VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video]

His channel is a fresh breath of air on today's YouTube. No clickbait titlea/thumbnails, no exaggeration, no drama, no filler content? That's rare these days. Everything is well organized and clearly explained. His videos are often long, but every minute is valuable. His videos are like the opposite of CNET -- you learn more after watching 2 minutes of Technology Connection compared to 20 minutes of CNET.

YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg

Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.

I have my name listed in all of his videos going back to right around when he started his Patreon. You can find me on the first "page" as it scrolls by. Love his videos.

His videos are so interesting. I went out and bought a rice cooker after watching his explanation of its mechanism.

I am a big fan of his channel but in a lot of his videos lately, the tone has been somewhere between holier-than-thou and outright preachy. Just because you spent a week researching a semi-obscure topic enough to present about it on YouTube of all places doesn't make you an authority on the matter, and it absolutely doesn't mean you're suddenly qualified to dismiss people who disagree with your conclusions.

I prefer his videos where the vibe was more along the lines of, "Hey, I've been playing with this neato old technology lately, what say we nerd out about it for 38 minutes or thereabouts?"

I don’t know his experience with academics but if the stars aligned, he would be an amazing university lecturer.

I find his content wildly good but his voice to be so grating I can barely stand it.

I can also recommend:

  VWestlife
  This Does Not Compute
  Michael MJD
  Tech Tangents
  Janus Cycle
  LGR
  Posy
  Cathode Ray Dude

That’s a wild story I’ve not heard before, thanks for sharing.

It's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings.

Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.

With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.

The future has been monetized.

I actually think that "old tech" is pinnacle of human ingenuity.

When you see the inside of a camcorder, or a VCR as per his latest videos, those were object humans had to design not only for aesthetics but also for their function.

I'm not sure I'm clear but now, I feel like everything is just a randomly designed box stuffed with circuit boards. And more importantly, I really frequently feel like most objects I buy today are never tested by real people before being sent to production lines. If it was the case, somebody, somewhere would have noticed that a tactile snooze button alongside the buttons to change the hour on an alarm clock is stupid, or that the screen is too bright for you to sleep.

When objects were a complex arrangement of things that moved smartly together to create a function, the people designing had to test them. They also had to think actively about ergonomics because there were real constraints to solve in creating a camcorder that you can use with only one hand so you'd better place the buttons in an ergonomic place.

Because at the time it may have been the pinnacle of ingenuity. Engineers had to figure out a new thing, or a way to do a thing in certain constraints, with what they had on hand, and had to be clever about it.

Technology Connections is a rabbit hole of its own, and if you let it it will send you into a billion more.

You watch 2h30 about RCA's CED (video disc format from the mid 60s which didn't see production before the early 80s at which point it was DOA), and when the playlist ends you're sad and wonder if you should watch it again. It's great.

I suggest you start with his dishwasher content

Technology Connections always puts out quality content.

Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.

One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.

I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.

Film can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness.

80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.

TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.

Film needs to be developed to be able to see the content at all. Regular color films after shooting is covered in extremely photosensitive, opaque gray paste, and it needs to be washed and cleaned in temperature controlled acid bath to remove the reactive part and only leave the image on the film.

Tapes, on the other hand... You can just rewind it, play it, and overwrite a few times. Cost differences are significant to say the least.

Just need to take over the TV station:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2efhrCxI4J0

Very few movies were shot on tape, and those that were did it deliberately for the effect of looking awful (Blair Witch Project).

For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.

This is my main problem with the modern Youtube meta, every single "serious" topic video is +30 mins length. 10 years ago we were perfectly fine with 10 mins stuff but of course algorithms and advertising and nowadays most Youtuber is pushing longer and longer videos as if we are watching peak evening television reporting...

Please no.

His videos are long but every minute is worth it.

Let someone else make watered down videos that appear to cover everything but don't actually explain anything.

I think the problem is that a lot of creators had ran out of low hanging fruit contents. I feel his script more repetitive than before.

I respect the guy a lot but I'm not going to watch 2 45m video about gas lanterns. But that's a good thing that we have choices and people like Alec who will put that much effort into the research

Why?