tim@cithep.UucP (Tim Smith ) (01/27/85)
If I tape WTBS, will the STARGATE stuff be on the tape, or
does the VCR muck with the signal in such a way as to remove
stuff in the vertical interval?
If it can be taped, then neat things can be done. First of all,
no need to convince your company to buy a dish! Just tape the
stuff at home. All the company needs is the converter.
Video tape might also be a good way to archive STARGATE stuff. Then,
if a site goes down, they can get the stuff they missed from someone
who taped it. Of course, if they know in advance that they are going to go
down, they can tape it themselves.
--
Duty Now for the Future
Tim Smith
ihnp4!{wlbr!callan,cithep}!timlauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/30/85)
Because of the low quality of most consumer VCR equipment (they are really much lower quality than most people think, but people will accept a lot of garbage in their picture), those machines are not suitable for data recordings. I've experimented with this myself. You can forget it completely on Beta and VHS machines. You are lucky to be able to record the closed captioning on 1/2" VCRs (and there are only 2 (TWO!) bytes per field for closed captioning. A U-MATIC 3/4" VCR can record some data so long as the color is stripped out (or you are recording a monochrome program). With color on, the bandwidth is too narrow and the data is smashed. Even in monochrome, the data error rate is very, very high, but you get a little of it. A good professional 1" VCR (type C, for example) can usually record some or all of the data successfully. But these are not consumer machines, of course. The cabletext data bits are impressed on the signal at a steady 5 Mhz. rate. "Inexpensive" VCRs, which have sacrificed picture quality for recording time, simply cannot deal with other than VERY low rate data. --Lauren--