The Secret Life of the Videorecorder - Remastered 

England needs you knighted. Sir. Hunkin. National treasure

Rex’s classic and memorable line “this is recorded on sticky tape and rust”.

This show changed my life.

Looks like I'm not the only one refreshing this channel to see when the next one will come out!

Its interesting how in the 30 years since this show was made, we've gone from our shows and other programs being stored on a load of rust to them being stored on a load of silicon.

These were the best shows ever. So happy you’re rereleasing them!

This was yet another episode that, as a kid, showed me how a common household item was based on fairly simple principles. I remembered bits of this episode and when our own VCR ate the odd tape the knowledge had taught me enough to be able to extract the tape through the slot without damaging anything.

As an avowed geek, these are absolutely amazing. I love this entire series. They're fascinating and spectacularly well done. I wish programs like this were still on TV that really explained how things work.

Tim Hunkin: The principles are really very simple The Machine: Captures and records imagines from the magic picture box

I was really not expecting the sticky tape and rust demonstration to sound so good. The part with Rex talking about tiny modern electronic components being hard to work with made me smile because he reminded me that I felt they signified the end of hobby electronics. Spoiler: they did not. We all adapted and some of our tools changed too.

Me: Look, one of my fafourites, how a video recorder works. Daughter: A what? Now she knows more then I did when I used one. This series is priceless!

Just been pondering... Of all the machines featured in the SLOM series, it occurs to me that the VCR had one of the shortest lifespans of 'ruling the roost' in the home. It really was only popular and a must-have item from 1979 to 2006 when they generally went off sale; 27 years. Think of the sewing machine, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the television, the telephone, the radio, they are ALL still present in people's homes (except maybe the sewing machine but that was popular for over 100 years). The VCR's light shone bright but burnt out /relatively/ quickly.

Bravo, bravo, bravo. Hunkin is the best explainer I've ever seen.

Shoutout to Cathode Ray Dude for mentioning your work/channel in one of his videos. I love these old documentaries on technology of the times. I know what I'm watching all day! #subbed

The demonstration using your bandsaw is simply inspired

I'm still a fan of this old analogue stuff. I acquired a still working Sony Handycam from 1998 last year.

I'm still recording on tape (LTO8 is 15TB in on tape!), it's nice for backup. You can't trust hard drives for long term backups. I recently digitized 30 years old VHS, and I was bluffed by how the quality was still here like it was just recorded (after adjusting the tape alignment of the reader). I'm glad to have digitized last year because quality VHS players are harder to find than 10 years ago and the later ones were of bad quality.

I`m a simple man. I see "The Secret Life of the Machines" and press like and play button. Wish to have all the episodes when I was a kid, it`s wonderfull. Commentary was like another episode showing electromechanical magnetic data storage at it`s finest. I have ( Somewhere :D ) the smallest HDD in the world, it`s Toshiba 4GB capacity drive originally mounted in Nokia N91 smartphone. Just like you said, Tim - It`s piece of jewelry. Fun fact - Phone had built in accelerometer and when it detected gravity loss then the HDD heads were parked to safe place to protect the drive.

Honestly I don’t know if I am more impressed with the explanation of how things work or with the introduction and end credits they made to go with the series.

I remember in the early 70s having a video recorder at school that was in a big wooden box under a tv that was wheeled from room to room. It was the cutting edge of science to us children. Going home talking to parents who had been around at the birth of tv about it now seems slightly surreal. We only had 4 channels when we first got one, if not 3, yet there was always something to record. I haven’t a clue how many hours of TV we can record on our new Q box, personally I only record "The Repair Shop."

I saw this when I was 14 years old and it is partly responsible for the work I have right now in maintenance for professional video tape preservation! There's more to say but I'm going to wright it up properly before I post it.

Coincidentally, I wore out my VHS copy of this, taped off -air all those years ago and played on all kinds of junky machines I picked up at car boot sales and fixed. Plenty of white mis-tracking lines add to the charm! As concerns the legendary sticky tape and rust - Ironically, some 1970s and 80s audio tape (Ampex etc) suffers from a binder which has deteriorated and absorbs moisture, making the tape now stick to the heads when playback is attempted. Sticky tape is very much still around!

I had always assumed that "AMPex" was named after the electrical unit "ampere;" I was surprised to learn that AMP are Ponyatov's initials.

It's worth noting that the lowly "sticky tape and rust" has continued to be improved and used for storing extremely large amounts of data for archival and backup purposes. The state of the art LTO tape cartridge, half the size of a VHS cassette, holds 18 terabytes (18,000,000,000,000 bytes!) on more than a kilometer of thin, precisely manufactured tape. Of course, solid state technology has now given us 1 TB microSD cards costing only a couple hundred dollars and are the size of literally a thumbnail. I really cherish the Secret Life of Machines for showing us so visually how technology works, back when you could actually SEE the technology! ◡̈

This is the sort of You Tube video that you click the like button before watching it.

It's remarkable how equipment shown in secret life of machines such as telephone, radio, word processor, television and video recorder converged into a single device called 'mobile phone' just in few decades.

Yes the sticky tape and rust comment of Rex's. I always rem that. Thanks for uploading Tim.

I'm a simple man, I see a load of rust, I give it a like!

I actually learned something here. I knew the head was tilted but I didn't know why and how it effects the playback and those bits where you held a piece of tape and moved it through (both the home-made one you recorded Rex's voice and the video tape) was really fascinating!

The helical tape head still amazes me. Not just the idea to pack in way more tracks on the same tape, but that it ever worked reliably enough to distribute millions of the mechanisms to households everywhere.

Watching your show, Connections and Modern Marvels taught me so much about the world. I feel sad for today's youth, a lot of them have no sense of wonder and discovery anymore. I hope that changes and people understand how their world works. When you know things you have power, people can't take advantage of you so much.

Thanks Tim for showing the world your brilliant career. I am amazed at all of your accomplishments. 🍺🍺

The programmes were utterly fascinating when they first came out on the BBC. I remember eagerly waiting for each one to come on.

Great to see this programme again. I made a living repairing VCRs, an era where repair of electrical items was the norm.

I love how the documentary continues with the hard drive part during Tim’s ending comments

Tim scratching with the channel 4 logo by pulling videotape through the machine is pure genius😁

I’ve always enjoyed watching this particular episode of Secret Life. Thank you so much for making it available again. Truly great stuff.

A brilliant rediscovery of a great show. I always remembered Tim & Rex taking a bunch of old TVs and getting most of them to work simply by plugging in random valves! It sparked a career in electronics. May you never grow old guys.

22:21 I would not have been able to do this scene without laughing.

It looks like Tim Hunkin has been digitally remastered. Respect for you Tim.

I knew about the German Audio Tape Recorders and that Bing Crosby was an early adopter to get his radio broadcasts recorded to send to radio stations across USA for playback at the correct time for each time zone. Also recorded programs can have retakes edited and trimmed or padded to fit time slots.

I fondly remember watching this program when i was younger. Love it just as much now.

Why did the demonstration of generation loss terrify me as a kid? I was just a weird kid, I guess. At the risk of ending up screenshotted on r/lewronggeneration, we did lose something in the transition to all solid-state and flash memory. There's no opening up your iPhone and showing how the camera takes in the picture and records it to memory, not in the same way Tim and Rex were able to demonstrate here. We've definitely gained a lot since then, and I'm not saying we should go back to hard drives and magnetic tape, but we lost the ability to easily teach the concept of how things work.

I remember this series shown on Ireland's national state television service, RTE, during the early 1990's. This episode about VCR's was my favorite, probably because I used to take my own VHS recorders apart to see how they worked. I also owned Betamax machines which worked slightly different than VHS ones in the way they laced up the tape to the head drum, and were much faster to play back a video once the play button was pressed compared to VHS recorders.

My career was built on these machines. Now even museums are not interested in them. I can record 18 hours of high definition in a memory card smaller than a postage stamp. A postage stamp? What's that?

Back in the day my instructor told us that there were 30 (thirty) lines of information (tracks) in the width of human hair. The precision for the laser mechanism to follow that with a moving disc is incredible. Especially considering that not all discs are exactly centered and they are warped up and down thru changing heat cycles. Ronn

The secret life of the pinball machine would have been an interesting episode. Maybe a bit specialist, but a lot of history, and many people are intrigued how the pre-solid state ones work when I mention I repair them. Once they went digital of course, there's an uninteresting one-line answer - it's a computer.

Oh.. my mind back to the day when I was kid while watching this.

the bandsaw method is such a smart and simple way of showing it ! great !!

I love that the VHS format is the one that won, because it should technically be HVS for 'home video system' but is instead 'video home system' because it was a Japanese invention. And that quote: "what you've been watching for the last half hour is basically a load of old rust." Hilarious!

I luv that the demonstrations aren't the best of 100 takes, so we can see how freaking difficult this stuff really was to create, make and use, and to appreciate advancement as an invention in itself.

This is an incredibly interesting series , I remember this watching it I loved it, still do ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ this remastered version is brilliant to view and actually I have some original episodes on Vhs 📼 thank you Tim and Rex for your Incredible work and Great knowledge in presenting this Brilliant series best wishes

I remember that four from when I watched this episode as a kid. Fascinating stuff. Thank you for releasing these remasters.

I remember watching this on a VHC recorder. It’s good to be able to watch it again

Love this! Thank you

The video head demonstration with the pens installed in place of the heads is just pure genius. Thanks, Tim and Rex.

Wonderful series!!

This was such a great and entertaining show....I've seen things on here as a teenager some 30 years ago that I've never forgotten and never seen anywhere else.

Spinning rust is still alive, at least in the background of cloud computing companies. Solid state is too expensive for certain forms of infrequently accessed data, so hard drives and tapes are still used at places like Amazon and Google.

Yet another great remaster Tim, thanks so much! Like many here I always look forward to seeing your next video, and this one sure brings back memories with the sticky tape and rust recording you and Rex did! I was always amazed by how well it worked!

Fabulous. Thank you for sharing.

Outstanding

Another fantastic episode.

Lovely job and your update at the end was very appreciated.

Thanks Tim,

Thank you Tim.👍

Utterly marvellous!!

Excellent video. Great detail.thanks for the upload

Superb episode! Thank you for taking the time to remaster and uploading.

I love these programmes!

One of my favorite episodes!

Thanks Tim for sharing your experiences in the end credits of the making of the Secret Life of the Videorecorder, very interesting. I am now 56 and still to this day miss the Secret Life of Machines TV programs which really inspired me to go into engineering. You are far from over the hill for making some more incredible documentary films and I think that you should really conciser it. The younger generation as always no more knows the origins of the new technology they proudly embrace as a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Doc Company to quote Douglas Adams.

Yay a new episode!

Keep 'em coming Tim - brilliant!!!

Thanks for redoing these with commentary at the end.

these productions are a piece of art. thank you for preserving them.

😍 I can't stop watching ! Great shows

I remember watching this when it was first shown. Lovely to see it again. Thank you.

Beautiful. The quality is Top Notch. 👍

Seeing these videos makes me want to pull apart machines, but there is hardly any hardware left that is this exciting or accessible I think :(

Loving these Tim. As a local Lad I really enjoy these keep them coming

You are fantastic, keep the videos coming please, thank you so much.

I love this show so much, thanks for the update, Tim! I hope you continue making videos or new episodes or what have you for us to watch, keep SLOM alive.

Tim, congratulations on the remastered videos. Looks and sounds fantastic!

This was my favourite episode, looking forward to watching again.

Love this! Such relatable animations and a very fitting creative ending. Thanks for sharing!

this video is total gem

I remember this show on channel 4 many years ago loved it still do

Love your stuff so much Tim. Had the pleasure of seeing your work again on a recent trip to Southwold. 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

Best doc series ever.

Marvellous.

So great to see a new one (newly remastered, that is…)!

This is so nice and interesting! I really love the little comments on the end by Tim Hunkin. It puts it all in perspective. And he is such a gentle, relaxed man.

Can watch these all day long!

This series of videos are, in my opinion, are the greatest ever made. So much explained in such a simple way. Thank you.

I remember seeing this as a kid, this was so much fun. Perhaps even more fun today!

Epic Series....

These are a gem. Keep em coming. You will be a huge RU-vidr soon. A rebirth of career. Thanks for keeping on after all these years. Really enjoy your programs.

So happy to be able to watch these again and with the added bonus of Mr Hunkin himself afterwards. Quality TV!

I'm hoping to get my first bandsaw in a few days. I'm absolutely planning to try 'recording' a magnetic signal on it one day.