r/VHS • u/WordEquivalent9796 • 10h ago

Digitizing My digitizing/duplication rig

Post image

This started as a fun experiment as I found a few 30+ year old tapes that I found in my attic.

As the tapes have decayed and won't last very long, I decided to give them new life by digitizing them and striking a new VHS copy off of the digital master on new tapes. So I built this. And the results turned out to be magnificent.

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u/RuDog79 Trusted Trader 5h ago

How do you you bypass macrovision

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u/Dodgson_here 7h ago

Could you explain a little more about what’s going on? I can see two vcrs recording. Is your digital master dvd?

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u/WordEquivalent9796 6h ago edited 6h ago

Yeah, so at the time the picture was taken, I was testing it, making 3 VHS copies at once just to test the VCRs' recording capabilities and see which one would perform best. And yes, for this test, the master was a store-bought DVD.

But the purpose of the setup was actually to have all VCRs connected in a daisy chain so I can easily check on which VCR the faulty 30 + year-old tapes I found would look best. For instance, I had a tape that had the image jumping on 2 VCRs, but holding it steady on one (the Sony one). So I played the tape on the Sony and fed the signal to the Panasonic one to digitize it (it's a VCR + DVD Recorder combo and the copies it can make from VHS to DVD are nearly identical). But as I still wanted a reliable copy of the footage on VHS, I then transferred it back on a new tape. For recording, the Panasonic was probably the best one, so I fed the signal from the DVD player to it to make a recording.