A Woman Who Preserved over 30 Years of TV History
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
It's much more reliable from S-VHS recordings, though those are understandably much rarer.
I'm specifically talking about a full raster SD video capture at 720x486 NTSC with the VBI information visible. Is there a filter that will read the white dashes in the VBI and do some sort of optical translation of the dashes into something like an SCC file. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I used to actually be able to decode the VITC in my head by reading the dashes. It started out as a joke while bored working 3rd shift where we'd offset the H/V delay on a monitor. It actually became a useful skill when we started digitizing the full raster video image but the time code was not captured/saved in the resulting digital media. Reading the white dashes allowed me to then reset the time code of the digital file.
For those wondering, there were 2 types of time code in video tapes. LTC (linear time code) was an encoded audio signal that would sound like a series of tones that would be decoded into time. VITC (vertical interval time code) was visibly encoded into part of the video signal that consumer televisions would not display. Normally, the player would "listen" to the LTC while playing and fast scan/rewind. While a player was paused onto a video frame, it could no longer "hear" the LTC. It would instead then switch to decoding the VITC. The VITC was also not able to be decoded at fast speeds since it went by too quickly. When the VITC and LTC did not match, all sorts of interesting things would happen in an edit bay.
https://archive.org/post/121377/internet-archive-officially-...
I've heard about this happening during the early days of TV. For example, there was a lost episode of Dr. Who that finally turned up and part of the story was that most studios just re-recorded over the old stuff.
I didn't realize the practice continued into the 80s.
Are there any estimates for how much TV footage was never preserved by the networks?
It's a lot easier to imagine live TV such as news or sports not being recorded or saved. Broadcast-grade tapes probably weren't cheap.
Damn, that's astonishing. I hope it ends up on youtube: I still watch grainy recordings of HBO from ~1980 for laughs, would love to see what "real" TV with commercials and programming was like over 40+ years.
How much of what's transmitted around the Earth escapes?
Then as radio becomes more sophisticated, the signals become harder to receive and be recognized. Over time, radio becomes more efficient, so signals will be more directional, lower power, and compressed. That means you have to be in the right place with the right coding scheme otherwise the signal won't be received, or will look like noise.
The probability of decoding NTSC signals (ie, the old SD standard) without prior knowledge is probably going to be better than decoding the current digital MPEG broadcast standard. So the aliens have about 50 years of signals to look at before it suddenly looks like we encrypted everything.
I hope they like reruns of Mr Ed.
rom 1968 to 1971, she had co-produced Input, a Sunday-morning talk show airing on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate, with John S. Stokes Jr., who would later become her husband. Input brought together academics, community and religious leaders, activists, scientists, and artists to openly discuss social justice issues and other topics of the day.
"She eschewed Tivo, and although she was an early and evangelical investor in Apple Inc., she never sent an email in her life. She even managed to convince the rest of the already-wealthy Stokes clan to buy Apple stock, which paid off in spades. She funneled these funds into her recording project and the massive storage space she required as the sole force behind it."
It comes down to savvy investments on her part and family money, not just "she spent her husband's money".