Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️bad idea for an experiment:
take a betamax tape, and a vhs tape. open both casettes, remove the actual tape, and put the beta tape into the VHS cassette.
First of all, it won't play. obviously.
but then see if we can record to it and play it back.
where's a VHS rewinder when you need one?
why VHS beat Beta in one, oversimplified example:
The reel on the right is beta. the reel on the left is VHS. A bigger reel meets it holds more tape. More tape means it can record for more minutes.
Beta tape is now wound onto the the VHS reel.
Now I need to unwind the other reel of the VHS tape and splice it back together
Now I need to unwind the other reel of the VHS tape and splice it back together
how do you unspool half a kilometer of tape?
a power drill, obviously!
okay, tape is back together. Now I'm going to manually rewind it, because I don't want to risk my VCR slamming into the end of the tape at high speed.
I should 3D print a VHS-reel-to-drill adapter
and it gave a signal! it's gibberish, of course, but I'm amazed. I thought the VCR would just stop or show nothing.
So this is what happens if you play a Beta tape on a VHS VCR: gibberish lines.
I am currently recording a video onto the Beta-VHS tape. You can probably guess what video.
Here's a GIF of what it looks like in action
And here we go! So the answer is: YES.
You can absolutely record VHS signals onto Beta tape.
(The pause at the beginning is just me not starting the blu-ray player at the same time as I hit record on my VCR)
There's no audio, but I'm not sure if that's a problem with my setup or a technical issue with the tape. I'll have to play around with it
okay yep: I hadn't connected one of the cables to my PVM correctly.
The audio is fine on the VHS-recorded segment. There's no audio on the beta-recorded segment.
also I've ejected the tape three times now with no snags. It definitely isn't exploding my VCR that I can detect.
André van Schoubroeck@foone My guess the main problem is the different leader which these systems use to detect the beginning/end of the tape. I found out when I did this as a kid, rewound the tape and had it slam into the beginning at full speed.
Also, you're in the US, right? So there are NTSC machines. You did have some variants beta 1,2 and 3. Do you know what it was recorded on?
When I did this way back when on PAL machines the VHS VCR managed to produce some picture.
prozacchiwawa@foone it's kind of fascinating that we have all this variation in media formats and it all eventually comes down to "quarter inch tape" or "half inch tape" and those haven't changed in decades.
Tapewolf@foone I was sure we got some kind of audio from the Beta recording when we tried doing this in the late 90s.
I have a vague feeling it was running slightly fast, but I could be misremembering.
I have a vague feeling it was running slightly fast, but I could be misremembering.
Fox Rainbow (She/Her)@foone seems tapehead forums have a bit on this, it seems they probably had dif audio setups, but it might still be possible to do.
Marcin Wichary
Henrik Pauli@foone foone nein
FozzTexx@foone Was someone insisting that video tapes were like Coleco Adam tapes and they had to be formatted at the factory before a consumer could use them?
@fozztexx not that I've seen. but I was wondering if it'd work. I expected it would, but expecting isn't the same as knowing.
leading cackle influencer@foone did you seriously do all this work just to set up a rickroll
Jakob@foone Nice! Were you able to spot a difference in quality compared to VHS?
@74k08 Not really. A few horizontal lines but that may just be a speed issue because my tape isn't properly wound tight
Yuki "neige d'aout" Hazuki 膤 ❄️ 
@foone Foone finding increasingly cursed ways to rickroll people, where will this end?
Gabbo the wafrn dev guy@[email protected] I dont know how much@[email protected] will enjoy this thread but im gonna assume you two are mutuals
#famous-people-has-mutuals-too
Comrade Weez@foone Would have been much more surprised if tape from a Beta cartridge wound into a VHS cartridge wouldn't work. They're both just 1/2" videotape. The tape had to be durable enough for auto-loading into the transport and helical scanning, so sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Ampex figured that much out in the 1960s.
sadmac356@foone I can HEAR IT without you even saying
tlariv@foone
Videodrome?
Videodrome?
Daveography 🇨🇦
I'm not an expert in this stuff by any stretch, but it seems to me that lines gibberish or otherwise are a pattern, and a pattern is a signal. It might not be able to decode that signal, but the fact that it's picking it up is actually extremely incredible to me.
Nice work!
Luka Rubinjoni@foone Big Videodrome Energy
So‑Called Vaughn@foone As I recall the drum inclination (azimuth?) varied between the two ‘standards’ (both in essence mimicking a 3” swath on 1/2” tape) the Beta had a slightly longer ‘track’ IIRC
Momo@foone
It's 5am in germany now. I'm stone-tired and can't sleep for medical reasons. The only thing that kept me sane during the last hours is what you do here and if it works.
It's 5am in germany now. I'm stone-tired and can't sleep for medical reasons. The only thing that kept me sane during the last hours is what you do here and if it works.
Ben Foote
Pxl Phile@foone good idea. I feel to overengineer this with the help of gear shifts so near the end the speed can be decreased. OMG, this could actually work.
Rue Mohr@foone where is the file tho? How am I going to rewind all my VHS tapes?
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops@foone if the tape's a similar width, I'm putting a nickel on "It'll at least *kind of* work 'cause it's just rust and stickytape and I've seen that episode of Secret Life of Machines"
Bill Plein🌶@foone You could try what I did with an 8-track tape back in the early 1980s. Find a long stretch of straight road and throw the tape/cassette out the window while holding onto the end of the tape.
I know more about the ecosystem and the effects on wildlife now. And I’m no longer 16 years old. So I wouldn’t do that.
Andrew (Television Executive)@foone I used a car. We just drove down the street with the tape end, while someone held the spool on a spindle.
Took forever to clean up.
Rachel Stantz@foone that’s a big old spool!
Karl Baron@foone And to get the play time the same as VHS, they had to implement the equivalent of VHS LP, tanking the image quality, making it at best on par with VHS. Later Beta players even dropped the standard speed altogether and now there were literally no pros to going with Beta over VHS. Worse quality and worse recording time options.
Phil M0OFX@foone ...on my desk, waiting for me to convert it into a VHS tape cleaner!
SkaveRat 🐀 
thefloweringash