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Thread: Reminiscing about the old Video days.

  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by mtv View Post
    It was a shame VHS won the 'tape war' as Betamax was the superior format.
    False Dichotomy! What about Video2000?

    Quote Originally Posted by Johnno View Post
    LOL. Were you the one always sneaking off into the XXX section of the video store.. naughty boy
    Pfft... what's wrong with you old satellite pirates? Did none of you hire a video and then on the last 20 seconds record that snippit of porn before rewinding the tape and sending it back to the video shop? That shit never got old. You'd always wait until the end of the tape to see how many other people were doing it after the credits. (Because normal people would just rewind the tape as soon as the credits hit).


    And then there was macrovision. Yeah that shit was fun to break. Repurposed my old EPAL decoder after it had already been modified for vidiplex and galaxy MDS and later optus cable tv.
    Some idiot thought it would be funny to put some equlising pulses in the vertical blanking interval and then add in a burst of ver short blacker than black false sync pulses about line 16.
    A TV flywheel circuit would just ignore pulses that weren't ~64uS but a VCR cracked the shits. It was easy just to tell the epal decoder to blank anything that wasn't horizontal snyc.

    Hire a video, copy it and share it with your mates for $1 a hit.
    Last edited by trash; 13-08-20 at 11:21 PM.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.



  • #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    False Dichotomy! What about Video2000?


    Pfft... what's wrong with you old satellite pirates? Did none of you hire a video and then on the last 20 seconds record that snippit of porn before rewinding the tape and sending it back to the video shop? That shit never got old. You'd always wait until the end of the tape to see how many other people were doing it after the credits. (Because normal people would just rewind the tape as soon as the credits hit).


    And then there was macrovision. Yeah that shit was fun to break. Repurposed my old EPAL decoder after it had already been modified for vidiplex and galaxy MDS and later optus cable tv.
    Some idiot thought it would be funny to put some equlising pulses in the vertical blanking interval and then add in a burst of ver short blacker than black false sync pulses about line 16.
    A TV flywheel circuit would just ignore pulses that weren't ~64uS but a VCR cracked the shits. It was easy just to tell the epal decoder to blank anything that wasn't horizontal snyc.

    Hire a video, copy it and share it with your mates for $1 a hit.
    Yep what I indicated in my post #7.
    Later you could just buy a "stabilser" box for a few bucks. I think even Conrad sold it later officially but as a kit. I don't know how they got around the legality issues but nobody seemed to care much about that back then.

    Video2000 was a bit of a disaster. I was there when it was introduced in the Funkaustellung Berlin late 70's as some great new wonder machine.
    I was given one later but it never worked properly and I honestly didn't know what to do with it. Mechanically very tricky.
    That old Sony portable Betamax I mentioned earlier, I think I might still have it, was built like a switch watch and never failed no matter how bad it was knocked around. It even survived the 18V when the regulator of my DIY 12V supply crapped up.
    Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
    Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
    Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...

  • #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    Pfft... what's wrong with you old satellite pirates? Did none of you hire a video and then on the last 20 seconds record that snippit of porn before rewinding the tape and sending it back to the video shop? That shit never got old. You'd always wait until the end of the tape to see how many other people were doing it after the credits.

    Hehe... So that was you ? I was too busy dating a BIG M Girl back then.. Do you remember them ? I liked the Egg Flip Big M.


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    I remember the day waiting for 6 Months to get a letter from AV COMM telling me new transponder on Intelsat @ 180, 170 and I think on 166 were active. Yes Internet was even dreamed off in the late 80's and the only way was to find info is wait for a quarterly letter.

  • #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    And then there was macrovision. Yeah that shit was fun to break. Repurposed my old EPAL decoder after it had already been modified for vidiplex and galaxy MDS and later optus cable tv.
    They were the good days when on the Weekend Channel 9 would run movies from there uplink on the west coast of the US and around 4 to 5 pm they will switch to vidiplex and change to NBC CBS feeds with Willard Scott. Yes had a Epal decoder for Ch 7 + the Vidiplex fixer integrating in my Ecostar 8000. They were the hard days.

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    Funny to read this, just yesterday I decided to pull the entertainment cabinet apart & clean it & remove superfluous stuff.
    One thing I removed was a stabiliser for fixing the macrovision, from when I used to copy any good videos.

    left the still working AKAI VHS & DVD recorder hooked up just in case someone wants me to digitise a VHS for them, as pretty sure I've digitised every video that I thought was worth doing in my own collection.

    Cheers, Tiny
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    The information is out there; you just have to let it in."

  • #27
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    The video stablisers were crap. They fixed macrovision 1 but not macrovision 2. And there were a LOT of dodgy macrovision decoders none of which worked.
    Garry's epal decode was not all that good and from memory was a patch on a mod from an inverted video decoder. It barely worked and had a lot of issues.
    EPAL wasn't inverted video. It was inverted sync. So if you inverted the video you got a picture but if you had any white or a lot of chromonance it would lose horizontal sync.

    The EPAL decoder Julie VK2XBR and myself designed was a lot better. I'm still quite proud of how much effort we put into the logic behind it.
    The best part was that pretty much anybody could build it and it only had four pots to align it. And only Julie and I knew how to set it up correctly so anybody who built one had to bring it to us to set it up properly. We were happy to do it for nothing, we just used it as an excuse to find other serious satellite abusers.

    Yeah it wasn't ch7's feed on intelsat Mr672A, it was channel 10.
    Mystery Science theatre 3000 was on friday nights and then it was followed by a new movie which wasn't released in Australia.
    And I think it was CNN on the flip channel. I can't quite remember.

    I was having a laugh because I also remembered doing up a SECA card for a friend of a friend who use to record the French late night soft porn and copy it to tape and later burn it to VCD and sell them at the local pub to all the gronks for a tidy sum.

    I've forgotten so much of what used to be on the old i308. There was a VCII signal but it has slipped my mind what channel it was.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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    Quote Originally Posted by trash View Post
    The video stablisers were crap. They fixed macrovision 1 but not macrovision 2. And there were a LOT of dodgy macrovision decoders none of which worked.
    Well I never said it was a good one, however I don't remember ever having a video that had a copy problem when I was using it.
    Lucky me I guess, maybe I never came across a MV2 video.
    Cheers, Tiny
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  • #29
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    MV1 and MV2 look the same. And I think it was Disney that either commissioned it or at least was the first I saw using it.

    You can easily spot it in the vertical blanking interval as black and white squares from the the left to about 2/3rd's across the screen and it sometimes alternated black and white.
    I sometimes wonder if MV1 was just a clever distraction. Putting it in caused people like me to fail to recognise a change from MV1 to MV2 when they introduced the blacker than black pulses that caused the real problems.

    MV1 decoders just blanked the vertical blanking period. That worked, but when MV2 came in it didn't blank the false sync pulses. To fix that all that had to be done was detect a sync, time it to ensure it was longer than 4uS and then gate the next H sync pulse at 64uS and reset the counter. And this had to also inhibit during vertical sync periods.
    It was easy to blank the first 20 lines between H-sync pulses and clamp it at black level.

    I actually expected an MV3 to appear but it never did. The next logical place to put false sync pulses was in the picture itself. If the video level dropped to black level then the protection could have dropped to sync level for a one shot on that line. It would have also watermarked the video. And even after that there was room for other ways to mess with the signal so TV's still displayed it wile VCR's went nuts.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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