Hacker Figures Out How To Capture Horrible-Quality Video on Audio Cassettes

Compared to the audio tone of digital files and CDs , parallel cassette tape recording was kind of awful . And asYouTube ’s Kris Slykadiscovered , it ’s an even unsound medium for recording and meet back telecasting , but quality issues do n’t make Slyka’sclever hackof an onetime cassette recorder any less telling .

Some of our more veteran reader might remember that Mattel took a standardized approach back in the ‘ 80s with the Fisher - Price PXL 2000 PixelVision camcorder designed specifically for Thomas Kid . To keep it semi - low-priced and humble , the PixelVision used sound cassette tapes which were readily available and cheap at the prison term . To reconcile the demand of video , the camcorder move the tapeline roughly nine times fast than a tape recorder would , but the results were still granular , wavy , opprobrious and lily-white TV that suffered from playback speed issues . As a effect , the PXL 2000 , despite being innovative , was far from a smash .

Kris Slyka decided to take another twinge at repurposing cassette tapes for capturing and playing back video , but since he had no intention of creating a mass - produced machine for consumers , he took a different approach . Using a pedigree but gamy - quality Sony tape recorder , he devise a method acting of encode full - color video into a signal that could be the right way show on an audio cassette using the recorder ’s stereo agate line - in connections . But he had to cut corners .

Gif:Kris Slyka(YouTube)

Since he ’s based in a county that used the PAL formatting for standard definition telly broadcasts , Slyka calculate that video with a closure of 768×576 pixels running at 25 frames per second amount to a little over 11,000,000 pixel of video data generate every sec . That would require bandwidth that far exceeds what stock sound cassette tapes were design to capture , they simply did n’t have enough fidelity to fit a datastream that heavy . The only root to the problem was to cut some corner and make some compromises when it came to mental image quality .

It release out that “ some ” compromises add up to take a 768×576 pixels 25 frames per second video watercourse and crushing it to a resolve of just 100×75 pixels go at a paltry five form per s . To smooth out choppy video Slyka was capable to double over the frame rate by twine the video images , but that resulted in the issue of pixels in a given frame being halve . And because audio cassette could accommodate two channels of audio frequency for two-channel sound , Slyka find a path to employ the second audio distribution channel to include people of colour information as well .

The resulting quality of the video effigy falls somewhere between abysmal and virtually unwatchable , and with both channels carrying video recording data point , there ’s no way to include an attendant soundtrack . As Slyka points out , there ’s a good reason with child VHS cassettes were devise ( and their even larger , professional - grade Betacam cousins ) to increase the size and sensitivity of the magnetized mag tape in guild to lodge bandwidth - heavy analogue telecasting signal .

The Fisher-Price PXL 2000 PixelVision could record low quality black and white video on cassette tapes back in the ‘80s.