There are Media Markt, and Saturn. Two big electronics stores in Europe that are "rivals" to each other, however they both belong to the same parent company. The illusion of free choice, I guess.
I picked up the Sony VRD-MC5 on ebay after the vwestilfe video on it in order to digitize some Video8 tapes. Couldn't be happier with the results. It's a great machine! Apparently unlike this one, which is yet another example of how we seem to have de-evolved regarding modern digitizing products.
They can definitely make a unit comparable to the Sony ones, they just chose to make it as cheaply as possible because profits were more important than quality.
After that rigid ballroom dancing video with the girl with the giraffe neck, the dirty dancing video was playing, and I saw the "lady" shaking her ass from time-to-time. Something had to be up.
This is why I keep coming back to your videos. Your droll sense of humor is hilarious. Gotta love the dirty dancing video as a demonstration of how it handles quality. 😅
Your uploads are always enjoyable to watch. I can understand why someone would want to transfer old tapes into both USB drives and DVD's for safe keeping.
@@Didz The DVDs were probably due to CSS, but you're probably right that any commercial VHS is probably going to look terrible due to the macrovision. I remember it being a real pain when I was trying to hook up a VCR because the output through the composite jacks got scrambled to prevent people from copying it.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Aaand let's keep in mind Android doesn't really do DVD playback. That is if the claim of the device running Android is even true or not.
@ You probably wouldn't want it to. Personally, I rip my discs and convert them into something that's appropriate for a mobile device. Storage on phones and tablets has improved, but movies are still pretty large.
They move a lot of merch by having credit plans and credit cards aimed at people who lack credit, and taste, and brains, but who still want to have Dyson vacuum.
They shift a hell of a lot of goods. People at home all day with disposable incomes. Impulse purchases because it's on the TV and the money is nothing to them. Or people who want a retail hit who use their credit plans.
It's genuinely impressive how bad of a job it did with the audio, capturing that digitally was solved a very long time back and I feel like they actually had to somehow intentionally set the recording settings that poor.
I have a hunch that someone read that digital audio for video is supposed to be 16-bit, 48 kHz PCM, and they mixed up those two and set it to 16 kHz and 48 kbps instead.
@@vwestlife Check if a firmware update exists for this device, perhaps there are wrong settings in the firmware for audio digitization, if true then it can be fixed by a new firmware.
@@techmaster-ch5yd While that's a very good theory on paper, how many of these products actually receive firmware updates? I'd be most surprised if a firmware update for this unit even exists.
I like how your channel is so helpful to consumers while entertaining at the same time. You should be at a million subs. P.S. What's with all the pretty boys on your videos Kevin? Oh wait..., I forgot, never mind....
There’s actually one thing these DVDirect clones can be good at: if you really enjoyed UA-cam’s early years and the videos that were released back then, you can use these devices to make your own late Oughties-style YT video! (judging by the picture and sound quality) 😊
@@dutchbeef8920 Are you still watching on a dial-up connection that can barely handle 240p or something? UA-cam is infinitely better than it was close to twenty years ago.
Wow thats extremely depressing to imagine someone using this then throwing out they're vhs tapes n being left with these files that look and sound like u threw a blanket over them
A lot of people probably don't remember that VHS tapes COULD look and sound as good as the examples you provide so they may just say, 'Look at how far technology has come; I can't believe we used to watch this!' Maybe they mute the audio during record on purpose so you can't compare the before and after.
In my experience VHS is quite difficult to digitize. The tape noise, which isn't a problem on uncompressed video, tends to overload compression algorithms.
@@MrDuncl There is also a problem linked to the analog nature of VHS : the lack of time base corrector (TBC) in most of VHS players, this can lead problems for the digitization.
6:39 "Fantasy? No, you actually can make your wild dreams of dancing to glorious MIDI tango come true!" I'm getting an adrenaline rush just to think of it.
I was a kid (9 or 10) when that song came out, and my mother put quite a lot of miles on the "Whenever You Need Somebody" cassette in her Pontiac, so I could sing the entire song _a cappella_ with the muted video playing if I wanted to. It's not his only hit, but thanks to the internet, it's the only one most people remember, or have even heard. In fact, I didn't even know what Rick Rolling was until somebody told me, and when they were explaining they said it was a song someone invented to troll people. I had to correct them and tell them it actually was a chart-topping hit from before they were born! Rick Astley's still actively singing, he posted quite a few songs on his UA-cam channel during the pandemic that he recorded from his home studio. In fact, he's seemed to embrace being a meme.
The south park episode on the shopping networks just takes the cake. This video is good too. The audio on that thing was the real kicker for me. Night and day even on my phone speaker.
"We're going to do something quite extraordinary and special for you guys tonight." -- I love how these shopping channels always present it like they are doing us a favour. But I guess it sucks a lot of people in. I wonder how much they make these days compared with pre-internet shopping?
I'm loving your light use of gag cutaways and the B-roll source materials in the past few years. It enhanced the humor of your dry wit approach. Your vids are composed in the same style as "Look Around You" series 1, Except of course, that your facts and info are real and valuable, whereas that show was just for silly comedic purposes.
I bought the VRD-MC6 after seeing your last video and it’s worked wonders! I can even use it to capture my DS TV Out mod footage for hardware accurate displays.
4:24 - Rick Rolled again! 6:42 - Instrumental of Debelah Morgan's "Dance With Me?" 🤣 8:06 - NewTek Video Toaster text overlay? Or Videonics MX-1? We've come SUCH a long way in a few decades. 9:21 - Where was this video when I was an adolescent? 🤤 10:47 - OMG I used to love Paula Poundstone's comedy act! And Rita Rudner, too.
The recording quality difference between the Sony and the Protis was crazy. I too feel really sorry for folks who bought the Protis or the other knockoffs.
Another irony lost among the optimistic sale pitches, is that writable DVD media has a far shorter shelf life than magnetic tape does anyway. I have audio tapes that are over 60 years old and video tapes that are 40 years old that all still play fine, while more than half of the DVDs I burned 10+ years ago are completely unreadable now.
Thats exactly why when companies need to store large volumes of important data. They don’t put it on any optical media or even hdd. They store it on tape it exactly because how long it lasts compared to anything else.
@@erikm8707 It's funny how such flimsy data storage can just last and last. I'm just like OP, and have VHS which dates back to 1982 (and older audio cassettes), and while I do stretch the tape every once in a while, they seem just as good as they used to. I would say my dvd/BD failure rate is probably four times what the VHS rate was. I do LOVE the higher resolutions possible through the advanced formats though. It's certainly a trip to see something as old as Gunsmoke in either 720 or 1080p. Now that I think about it, I notice my strictly audio tape failure rate was significantly higher than my VHS one. I suspect the mechanisms in VHS make it much less likely to get tangled, and even then you possibly can "iron it out", plus, given the convenience of audio and how much I used it, those tapes were probably played a lot more than my custom VHS's.
@@erikm8707 Archival magnetic tapes are awesome. Those data centers look like what we were told computers would be in the year 2000 from 70s futurism books.
I really like your videos. You do all the dirty work so I don't have to. I got the Sony VRD-MC5 based on that excellent video you did and I'm very happy with it. Keep up the good work.
Literally NOBODY seems to realize what the customers REALLY NEED. It shouldn't be a rocket science to make a standalone video capture device with DECENT procamp, A/D circuit, and high quality deinterlace algorithm - and output in high bit rate mp4 file straight to a USB stick. And that's it - no other fancy function needed including DVD drive as well. Is it really that hard?
Oh but you see, that would make the device more expensive! The profit margin would be thin, and the Average Joe won't even know, notice, or care that something's off. We can buy cheap crap and sell it as the best thing ever made and at a massive markup! Won't somebody think of the profits??
Yup, point taken. But cost saving from ditching DVD drive should be quite enough to cover that up, at least. However yes, all potential buyers for this kind of product would have more WOW factor to bell & whistles rather than actual quality anyway hence not much choice to take.
@@Nantawat_Kittiwarakul But then you're not marketing this product towards your average grandma who doesn't know how to use a computer or manage files, but do still know how to use and are familiar with DVDs, and just wants to watch the videos on their big TV, and also who doesn't know any better about video digitizing. It's too bad, because this could be at least as good as the Sony, but then it would be even more expensive. At that point, just get the Sony
I just know that they are archival grade Taiyo Yuden that will last 10,000 years and outlive humanity because HSN always sells only the finest quality products and would never sell cheap junk that you could buy for 10 dollars of aliexpress
First Legacybox tells me i need to "Digitize" my MiniDV tapes because they are "Degrading Analog Media" Now HSN says should make HD DVDS from my Betacams?
It won't do it, 'cause it doesn't have any BNC connectors on it. It has RCA connectors, so... this isn't suited for anything Betacam-related. As such, you are restricted to digitize any consumer videotape of any consumer videotape format, like VHS and Betamax, for example.
We used to leave the shopping channels on for the dogs so they wouldn’t get lonely at night. Until one day when we received loads of vegetable chopper-uppers in the mail and turns out Fudj had run up a huge credit card bill during the night! 😂😂😂😂😂 Guffaw!🤣
TV shopping, selling crap? NO! SAY IT AINT SO!! (I'm still annoyed that the night vision glasses i bugged my parents for as a 7 year old off qvc kids was just a strip of green plastic and a elastic band, never forgave QVC for that)
I had one of these I got off Amazon back in 2016 for copying DVR recordings, and needless to say it was CRAP. Video quality and unit functionality was down the gutter, and I remember a glitch where for Video DVDs it would only record the first two minutes correctly, so I always had to make it a Data DVD in MP4 format. Ultimately I quit using it because one day when using it to copy a DVR recording it made a smell similar to burning plastic and then just shut off. I opened it up and the smell was there, but nothing looked obviously burned. I would ultimately buy a used Sony VRD-MC5 on eBay in 2017, which was of course a much smarter purchase and is in fact a much better product.
Coming from the UK myself, 13:08 rings clear warning bells for me: If _any_ product goes to the extent of bringing in some „posh“ presenter from a foreign country so „sensible“ it can't even keep itself inside a hugely beneficial trading union, *run away!* 🏃💨🇬🇧👍
If these contraptions are knock-offs of Sony's devices, then how could these be legally sold trough TV-Shop channels? Sony would go medieval on them. I'm sure that same, or even better can be find on AliExpress. That cassette on the bottom (weekend cartons) is sure intriguing🔍
As far as I know, there's no definitive timeline of when will magnetic recording degrade to the point of unwatchabe. I got quite a quantity of '80s VHS tapes and they're still playing fine. Naturally, I am aware that magnetic recording isn't permanent.
They weren't claiming the device was a Sony. p.s. For a very recent example of a knock off compare the new Ford Capri with the four year old Polestar 2.
@@MrDuncl You mean that new Ford Capri EV that is crossover SUV and has F.A. to do with original mid-sized coupé? Equally atrocious as new Mustang Mach-E (EV Crossover) that also has F.A. to do with Mustang the muscle car🤮 The dumbest thing ever in automotive industry💩
To record retro (mostly VGA signal), I use Unisheen field monitor with a built in recorder. It was expensive ($350) and had some lies in the description, like the ability to livestream via USB. That doesn't work. I know, because they didn't hook up the port to anything internally. But when it comes to regular signal, it can do very good quality capture to mp4 and has an aspect ratio switch. I wish I knew of a perfect device for retro capture, but they all have issues. Older Dazzle capture cars are good, but may be hard to find. I also have some Hauppauge capture devices, but they provide less than perfect image quality, recording in a checkerboard pixel pattern with their own special codec.
Those HSN sellers claimed that you could record in "high definition" on DVD which sounds completely contradictory and to no surprise the device couldn't do it. As someone who digitized their tapes ages ago, I can really just recommend going the extra mile and doing it in software as much as possible to preserve quality. Just get any PC capture device, capture (e.g. with OBS) to a very high bitrate, ideally with a lossless format and then color correct, denoise, sharpen and filter the video to your liking (e.g. in DaVinci or AviSynth) and then render the video in a modern format with transparent quality settings (H.265 with a quantizer setting of 20-23. Lower number is better quality). Your results will be much better than any device that captures directly to files.
I suspect they meant Betamax camcorders or old Betamax tapes. I doubt that the people who put this together know the difference, or would much care if they did! Mind you, anyone in a position where they're wanting to transfer actual Betacam is likely to know enough that they're not going to be doing so on some worthless old toss like this anyway.
I have my trusty pioneer and also a Sony DVD/HDD recorders which do an excellent job and can edit the footage also! They are selling second hand for next to nothing these days.... And they function as a DVD player! I recently found out that you can record at higher quality than what first appears that XP is the highest quality that can be selected, somewhere in the menu you can go higher than this which at XP quality is already pretty good! The operating system on both the Sony DVD/HDD recorder and the Pioneer are exactly the same! One has analogue tuners while the other has digital TV tuners, you can watch something else pre recorded from the HDD or DVD while recording from an external input or TV tuner! My son just recently upgraded the HDD on his digital tuner Pioneer with a larger HDD.... He needed a special remote control to setup the new HDD, he found the code for the remote control and punched it into his Logitech programmable remote control and it had all the secret factory system setup settings already in it! These machines are so underated! Even the CD/DVD mechanism can read disc's that other machines I have will struggle with due to scratches.... I have plugged my Pioneer into my PC via USB and put Mp3s on it, it has jukebox feature for music playback, slideshow photo viewer which you can plug in your digital camera and transfer your pictures into the HDD or burn to DVD.... I have had my Pioneer since new and paid a fair amount for it back in the early 2000's but I got my Sony for $10 in almost new condition, had to get a new remote from eBay for $15 but worth every cent! I'm surprised that I haven't seen one on this channel yet? Maybe in a future video? Possibly?
I have several Sonys and upgraded one to 1TB. The Sonys were actually made by Pioneer. Dive deep enough into the service menu and there is a S / P setting to determine if the splash screens say Sony or Pioneer. The only disadvantage is that if the DVD drive fails it is very difficult to get the data off. I found that out the hard way. The file system is BSD so nothing as simple or common as Linux. The reason for having several was that I tried swapping the hard drive then the DVD burner but neither idea worked. I did eventually get the video of the HDD using UFS explorer software.
Not technically lying about playing the DVDs you recorded from it but yeah it seems intentionally vague. It can playback the DVD data files stored on the disc, but not really DVD video, and can't play commercial DVD video, which they should've definitely been clearer about. I can imagine a lot of people might've picked this up as a very small DVD player since I could see there being some demand for that for a bedroom or something and they ended up with something that doesn't work for what they need. An odd quirk in the UI I can see, is that even for screens with no scrollbar, the selection highlight is only the width of the text area with the scrollbar so it looks weird and off-center. :p Kinda silly it recorded NTSC video in 25 FPS, especially when it would've _had_ to record in 30 FPS MPEG2 for DVD-video. It would've had to do an extra conversion step. This seems almost intentionally bad. Also, never realized when I was like 5 how hot hard hat harry was, damn. Shame he's dressed as a cop in this one. I had the one about construction equipment. :p
I remember the Sony DVDirect being sold on HSN, with Aaron Berger calling the record button the "big red pancake" 😂 I guess this is one of those cases of the original is the better product. It's shame the DVDirect is discontinued; probably because nobody has DVD players anymore, so a product like this is kinda useless for most people now.
Don't think I'll ever part with all my dvd players, primarily because my BD player is garbage so much of the time. This means I may eat dinner starting off playing, or trying to play, a BD, but end up shutting it off and then playing a dvd on the dvd player instead. The dvd player never has a problem, but approximately 20% of my BD's won't play the first or second time around on that player. I suspect since this and the prior Sony were altered to destroy the region limitations, that it affects performance at times and it goes into a weird flashing warp instead.
I converted my tapes about 15 years ago on a Magnavox dvd recorder. Sound quality was terrible but there weren’t many choices at the time. Luckily the vhs tapes never got thrown out but I gave them all to my son. He still watches them on a vcr.
I wonder if it can be jailbroken and proper software put on it to remedy the issues. Then again that fixes the bitrate and possibly audio, but other than that the ADC in there is probably one of those bottom of the barrel "Easy Cap" dongles that produce nearly monochrome pictures
I have a LG pro-sumer vhs/dvd-r/rw/DL combo unit from 2005 that I use for backing up tapes. It has a hdmi and s-video output along side composite and RF. It works beautifully. It’s definitely much better build quality than any other vcr I ever owned. I was looking for another unit as a back up but the only time I ever see them for sale they’re about $500 to $600. I got mine for free because the school I used to work for threw it in the dumpster lol.
I can't believe how cheap those recorders are despite their price tags. It's making me hard to believe that was the CPU's maximum performance for encoding and decoding the video. They must've used a really crappy analog to digital converter.
Those tapes labelled "Powerpuff Girls" and "Weekend Cartoons" are ones I'd want to see. Also, when you selected the VOB file on the Top Gun DVD, you only selected the one that contained the warnings. There are usually several VOB files on the disc with different lengths and sizes and different contents. The one containing the movie is usually a few gigabytes in size.
Whenever I watch these home shopping clips, I always think of that South Park episode that tells them the only humane thing left for them to do is to kill themselves.
0:40 there’s no such thing as a High Definition DVD, especially when the source is standard. Such false representation. (Also, yes HD DVD did exist, but the format is entirely different to what is being sold these days as it was discontinued soon after its release)
Yeah, like the average consumer would own any Betacam equipment. To digitize Betacams, you'd better have the ability to capture composite video! To be fair, he probably confused it with Betamax.
The weird thing is that the video quality actually looks pretty acceptable. They got the "hard part" right(ish), but then they ruined everything with the abysmal audio. And you'd think that recording high quality audio in the 21st century is foolproof. So weird.
9:20 - Why do I suspect that there are quite a few 90s kids out there who look back on "Hard Hat Harry" as a formative influence and the point at which they started to realise a few things about themselves...?!
That audio sounds like the kind of low quality samples that old Flash games would use
audio/music from dial-up AOL online games (back when I didn't now better LOL)
@@youdontknowme5969 more like on hold music.
Yes, and early Internet radio stations too, I remember Triple J sounding like that back in 2001 using our old dial up Internet connection.
@@youdontknowme5969 "RealAudio Player" vibes!
The ballroom dancing tape was actually making my speakers rattle
"Put a cork in it, Amber." Too much.
I lol'd!
I was not expecting that at all and it absolutely destroyed me
Borrow hard-hat Harry's cork.
I'm sad I wasn't first to post this! That kid is my hero
so 90s
7:18 "even worse than what I got from LegacyBox"
Now that's a rare insult lol
Hahahahahahaha
That is an insult, Legacybox is known to be laughably bad
Thats a smack down
11:24 Holy sh*t, the difference in sound quality on Sony is like experiencing lossless audio for the first time :D
Not to mention the video; the toaster looked like it was upconverted to HD for a second there.
It's funny you call HSN and QVC rivals, because they're now part of the same company!
@@imrustyokay lol thanks for the info.
The illusion of free choice.
@@novelezraThe product being sold under different names is giving off that same illusion too
Yeah, both QVC and HSN are under the umbrella of QVC
There are Media Markt, and Saturn. Two big electronics stores in Europe that are "rivals" to each other, however they both belong to the same parent company. The illusion of free choice, I guess.
4:24 I can’t believe we got RickRolled.
Silently.
I write documentation for my job, I may have silently rick rolled in a document or two in my time lol.
@pupslace gotta keep 'em engaged 😉
I'm a programmer and put a rick roll into my user guide video for an app I built :)
@@vwestlifethats the best way 😂🎉❤
The choice of video clips is close to reaching high art. Outstanding work.
Well said!!
I picked up the Sony VRD-MC5 on ebay after the vwestilfe video on it in order to digitize some Video8 tapes. Couldn't be happier with the results. It's a great machine! Apparently unlike this one, which is yet another example of how we seem to have de-evolved regarding modern digitizing products.
They can definitely make a unit comparable to the Sony ones, they just chose to make it as cheaply as possible because profits were more important than quality.
8:00 the art of dancing dirty. a rare jewel. love it.
Putting “the art of” in tiny font, Dancing Dirty in huge font, this must’ve been designed to be as deceiving as possible to increase sales.
@@Chickenpatty878 Plus the bad Swayze/Grey "lookalikes" on the cover. "Swayze" looks more like Tom Cruise.
After that rigid ballroom dancing video with the girl with the giraffe neck, the dirty dancing video was playing, and I saw the "lady" shaking her ass from time-to-time. Something had to be up.
"high definition full quality DVD mode"
My eyes rolled backwards towards my brain when I heard that.
It's THE highest quality. And it's DIGITAL
DVD was never HD.
@@kemi242 Who are you talking to?
But yet, this recorder can't write AVCHD-formatted discs.
AVCHD is the only known standard for doing HD video on a DVD, by the by.
I just love the way you owned the male presenter from the TV shopping channel, first class job Vwestlife, and this is why I love your videos.
It is a great day whenever Volkswagen estlife uploads a new video.
Or, if you will, Veedub estlife
Whatever happened to his rival, SAABoyzone?
(Yes, I did eventually think of a car brand ending in "B").
why is volkswagen living the west life
Another example of buying cheap crap so we don’t have to… fabulous!
I agree. It's more cheaply built and designed than it's cheap to buy, I might add, though.
better off buying whatever great crap at a thrift store
Well... I wasn't expecting to Google "Hard Hat Harry" yet here we are.
This is why I keep coming back to your videos. Your droll sense of humor is hilarious. Gotta love the dirty dancing video as a demonstration of how it handles quality. 😅
Your uploads are always enjoyable to watch. I can understand why someone would want to transfer old tapes into both USB drives and DVD's for safe keeping.
I bet the DVD playback problem was due to copyrighted media and self-burned DVDs would have played back just fine.
Probably Macrovision which it is then soft blocking, it has nothing to do with copyright.
@@Didz The DVDs were probably due to CSS, but you're probably right that any commercial VHS is probably going to look terrible due to the macrovision. I remember it being a real pain when I was trying to hook up a VCR because the output through the composite jacks got scrambled to prevent people from copying it.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade
Aaand let's keep in mind Android doesn't really do DVD playback. That is if the claim of the device running Android is even true or not.
@ You probably wouldn't want it to. Personally, I rip my discs and convert them into something that's appropriate for a mobile device. Storage on phones and tablets has improved, but movies are still pretty large.
It's fascinating that HSN or QVC are even still a thing in an age dominated by Amazon, etc.
They move a lot of merch by having credit plans and credit cards aimed at people who lack credit, and taste, and brains, but who still want to have Dyson vacuum.
Retired people who don't know how to use computers.
They shift a hell of a lot of goods. People at home all day with disposable incomes. Impulse purchases because it's on the TV and the money is nothing to them. Or people who want a retail hit who use their credit plans.
They are down the street from me in St Pete Florida and quite a large employer. Their outlet store is actually not too bad.
The question is which has the better quality. Amazon seems to be full of consumer electronics with obscure brands.
It's genuinely impressive how bad of a job it did with the audio, capturing that digitally was solved a very long time back and I feel like they actually had to somehow intentionally set the recording settings that poor.
I have a hunch that someone read that digital audio for video is supposed to be 16-bit, 48 kHz PCM, and they mixed up those two and set it to 16 kHz and 48 kbps instead.
@@vwestlife Check if a firmware update exists for this device, perhaps there are wrong settings in the firmware for audio digitization, if true then it can be fixed by a new firmware.
@@techmaster-ch5yd While that's a very good theory on paper, how many of these products actually receive firmware updates? I'd be most surprised if a firmware update for this unit even exists.
@@Lachlant1984 well it supposedly runs Android. There might be a way to add custom software to it. Might make a good followup video.
“No, it’s not, Bret Chuckerman!” Seems like a bucket list statement. 👍
2:37 you can hear the cheapness as you handle it.
I like how your channel is so helpful to consumers while entertaining at the same time. You should be at a million subs.
P.S. What's with all the pretty boys on your videos Kevin? Oh wait..., I forgot, never mind....
"High Definition Full Quality DVD Mode", I'm not a DVD hater, but that even made me laugh.
Considering that standard VHS was considered to be about 240p. You can't make 240p video into 480p quality!
@@mchenrynick yes and no, you can use AI to upscale it, but it still wouldn't be the same
There’s actually one thing these DVDirect clones can be good at: if you really enjoyed UA-cam’s early years and the videos that were released back then, you can use these devices to make your own late Oughties-style YT video! (judging by the picture and sound quality) 😊
Remember when "UA-cam quality" used to be a synonym for "godawful low resolution compressed mess"?
@@NotATube it still is
And looking and sounding like it was filmed under the ocean.
@@dutchbeef8920 Are you still watching on a dial-up connection that can barely handle 240p or something? UA-cam is infinitely better than it was close to twenty years ago.
@@NotATube Yes, but at least there was no Mr. Beast around to hire up all the people that should be allowed nowhere near minors.
Wow thats extremely depressing to imagine someone using this then throwing out they're vhs tapes n being left with these files that look and sound like u threw a blanket over them
When Harry came on screen - wait... Poor choice of words.
Was scrolling through the comments specifically to find jokes such as this!
Looks like a Village People reject! 😂
A lot of people probably don't remember that VHS tapes COULD look and sound as good as the examples you provide so they may just say, 'Look at how far technology has come; I can't believe we used to watch this!' Maybe they mute the audio during record on purpose so you can't compare the before and after.
In my experience VHS is quite difficult to digitize. The tape noise, which isn't a problem on uncompressed video, tends to overload compression algorithms.
@@MrDuncl There is also a problem linked to the analog nature of VHS : the lack of time base corrector (TBC) in most of VHS players, this can lead problems for the digitization.
The HSN live promo reminds me of QVC’s advertisement about the Funai VCR/DVD combo lol.
Yup
They'd also shill schlock like Esteban guitars, which are consistently maligned.
"high-definition" and "DVD" don't belong in the same sentence unless you're using HD-DVD, which is incredibly unlikely.
For a brief moment I parsed that as “Funeral VCR/DVD Combo”.
@@cysjunkextra well said!
A huge part of the charm of your videos is the media you showcase. Would love to have your library of videos tapes and vinyls. Keep it up!
6:39 "Fantasy? No, you actually can make your wild dreams of dancing to glorious MIDI tango come true!" I'm getting an adrenaline rush just to think of it.
4:24 THE S.O.B RICK ROLLED US 🤣 i could even hear the damn song in my head! Down to the drum intro. What has the internet done to me!
I was a kid (9 or 10) when that song came out, and my mother put quite a lot of miles on the "Whenever You Need Somebody" cassette in her Pontiac, so I could sing the entire song _a cappella_ with the muted video playing if I wanted to. It's not his only hit, but thanks to the internet, it's the only one most people remember, or have even heard.
In fact, I didn't even know what Rick Rolling was until somebody told me, and when they were explaining they said it was a song someone invented to troll people. I had to correct them and tell them it actually was a chart-topping hit from before they were born!
Rick Astley's still actively singing, he posted quite a few songs on his UA-cam channel during the pandemic that he recorded from his home studio. In fact, he's seemed to embrace being a meme.
The south park episode on the shopping networks just takes the cake. This video is good too. The audio on that thing was the real kicker for me. Night and day even on my phone speaker.
I think it's fair to say that it's so bad that the difference would still be night and day even if you pumped it through a Gameboy speaker
That Ballroom test recording is so bad it could be in an analog horror game and I wouldn't even question it.
"We're going to do something quite extraordinary and special for you guys tonight." -- I love how these shopping channels always present it like they are doing us a favour. But I guess it sucks a lot of people in. I wonder how much they make these days compared with pre-internet shopping?
There's about 30 of them broadcasting in the UK, mostly showing pre-recorded programmes.
I'm loving your light use of gag cutaways and the B-roll source materials in the past few years. It enhanced the humor of your dry wit approach. Your vids are composed in the same style as "Look Around You" series 1, Except of course, that your facts and info are real and valuable, whereas that show was just for silly comedic purposes.
I am so sick of those deceptive ads for cheap Chinese junk. It’s so dishonest. They know damn well the quality is garbage.
That could apply to pretty much everything sold on any home shopping channel, ever.
Nothing like a brisk tango to 'Hernando's Hideaway'.
I bought the VRD-MC6 after seeing your last video and it’s worked wonders! I can even use it to capture my DS TV Out mod footage for hardware accurate displays.
4:24 - Rick Rolled again!
6:42 - Instrumental of Debelah Morgan's "Dance With Me?" 🤣
8:06 - NewTek Video Toaster text overlay? Or Videonics MX-1? We've come SUCH a long way in a few decades.
9:21 - Where was this video when I was an adolescent? 🤤
10:47 - OMG I used to love Paula Poundstone's comedy act! And Rita Rudner, too.
The recording quality difference between the Sony and the Protis was crazy. I too feel really sorry for folks who bought the Protis or the other knockoffs.
A friend of mine had a Sony and he liked it so much thanks Kevin for bringing us in the past. Miguel.
I didn't even realize it was the same guy until the end. 😆
Paula Poundstone, that name sure brings me back.
I got rickrolled in SILENCE
Another irony lost among the optimistic sale pitches, is that writable DVD media has a far shorter shelf life than magnetic tape does anyway. I have audio tapes that are over 60 years old and video tapes that are 40 years old that all still play fine, while more than half of the DVDs I burned 10+ years ago are completely unreadable now.
Stop it, stop it, somebody fed starving orphans off the profits😆 of the new formats.
Thats exactly why when companies need to store large volumes of important data. They don’t put it on any optical media or even hdd. They store it on tape it exactly because how long it lasts compared to anything else.
@@erikm8707 It's funny how such flimsy data storage can just last and last. I'm just like OP, and have VHS which dates back to 1982 (and older audio cassettes), and while I do stretch the tape every once in a while, they seem just as good as they used to. I would say my dvd/BD failure rate is probably four times what the VHS rate was. I do LOVE the higher resolutions possible through the advanced formats though. It's certainly a trip to see something as old as Gunsmoke in either 720 or 1080p.
Now that I think about it, I notice my strictly audio tape failure rate was significantly higher than my VHS one. I suspect the mechanisms in VHS make it much less likely to get tangled, and even then you possibly can "iron it out", plus, given the convenience of audio and how much I used it, those tapes were probably played a lot more than my custom VHS's.
@@erikm8707 Archival magnetic tapes are awesome. Those data centers look like what we were told computers would be in the year 2000 from 70s futurism books.
I really like your videos. You do all the dirty work so I don't have to. I got the Sony VRD-MC5 based on that excellent video you did and I'm very happy with it. Keep up the good work.
Literally NOBODY seems to realize what the customers REALLY NEED.
It shouldn't be a rocket science to make a standalone video capture device with DECENT procamp, A/D circuit, and high quality deinterlace algorithm - and output in high bit rate mp4 file straight to a USB stick. And that's it - no other fancy function needed including DVD drive as well. Is it really that hard?
Oh but you see, that would make the device more expensive! The profit margin would be thin, and the Average Joe won't even know, notice, or care that something's off. We can buy cheap crap and sell it as the best thing ever made and at a massive markup! Won't somebody think of the profits??
Yup, point taken. But cost saving from ditching DVD drive should be quite enough to cover that up, at least.
However yes, all potential buyers for this kind of product would have more WOW factor to bell & whistles rather than actual quality anyway hence not much choice to take.
@@Nantawat_Kittiwarakul But then you're not marketing this product towards your average grandma who doesn't know how to use a computer or manage files, but do still know how to use and are familiar with DVDs, and just wants to watch the videos on their big TV, and also who doesn't know any better about video digitizing. It's too bad, because this could be at least as good as the Sony, but then it would be even more expensive. At that point, just get the Sony
Wow! The audio is so much better from the Sony. Also much more vibrant, clearer picture (the Protis looks low contrast)
I'm sure those bundled blank DVDs were _only_ of the finest possible quality! Will it even try to record a copy protected DVD or video tape?
The manual says it won't record copy-protected video sources, but I didn't try.
I just know that they are archival grade Taiyo Yuden that will last 10,000 years and outlive humanity because HSN always sells only the finest quality products and would never sell cheap junk that you could buy for 10 dollars of aliexpress
@@evanaulik516 they look like frys GQ brand
"Chuck 'er man". More epic pwnage, that was funny.
First Legacybox tells me i need to "Digitize" my MiniDV tapes because they are "Degrading Analog Media" Now HSN says should make HD DVDS from my Betacams?
It won't do it, 'cause it doesn't have any BNC connectors on it. It has RCA connectors, so... this isn't suited for anything Betacam-related. As such, you are restricted to digitize any consumer videotape of any consumer videotape format, like VHS and Betamax, for example.
I don’t know how this content could possibly get more uniquely geared to me as a viewer.
Well, we can now safely say "put a cork in it Amber" to the Protis recorder! 😂 Can I have the hard Harry when you're finished with him please??
We used to leave the shopping channels on for the dogs so they wouldn’t get lonely at night. Until one day when we received loads of vegetable chopper-uppers in the mail and turns out Fudj had run up a huge credit card bill during the night! 😂😂😂😂😂 Guffaw!🤣
Rick Astley - no audio. That sounds like a great feature.
That's because both the DVDirect, and its' clones, manufactured by Shenzhen Koho Technology Co., don't have any speakers at all.
TV shopping, selling crap? NO! SAY IT AINT SO!! (I'm still annoyed that the night vision glasses i bugged my parents for as a 7 year old off qvc kids was just a strip of green plastic and a elastic band, never forgave QVC for that)
I had one of these I got off Amazon back in 2016 for copying DVR recordings, and needless to say it was CRAP. Video quality and unit functionality was down the gutter, and I remember a glitch where for Video DVDs it would only record the first two minutes correctly, so I always had to make it a Data DVD in MP4 format. Ultimately I quit using it because one day when using it to copy a DVR recording it made a smell similar to burning plastic and then just shut off. I opened it up and the smell was there, but nothing looked obviously burned. I would ultimately buy a used Sony VRD-MC5 on eBay in 2017, which was of course a much smarter purchase and is in fact a much better product.
a device for greedy people who find out how much it costs to digitize a VHS tape
Android "6.1" doesn't even exist, never did. 6.0 and 6.0.1 were the only two iterations of Marshmallow, immediately followed by 7.0 Nougat :D
I saw that you gave it so many chances for the unit to redeem itself. Final verdict, It SUCKS!
Thanks again Victor!
Coming from the UK myself, 13:08 rings clear warning bells for me: If _any_ product goes to the extent of bringing in some „posh“ presenter from a foreign country so „sensible“ it can't even keep itself inside a hugely beneficial trading union, *run away!* 🏃💨🇬🇧👍
I was fortunate to see Mateo live in Omaha earlier this year. Such a talented guy!
Damn, that Home Shopping Network has really gone downhill with those recorders.
HSN was always shady anyway.
I remember the one time they were selling the Nintendo switch lite for the price of the regular system
A perfect example of why I only stick with name brands. The Protis DVD recorder is worth more in parts than it is as a working unit.
It probably has negative value, in that you'd have to pay to have the parts recycled. And you'd still be right!
This channel is outstanding
If these contraptions are knock-offs of Sony's devices, then how could these be legally sold trough TV-Shop channels? Sony would go medieval on them.
I'm sure that same, or even better can be find on AliExpress.
That cassette on the bottom (weekend cartons) is sure intriguing🔍
I doubt Sony hasn’t forgotten about these DVDirect machines since they discontinued them a long time ago while these clones remain in stock…
Could be Sony possibly had a patent for the DVDirect, but has since expired, allowing these cheap knockoffs to continue to be produced and sold.
As far as I know, there's no definitive timeline of when will magnetic recording degrade to the point of unwatchabe. I got quite a quantity of '80s VHS tapes and they're still playing fine. Naturally, I am aware that magnetic recording isn't permanent.
They weren't claiming the device was a Sony.
p.s. For a very recent example of a knock off compare the new Ford Capri with the four year old Polestar 2.
@@MrDuncl You mean that new Ford Capri EV that is crossover SUV and has F.A. to do with original mid-sized coupé? Equally atrocious as new Mustang Mach-E (EV Crossover) that also has F.A. to do with Mustang the muscle car🤮
The dumbest thing ever in automotive industry💩
To record retro (mostly VGA signal), I use Unisheen field monitor with a built in recorder. It was expensive ($350) and had some lies in the description, like the ability to livestream via USB. That doesn't work. I know, because they didn't hook up the port to anything internally. But when it comes to regular signal, it can do very good quality capture to mp4 and has an aspect ratio switch. I wish I knew of a perfect device for retro capture, but they all have issues. Older Dazzle capture cars are good, but may be hard to find. I also have some Hauppauge capture devices, but they provide less than perfect image quality, recording in a checkerboard pixel pattern with their own special codec.
Those HSN sellers claimed that you could record in "high definition" on DVD which sounds completely contradictory and to no surprise the device couldn't do it. As someone who digitized their tapes ages ago, I can really just recommend going the extra mile and doing it in software as much as possible to preserve quality. Just get any PC capture device, capture (e.g. with OBS) to a very high bitrate, ideally with a lossless format and then color correct, denoise, sharpen and filter the video to your liking (e.g. in DaVinci or AviSynth) and then render the video in a modern format with transparent quality settings (H.265 with a quantizer setting of 20-23. Lower number is better quality). Your results will be much better than any device that captures directly to files.
Really, anybody using BetaCAM would stay away from this junk.
I suspect they meant Betamax camcorders or old Betamax tapes. I doubt that the people who put this together know the difference, or would much care if they did!
Mind you, anyone in a position where they're wanting to transfer actual Betacam is likely to know enough that they're not going to be doing so on some worthless old toss like this anyway.
8:03 Dear God it's like watching my parents dance
@4:02 - Each time you push one of those buttons, I die a little inside.
I have my trusty pioneer and also a Sony DVD/HDD recorders which do an excellent job and can edit the footage also!
They are selling second hand for next to nothing these days.... And they function as a DVD player!
I recently found out that you can record at higher quality than what first appears that XP is the highest quality that can be selected, somewhere in the menu you can go higher than this which at XP quality is already pretty good!
The operating system on both the Sony DVD/HDD recorder and the Pioneer are exactly the same! One has analogue tuners while the other has digital TV tuners, you can watch something else pre recorded from the HDD or DVD while recording from an external input or TV tuner!
My son just recently upgraded the HDD on his digital tuner Pioneer with a larger HDD.... He needed a special remote control to setup the new HDD, he found the code for the remote control and punched it into his Logitech programmable remote control and it had all the secret factory system setup settings already in it!
These machines are so underated! Even the CD/DVD mechanism can read disc's that other machines I have will struggle with due to scratches....
I have plugged my Pioneer into my PC via USB and put Mp3s on it, it has jukebox feature for music playback, slideshow photo viewer which you can plug in your digital camera and transfer your pictures into the HDD or burn to DVD....
I have had my Pioneer since new and paid a fair amount for it back in the early 2000's but I got my Sony for $10 in almost new condition, had to get a new remote from eBay for $15 but worth every cent!
I'm surprised that I haven't seen one on this channel yet? Maybe in a future video? Possibly?
I have several Sonys and upgraded one to 1TB. The Sonys were actually made by Pioneer. Dive deep enough into the service menu and there is a S / P setting to determine if the splash screens say Sony or Pioneer.
The only disadvantage is that if the DVD drive fails it is very difficult to get the data off. I found that out the hard way. The file system is BSD so nothing as simple or common as Linux. The reason for having several was that I tried swapping the hard drive then the DVD burner but neither idea worked. I did eventually get the video of the HDD using UFS explorer software.
8:20 this is not how I remember Dirty Dancing
This was the prelude to Dirty Dancing. The place where the stars learned the dirty techniques 😲.
@charles2241 Right, this tape shows the precursor: Lightly Soiled Dancing.
Not technically lying about playing the DVDs you recorded from it but yeah it seems intentionally vague. It can playback the DVD data files stored on the disc, but not really DVD video, and can't play commercial DVD video, which they should've definitely been clearer about. I can imagine a lot of people might've picked this up as a very small DVD player since I could see there being some demand for that for a bedroom or something and they ended up with something that doesn't work for what they need.
An odd quirk in the UI I can see, is that even for screens with no scrollbar, the selection highlight is only the width of the text area with the scrollbar so it looks weird and off-center. :p
Kinda silly it recorded NTSC video in 25 FPS, especially when it would've _had_ to record in 30 FPS MPEG2 for DVD-video. It would've had to do an extra conversion step. This seems almost intentionally bad.
Also, never realized when I was like 5 how hot hard hat harry was, damn. Shame he's dressed as a cop in this one. I had the one about construction equipment. :p
What a weird creep that guy on the Dirty Dancing section.
4:24 Us: We got Rickrolled, again!!
You[VWestlife]: SILENCE!!!!
The blank discs are a nice touch, I’ll give them that.
chukermans acting career won't be fading away any time soon
Imagine TV shopping channels selling literal junk like it was a premium product... :P
I remember the Sony DVDirect being sold on HSN, with Aaron Berger calling the record button the "big red pancake" 😂 I guess this is one of those cases of the original is the better product. It's shame the DVDirect is discontinued; probably because nobody has DVD players anymore, so a product like this is kinda useless for most people now.
Don't think I'll ever part with all my dvd players, primarily because my BD player is garbage so much of the time. This means I may eat dinner starting off playing, or trying to play, a BD, but end up shutting it off and then playing a dvd on the dvd player instead. The dvd player never has a problem, but approximately 20% of my BD's won't play the first or second time around on that player. I suspect since this and the prior Sony were altered to destroy the region limitations, that it affects performance at times and it goes into a weird flashing warp instead.
I converted my tapes about 15 years ago on a Magnavox dvd recorder. Sound quality was terrible but there weren’t many choices at the time. Luckily the vhs tapes never got thrown out but I gave them all to my son. He still watches them on a vcr.
I wonder if it can be jailbroken and proper software put on it to remedy the issues. Then again that fixes the bitrate and possibly audio, but other than that the ADC in there is probably one of those bottom of the barrel "Easy Cap" dongles that produce nearly monochrome pictures
That cursed combination of 720x480 with 25fps gave me easycap flashbacks, so I agree it’s probably the cheapest possible ADC chip in there.
Those TV shows are just Resellers who buy that stuff probably from AliExpress 😂
Even if you convert. NEVER get rid of the original tapes.
I have a LG pro-sumer vhs/dvd-r/rw/DL combo unit from 2005 that I use for backing up tapes. It has a hdmi and s-video output along side composite and RF. It works beautifully. It’s definitely much better build quality than any other vcr I ever owned. I was looking for another unit as a back up but the only time I ever see them for sale they’re about $500 to $600. I got mine for free because the school I used to work for threw it in the dumpster lol.
Thank you for buying this stuff, so that we don't have to. I appreciate it SO much!!
I can't believe how cheap those recorders are despite their price tags. It's making me hard to believe that was the CPU's maximum performance for encoding and decoding the video. They must've used a really crappy analog to digital converter.
Those tapes labelled "Powerpuff Girls" and "Weekend Cartoons" are ones I'd want to see.
Also, when you selected the VOB file on the Top Gun DVD, you only selected the one that contained the warnings. There are usually several VOB files on the disc with different lengths and sizes and different contents. The one containing the movie is usually a few gigabytes in size.
I wonder if it auto-advanced to the next non-VOB file and then complained, like cheap MP3 players did back then.
It auto-plays all of the files in the directory.
I wonder if the piece 'o crap can't play encrypted files.
0:34
_"... all your old camcorders and Betacams..."_
Huh? Some consumers may have had Betamax, but Betacam?
True!
Oh god Pop Up Video. I vaguely remember that. I saw it on an episode of The Brady Bunch one time and thought it was neat at the time.
Whenever I watch these home shopping clips, I always think of that South Park episode that tells them the only humane thing left for them to do is to kill themselves.
The pro tip, is never buy any home shopping crap.
0:40 there’s no such thing as a High Definition DVD, especially when the source is standard. Such false representation.
(Also, yes HD DVD did exist, but the format is entirely different to what is being sold these days as it was discontinued soon after its release)
Haha, "Even worse than what I got from Legacy box."
God! I've watched almost all of your videos. You never sounded so frustrated
0:34 "Camcorders and Betacams"...
Yeah, like the average consumer would own any Betacam equipment. To digitize Betacams, you'd better have the ability to capture composite video!
To be fair, he probably confused it with Betamax.
@@dyter424 Brett has been an actor since childhood, so he might be old enough to actually remember BetaCam.
@@vwestlife And since Betacam was mostly used in the professional market (as opposed to Betamax), it actually makes sense.
Somewhat
9:21 I got a nice jumpscare here, I thought it was corn 😂😂
The weird thing is that the video quality actually looks pretty acceptable. They got the "hard part" right(ish), but then they ruined everything with the abysmal audio. And you'd think that recording high quality audio in the 21st century is foolproof. So weird.
9:20 - Why do I suspect that there are quite a few 90s kids out there who look back on "Hard Hat Harry" as a formative influence and the point at which they started to realise a few things about themselves...?!