so for the past month i've been leaving old vhs movies on in the background while i work
i noticed that several tapes had faded audio that got worse over the course of the film, with a lot of humming in the background, to the point of being inaudible after a while. a few web searches suggested either a worn out vhs tape (which I feared), or a poorly tracked vcr (I adjusted the tracking, which didn't improve anything)
i did notice that my older JVC vcr never had the "stereo" light on when playing back movies, and had a suspicion:
so holy crap, til: most VHS tapes past a certain age have two audio tracks: an analog mono track, and a stereo hi-fi track
when the vcr can't track the stereo hi-fi track properly, it switches to the analog mono track on the edge of the tape.
my vcr was always downgrading to the analog track, which on several (ex-rental) tapes had degraded due to mishandling and abuse (being at the edge of the tape path)
i picked up a Sony SLV-778HF today for $20 just to see if switching VCRs would make a difference.
holy COW is this a huge improvement over my old 80s JVC vcr! not only did it pick up the stereo hi-fi track on all of the "bad" tapes perfectly, but it improved the video so much that it looks like a dvd.
@vga256 great idea! :) Wish I could digitize new VHS tapes again. It's a great experience and I still have my VHS-Video-Grabber. I'm using a program called VirtualDub.
@vga256 agree with you. I remember the only end boss I've defeated was the frost guard at the beginning. After a computer crash I've lost my mood and never installed it again since.
Just backed Devil's Hideout on Kickstarter and I'm happy to announce that I'll be the Associate Producer again like in the previous @cosmicvoid games! 😎
The Kickstarter for Devil's Hideout started today!
Dedicating this one selfie to all my Mastodon lovely frands over here that always tell me that I should actually do a dorky selfie because I always write dorky selfie as cw
@edenwaith in German yes. German is a very long language which needs to be shortened all the time. Some users think "Siehe an" fits better than "Schaue an". 😁