Capturing Austext (Teletext) from VHS/Beta/other tapes

Hi folks,

My name is Jonathan and I'm a Master of Creative Industries student at JMC Academy - my final project is a visualisation engine fed from Teletext data. I was directed to this forum thread on OCAU from the Australian Vintage Computer Collectors group on Facebook. And, while I don't exactly need any more tapes (although I'll gladly take them off your hands if you're willing to donate them to the project) I would still greatly appreciate more datapoints. The capture itself is fairly easy - if you've got a capture card that's capable of seeing the VBI in Linux, then you can simply run the tools from the command line, and it'll generate .vbi files ready for conversion into .t42 files that contain the Teletext information.

Ideal candidates are from the Seven Network broadcast between the 1980s-2009. Other networks did broadcast tests, which are interesting to capture from a historical perspective, but the main focus would be content from Seven. Capturing full tapes is preferred, but contiguous recordings of 20 minutes in length do render surprisingly good results.

The tools themselves are located here.

Thank you for any and all help you're willing to contribute to the project!

 

You may like to check out VHS-Decode which grabs RF directly from the playback heads. There is a growing community working with this but I am not sure if there are many Australians.

 

I was wondering if the captures you've performed/uploaded on your YouTube channel were made using VHS-Decode - that's actually how I discovered Teletext recovery. I was astounded by just how much quality folks were able to pull by using a direct RF tap - better than anything more traditional capture methods have been able to resolve so far.

If this is the case, is there any chance you might be able to upload/otherwise share .u8/.vbis from tapes you've already captured, please? They'd greatly help out my efforts!

 

No I don't use VHS-Decode, I use the driver that comes with the capture hardware I use. While it sees 625 lines the driver outputs 768 lines so it is only the viewable area that I capture.

 

I see. Well, in that case: do you still have the tapes that you made the original captures from?

I ask because part of the community approach that I'm taking with this project is the ability to send VHS collectors a fly-away kit of sorts that contains everything you need (save a display, and a VHS deck) to be able to contribute to the project remotely. (That and I've already got plenty enough tapes. Heh.) To empty the internal drive of captures, I'd commission the computers to include a Blu-ray drive and ship them with a supply of rewritable blanks so that when the disk became full, you could mail back the discs instead, as opposed to needing to open the computer out to fish out the drive. (There would also be the possibility of being able to capture more than one tape at a time.)