#vcrs — Public Fediverse posts

🔮 Ah, the golden age of tech nostalgia where reminiscing about #VCRs is the new cool. 😴 Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to figure out why we need another voice-activated #lightbulb. 🚀 Keep chasing those analog dreams!
https://82mhz.net/posts/2026/08/i-used-to-be-excited-about-new-tech-but-i-rarely-am-anymore/ #technostalgia #voiceactivated #analogdreams #goldenage #HackerNews #ngated

I'm scanning some old #VHS tapes and I quickly came to the realization that things would be way easier if I made some mods to my old #VCR.

I want digitisation to be a mostly set and forget it thing. For that I can easily solder some wires to get the signals of the end of tape sensors and to emulate button presses.

I can then hookup everything to a raspberry pi such that it auto starts the digitisation process when I insert tape. It then rewinds it to the begining and then starts the video encoding until the tape ends. When thay happens, the raspberry pi can also rewind the tape and then auto eject the tape and send me a phone notification that the process went well.

This all would be rather easy if it were not for the fact that #VCRs sometimes eat tape. I need some way to auto detect this and I have no clue on how to do it.

I guess that a microphone inside the VCR plus some simple AI model could do the trick but that's way more effort than I want to spend on this project.

Another thing I considered is making like a transparent hatch on the top of the VCR such that I can easily see of the machine is eating tape. If so, I could just open the hatch and hand manipulate the tape inside to save it.

However I'm afraid that meddling with the metal exterior in such a drastic way is gonna cause some sort of problem for the RF shielding and I don't know if that could degrade video quality.