I don't recall if its a 16:9 matte. BTTF2 & 3 were shot on 35mm and would be more likely to have an open matte transfer done. I know they screwed up the matting on the first run of DVDs .
@@NJRoadfan yeah, the "full screen" BTTF trilogy is open matte, which is neat.
This stuff was all available on the high seas back in the day, in full quality. You could get the original 20GB MPEG2 files.
Drill some holes in a standard VHS tape and try to record DVHS to it to see what happens.
Don't have to, the machine allows you to override the tape check.
@@NJRoadfan You mentioned it for S-VHS, not for standard VHS. S-VHS has a thicker tape stock, I assume D-VHS is the same tape stock as S-VHS but meant for digital?
For standard VHS, there's "S-VHS ET" which lets you put purportedly S-VHS quality recordings on standard tape, though it does kinda lower the quality a bit in order to do it, so I'm not sure how good that actually was in reality. I just noticed my JVC S-VHS player has a button for it (and I don't record tapes anymore, it's 2022 not 2002!)
But I wonder what would happen if you tried to put high definition digital content on a standard VHS. I assume the bandwidth of the magnetic tape wouldn't be sufficient for it. Maybe SD stuff could work but the VCR would probably glitch out or start losing data for HD?
@@drfsupercenter As far as I know, SVHS and DVHS tapes are the same coercivity tape. It's likely recording onto standard VHS would be a glitchy mess, DVHS varies tape speed in relation to recorded bit rate so SD recording would be a mess too. SVHS-ET works by testing the tape, likely with a frequency sweep, and adjusting the recording bandwidth to match that particular tape.
I don't believe in any of the DVHS decks and ATSC tuners had built in MPEG2 ENCODERS. In 2002, that was still a $100,000 box. I work in the TV broadcast industry and did then too. You may want to re-check that. I have about 1000 movies captured from Dish on DVHS tape (including Back to the Future 1, 2, and 3). My satellite receiver was modified* with a 1394 port, well sort of. It was a parallel data link to a small PC via the printer port which reformatted the MPEG stream on the fly and provided a 1394 port to the VCR. This is dead technology as the newer receivers are built where there is no exposed access to the MPEG stream on the circuit board. I had Panasonic, JVC, and Misubushi DVHS VCRs. I had to label each tape as to which manufactures VCR recorded it as interchange was really bad with the format. In 2011 I transferred all these tapes to a 30TB RAID disk and use JRiver Media Server as playback software. But I still have all the DVHS tapes on the shelf as well as VCRs in storage.
Note the reason the FCC required cable boxes (not satellite) to include 1394 ports was that some early flat panel HDTVs used a 1394 port as their digital HD input. They had built in MPEG decoders. This was a proposed alternative to HDMI but as we know HDMI won out. The FCC nor the cable companies ever condoned recording HDTV content to DVHS. That would have brought on the wrath of Hollywood and the MPAA. But as you said, you could do it with some caveats like copy flags.
* I don't consider this as illegal. The satellite box was only modified to provide an unencrypted MPEG stream output for authorized channels. It did not allow reception of channels I was not subscribed to like those bootleg access cards did - those were/are clearly illegal. Every movie I recorded was paid for through my monthly subscription so it's basically an HD PVR before they were available.
It does indeed have a MPEG2 encoder for standard definition video. JVC used the LSI DiMeNsion DMN-8600 series SoC in their period DVHS decks and DVD recorders to encode analog SD video to MPEG-2 in real time. The same chip can transcode DV and MPEG-2 as well.
@@NJRoadfan Well I guess that's a feature in the 40000 model. I only had the 30000 and the H5MU (those model numbers may not be exact)
Digital VHS???
ישתבח שמו לעד אין על היפנים
Could you put an apostrophe in “it’s” under the title?