Recording Video Images on Audio Cassettes 

Really good idea, more experiments one day :)

How about trying a reel to reel tape machine at 7.5/15/30" / sec? 🙂

@@thomashenden71 I’d love to see one with two-inch-wide tape and a spinning head drum.

Why is it everyone who comes to this video is thinking of the exact same stuff?

@@AmaroqStarwind Great minds think alike :)

Thank you very much for this comment. Music is important to me. It's great to hear that someone else really appreciates this style as well.

@@JanusCycle yeah we're too few and far between. we're too underground for our own good.

@@JanusCycle i got rely inspired to explore the soundscape possibilities of this audio -> video method. Wondering if the is noticeable symmetry in music if find beautiful, or whether it differ from "normal/radio" music

no

@@jessihawkins9116 that was 2 years ago man

@@tonivoul1971 no

@@jessihawkins9116 yes

Thank you. Your comments are very encouraging. I put a lot of effort into sharing how it feels to explore technology. I really appreciate when someone notices. Keep sharing your own experiences, that's what makes the world a better place.

Well done, It's interesting that character movement was how you recognized them.

@@JanusCycle the “mugshot” style turning, facing, and holding still is pretty distinctive for screen tests! Then it was just a matter of narrowing it down from there :) the fact this was the test with the finished costumes, rather than the one with civilian clothes with visor prototypes etc, helped too!

Awesome! I'm glad this was an enjoyable experience for you :)

Thanks, enjoy

Really glad to hear you enjoyed this. The NBTV standards are really interesting. I'm so glad I found the group and started messing around with it. Cassette decks can really degrade this sort of precise signal, so I was stoked to actually get a working image.

The Star Trek guy, is Jean-Luc Picard btw.

Well spotted, nice!

It can really make my day to hear about the sort of experiences people have watching my weird videos. I really enjoyed your comment. Thank you for letting me know.

Yes, all TNG crew members! the video was production test shots of the crew, made before the first episode was filmed.

@@JanusCycle Oh!!! That's interesting! That's why it seemed so different! Thanks for letting me know!

Life can be uncertain. This one is much more chill, like sitting in a comfy chair. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vMNXpJTdVuk.html

Do you mean messing about with media formats in general and doing unexpected things? Because I have been thinking about more media format experiments in the future.

Yes do that

Excellent! these characters and stories matter so much :)

Yes, I think a quality real-to-real would produce a somewhat better, more stable image. If you do try, I'd like to know how it goes.

Maybe use a hi-fi VHS but use the audio track?

Awesome and Well Done! Thanks for letting me know.

The only way to convert video with NBSC is screen capture. It's more flexible that way but must be done real time.

Yes, I firmly support fair use in copyright. Beyond that minimum, please keep talking to me. I enjoy discussing interesting projects.

@@JanusCycle I assure you it would be a "fair use" case. I will only need a small portion. Thanks a ton already. Please let me know if you meant something differently (or I didn't get you properly) in your last comment. 🙂

im getting error 0xE000020B and am not able to usa an input audio channel

I didn't include audio in my experiment unfortunately. Have you been to the Narrow-Bandwidth Television Association forums?

@@JanusCycle I'll try that. Thanks

Do you mean several tapes at the same time with the signal split across them? That's interesting. The PXL-2000 records the video information on the left audio channel of the cassette, and the audio on the right channel. If the PXL-2000 had used both sides of the tape at the same time that would have really helped. You would still have one channel for audio. But now three for video, triple the amount of information for the video signal. Add a second cassette and you can get stereo audio and six times the bandwidth for much better video. But this does make it much more complex and expensive for what was sold as a toy. It was just such an amazing toy for it's time that we still talk about it today.

@@JanusCycle becasue its a shame i don't have the money or know how to do a project like this to make it possible, would have been cool if that was done

@@JanusCycle also to be fair toys in the past have indeed push computers to become faster and better in odd ways, I mean just look at the Z80 alone powered 70% of toys of the 80s lot alone the 90s

I'm really glad I was able to help. I'm very keen to see an NBTV encoder and decoder made for Android devices. But I understand that finding someone with the ability and time to make that software would be challenging. Let me know how you go with your NBTV experimentation if you wish. I'm also keen to make another video on the subject one day.

You definitely need an encoder/decoder. It would be possible to build a small circuit to convert the 6MHz camcorder composite video out signal to a 16kHz video signal for the Walkman. That's a bit beyond my knowledge though. And if you speed up the tape, you may be able to record better images with colour. But you might have to modify the Walkman's internal circuity as well for that to work.

@@JanusCycle That's interesting for an experiment. Could be possible to do something in the main cable to reduce and adjust the signal bandwidth? Or maybe programming an encoder/decoder into a raspberry as an interface between camcorder and walkman? Thank you

@@detectivedreams Yes, a Raspberry Pi would be able to convert the signal. Here is an interesting thread discussing the ability of the RPi to process video. www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=96871

@@JanusCycle Oh, thank you so much!!

You would need a lot of error correction, and I'm not too sure audio cassettes have enough bandwidth to do so. DAT tapes can certainly stored all of that as DATs are of course digital.

@@rommix0 DAT also used helical scan heads to maximize the bandwidth and speed available. In theory the bit rate from a DAT tape is about the same as a CD since the sample rate is the same, so you could encode MPEG1 video on a DAT with no problem, just like VideoCD.

Yes, I agree that using both the stereo tracks like this would greatly increase the available bandwidth. Your backwards compatibility is very interesting, thanks for mentioning it.

@@JanusCycle You are welcome :) If you are a computer programmer, you may try to make a program similar to NBSC scrape, using my suggested ideas. I believe it woths the try.

Thanks for providing such a valuable resource

That sounds really interesting. Please do let me know how it goes. If you have any questions or need any help then please ask. Making videos has taught me how difficult, and also how rewarding it is to be creative. Despite the constant struggle, it's worth every moment. I really appreciate hearing about people's creative journey and it's an honour to think I may have helped provide a bit of inspiration along the way, thank you so much for sharing. Thanks for watching and your comments. Looking forward to hearing/seeing your work.

@@JanusCycle what a nice thing to say thanks Janus!!

I was only able to install the very first version of Windows 10 version 1507, build 10240. Later versions didn't want to install at all. I haven't tried using Windows Update to see if it can be updated that way. Because I only needed Windows 10 for this one project.

@@JanusCycle I only tried 20H2, it didn't work, then i installed XP SP3, i didn't found driver for the touchscreen. I installed Windows Vista Business (which is the OS it vas shipped with), it runs great, ind i have all the drivers.

Tape can handle 2400 bits per second, possibly up to 9600 bits per second. At this speed video would not look much better. With lots of motion it will look much worse. Nice idea though.

AV1 can get us tantalizingly close www.draketo.de/software/ffmpeg-compression-vp9-av1.html

@@JanusCycle only if you do it "dumb" way as zx-spectrum and others did. think about phone line has waaaay worse quality than audio tape and still can give 33600 bps

@@yumiwatanabe440 That's what I thought, but tape has problems that phone lines don't, such as the wow/flutter problem he mentioned. I've heard that people achieved done similar speeds on tape, but it's not nearly as easy as I thought.

It's called NBSCPlayer, make sure you check the NBTV forums for the latest info.

@@JanusCycle Already no longer available... broken download link on their site.

I would love to do this when I get some more high end gear.

The best kind :)

It's good to experiment and try thing out.

Yes normal speed. But for best results you do need a high quality tape deck.

I used this software for both encoding and decoding. authorityfile.co.uk/NBSC/

@@JanusCycle k thanks

One of the best

Thank you. I really enjoy making videos. I've been working on developing a routine for producing on a more regular schedule. Stay Tuned!

I would love to find more software, especially an Android based encoder and decoder. The NBTV forums are really the only place I know that has anything.

@@JanusCycle I found an encoder called video2NBTV, that can encode a color video signal onto a single audio track, the color itself doesn't translate well to cassette, but monochrome video is just about possible. I think it may be an issue with the DC offset filter on the sound card. also are you having issues with the NBSC player not passing through sound on the other channel.

@@AB-Prince Great looking software, thank you! Can't wait to try it. I was not having any audio problems. I'm not sure what is happening with yours.

Here is a copy drive.google.com/file/d/1cKpAB8NhAKB8MjSZLiFrufjYHCQy5Ts_/view

@@JanusCycle Thank you for this!

It's important to consider that this is analog video I'm recording on this tape. But to answer your question you could record up to 100 - 200 kilobytes on a 60 minute tape. I tried this once in a very old video called 'Microcassette data backup using acoustic coupling' :)

@@JanusCycle Wow that's incredibly smaller than I thought. Like a 2 minute song mp3 can be 2 mb. So if a tape can hold 60 minutes that's 30 songs. And mp3 is compressed so the tape should be holding much more than that in uncompressed data. Blows my mind. But thank you so much for the response!

@@linsqopiring6816 You make an interesting comparison with mp3. Because mp3 discards a huge amount of sounds that we don't normally hear, like up to 80% of the music frequencies are discarded by the mp3 format, yet they still need lots of digital bits to do that. Whereas cassette tapes record all of those music frequencies on them, at least up to 16kHz or so. So you could say they hold a lot more information than mp3 holds. But they are limited instead by analogue distortion, hiss and wow and flutter that humans don't pay much attention to when we are getting into the music from a cassette. These extreme analogue limitations are what make it really hard for cassettes to hold digital information or you will get errors trying to fit too many digital bits on them. I'm sure there is a lesson here somewhere. Such as how extremely precise hard drives have been engineered to hold all that data on magnetic spinning discs. I't's kinda miraculous really.

@@JanusCycleOh yes I see your point now. That was a good lesson indeed 😊

You would need to convert the NBTV signal to composite video with hardware. www.taswegian.com/NBTV/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2192 Or use your computer as both an NBTV decoder and also a converter by using a VGA or HDMI to composite video adapter.

@@JanusCycle quick question. Can you do a video on how to setup NBSC? I'm having trouble recording, Value can not be null. What does this mean? Actually never mind I just found out why it won't work, because I did not set a save folder. Me dumb.

@@JanusCycle ok so I got an image from the digital file, but the analog is not doing anything but playback the audio, not the video. What I mean is I can hear the video signal, but it just shows grey. Actually I found out it was because the audio channel were flipped.

@@thenewbgamer6416 OK, sounds you were able to record the output wav file onto a tape ok? Moving on to NBSCplayer, when you load that wav file directly using 'open file' it should play clearly. Now, how are you plugging the audio deck output into your computer. Line in or microphone in? Line in can be with a direct audio cable. When using mic in you have to add attenuation the signal to match levels. I did this using 4 resistors and 2 capacitors. With NBSCplayer choose 'open device' from the file menu and images should start to appear. Even music played from the tape will decode as random pixelated video. Let me know more about how all this is going, so I know which step you are at. Thanks.

@@JanusCycle I am plugging it into an analog video capture device, connecting the audio, and I'm using audacity to capture the audio, then I play it back. I got video now, but it is highly unstable, so I have to manually Sync it. And even when I do that, it slowly strafes side to side. I also have to set the brightness down a little. My computer's mic input is difficult to get working.

If you mean NBSC, it's working for me. authorityfile.co.uk/NBSC/Home/Downloads

@@JanusCycle Oh... It was unavailable for me. I had 404 error. Thanks.

The Fisher-Price PXL2000 can be modded for composite output. It would be possible with a Walkman but that would need lots more modding.

Yeah, i wanted to test it and it doesn't work.

Do you mean this link? It can be temperamental, currently works for me though. authorityfile.co.uk/NBSC/

@@JanusCycle I see, thank you sir.

This is a Fujitsu U810, also known as a Fujitsu U1010. I hope you also have an amazing day /night.

@@JanusCycle thanks 👍!