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.
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!