Analog TV was smarter than you think

[@OddityArchive]

Bummer. I really had my fingers crossed for the ACS signal on that tape. Fascinating watch nonetheless. And, yes, I think I need to find one of those hubcap devices now. :D

[@thekidfromiowa]

I assume you want the tape back ;)

[@kkadera]

Avengers level geek teamup tho.. successful or not.

[@Choralone422]

I'm not entirely sure but I think the ACS signal was only occasionally present in the signal at like the top of the hour or possibly only a few times per day. I think it took a while (possibly overnight) for it to work on a Sony VHS player I had in the late 90s.

[@Robdeltonie]

I actually once played an old VHS tape of PBS Kids programming on a newer flat-screen HDTV (through the composite video jack, not even the RF signal), and after stopping, I noticed the date was somehow set on the TV for April 2000, which is when that VHS recording was from. So it's definitely possible to have it recorded onto VHS tape. It's weird that your tape didn't have it, though. I know it's difficult to take my word for it, as it's just some random person on the internet without any proof, but I guarantee you this is true!

[@BrianStewart126]

If the ACS signal is embedded in the station signal like the other meta data, then as a hypothetical VCR manufacturer I would intentionally exclude processing of the ACS signal from channels 3 and 4 (in the US), precisely to avoid the issue of someone's clock inadvertently being screwed up by playing a tape through a separate VCR.

[@andreasu.3546]

I remember watching a movie on SVHS in the early 2000s that had been recorded on November 9th 1989. The recording contained all of the channel's teletext pages of the day, including breaking news about the fall of the Berlin wall as it was unfolding. It was quite a blast from the past at the time to see that and probably would be even more so today.

[@alisharifian535]

I will never forget the day when i discovered that VHS recordings can also record teletext data and send it not only through RF cable but through composite signal. It was pretty unbelievable for my teenager mind😅.

[@5roundsrapid263]

That is lost media! Ceefax the day the Berlin Wall fell?

[@jimbotron70]

Right. Mine however used to record Teletext data over VHS garbled and scrambled...

[@JSRphones]

I never doubted analogue being smart, it's smart enough to utilise closed captions after all!

[@5roundsrapid263]

PBS in the US invented them in the ‘60s. I had a deaf cousin with a huge decoder box about 1990, just before they were included in new sets.

[@JSRphones]

@@5roundsrapid263 It's surprising that they weren't incorporated into new (TVs or VCRs?) until then. It's only fair that the hard of hearing among us can know about anything important happening rather than video alone.

[@5roundsrapid263]

@ It was the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1992.

[@kFY514]

As you mentioned, in Europe we had teletext instead (in fact there's a standardized digital encoding for it and it's still broadcast on many channels even long after transition to digital!), which was kind of both better and worse simultaneously. Better, because it contained literally hundreds of pages of text, with current news, whole schedule for a given channel, and various fun stuff like horoscopes, ASCII-art-esque images and so on. And it was also used to transport closed captions over here. Worse, because other than those closed captions and the clock, there was very little structure to anything in it, so it wasn't really possible for the TV to automatically decode the name of the current broadcast or anything like that. EPG systems for analog broadcasts eventually did appear (NexTView, Guide Plus etc.) but there was no single standard and adoption was limited. Even worse, European PAL/SECAM VBI teletext was too high-bandwidth to survive recording on VHS. It did survive recording on S-VHS, but that was never too widespread. Some hobbyists are trying to recover the signal from regular VHS tapes, but that requires some proper restoration work and more specialized hardware and software. So we don't have such vast incidental archive of historical teletext broadcasts as you have of closed captions and XDS information over in NTSC regions. It also meant that closed captioning wasn't possible on VHS in the PAL/SECAM regions.

[@PaulTheFox1988]

Are you sure about that last point? I have to hand a PAL VHS tape of Aladdin with the National Captioning Institute logo printed on it, and I distinctly remember seeing information at the beginning of tapes saying about closed captions being available, in fact I also have PAL copies of Snow White and Flubber with that logo which I would say proves that subtitling/closed captioning is on PAL VHS tapes. I can't say whether CC was on tapes with other languages, but for UK I can confirm that CC was available for VHS.

[@kFY514]

@PaulTheFox1988 How would you enable those captions? Was it teletext like on TV or some other feature?

[@meetoo594]

@@kFY514 Teletext had its own version of closed captioning that basically removed the page background so you got an overlay on the video. There was a dedicated button in the teletext area of a vcr or tv remote. Im from the uk and also remember rental tapes having teletext subtitles available via the normal teletext function of the telly.

[@stuartmcconnachie]

@@PaulTheFox1988 Teletext subtitles and American CC systems are different, although they are both encoded in the “spare” lines during vertical blanking. American’s CC are lower bandwidth, and so can survive recording on regular VHS tapes and machines (perhaps by design). Teletext is higher bandwidth and requires SVHS bandwidth to stand much chance of recovery via normal playback. Edit: So maybe there was prerecorded media with the American CC encoded subtitles on it available in UK. But as far as I know there was very little, if any, consumer PAL VCRs or TVs that could decode it (certainly none of mine could). Perhaps there were specialist devices or set top boxes available for the hard of hearing?

[@PaulTheFox1988]

@@stuartmcconnachie we didn't have high end VHS players at home, but ours definitely supported the closed captions of the prerecorded tapes we had, I'll grant you though that we definitely couldn't record teletext subtitles, not just because of the hardware limitations, but we also never had SVHS systems, we didn't have the money for anything that fancy lol. The closed captions on PAL VHS are apparently an adaptation of the line 21 system used in NA (not an expert in this field so I'm going off what I've read) and at least from my experience and from what I've read didn't require specialist hardware to use it, I'm not sure why your players couldn't make use of it, but the ones we had could 🤷

[@The_Magic_of_Zelda]

My sister used to be a corrections officer (CO). Every inmate that bought a TV would have the V-chip enabled by one of the COs before the TV was handed over to the inmate. Off topic but nice to see your ThinkPad X60 again. I had a T61 and it was one of the best laptops I ever owned.

[@fungo6631]

But why? What's the point?

[@The_Magic_of_Zelda]

@@fungo6631 I never worked as a CO so I have no idea. Inmates eventually figured out how to disable it so it became pointless.

[@Aeduo]

@@The_Magic_of_Zelda Endless time to break a PIN code in prison.

[@itme999]

I love an Oddity Archive shoutout! Also never knew that XDS technology existed. Very cool!

[@pikgears]

After the digital switchover we got a converter box to keep using our analog tv. Surprisingly it converted the digital metadata into an XDS signal including the closed captions and age rating. I don't recall if the auto clock set worked.

[@spongbros]

UK TV broadcasts used something called PDC (which relied on teletext) to signal VCRs to start & stop recording when programmes began & ended - handy when schedules overran - but I don't recall anything as involved as XDS or V-chips in the UK. Fascinating! I have no idea how I've lived this long without knowing that Westlife were managed by Simon Cowell.

[@meetoo594]

I had a high end akai vhs machine that let you set the vcr recording timer by selecting what you wanted to record directly from the teletext tv listing page. And yup, if the broadcast changed time the vcr would reschedule the recording. The vcr could also download huge chunks of the teletext database (maybe every page, it took a few minutes) into a buffer for instant access or transfering to tape. It was also capable of decoding the hi res teletext standard although i never found any channel that broadcast it even after going through hundreds of european channels on the Astra and Eutelsat constellation's via my pace satellite box and an 80cm dish. v-chips were an American only thing iirc, never saw anything like that on uk equipment.

[@rich_edwards79]

​​@@meetoo594That was VideoPlus. The machine translated the 6-digit code printed in the TV listings into day and time data to start and stop the recording. Probably because setting the manual timers on some 1980s VCRs could be quite challenging for those who weren't 'tech-savvy', but most people can punch in a short code. By the late 90s, many machines had both VideoPlus and Programme Delivery Control (PDC) which used an embedded signal to start / stop recording at the actual time of broadcast if the show was delayed or overran. I also remember the introduction of page caching and 'fasttext' where instead of entering the 3-digit page reference, you could press a colour coded key on the remote that corresponded to news, sport etc. All clever stuff which fascinated me at the time! It is a pity that VHS recordings aren't of sufficient resolution to easily extract the teletext data. I missed Ceefax so much that i set up my own version using a Raspberry Pi and the VBit software that's shown in other KZbin videos.

[@dyter424]

There was also ShowView (alternatively known as VideoPlus+), which would let you program a recording by inserting a code. In Italy, ShowView codes were published in TV guides through the 90s but disappeared in the early 2000s.

[@LightTheUnicorn]

Analog TV could do a lot. I mean for a long time it was *the* way a lot of people got a considerable amount of information, it really was prime real estate to tweak and play tricks to do cool and useful stuff. I used to really like playing the Bamboozle quiz via Teletext as a kid!

[@brantisonfire]

Awesome stuff. Always love watching the quirky and interesting discoveries about analog video and audio you cover on the channel. On a side note, over the Christmas holiday I showed my father-in-law that he doesn't need to get rid of the Panasonic CRT that has been languishing in my brother-in-law's childhood bedroom. I have a stack of the old analog-to-digital over-air antenna converter boxes (I have swore to my wife they will come in handy some day) and showed my FIL that you can still get OTA television even though the analog signal is no longer broadcast. We live in a mid-large metro area that has the main ABC/NBC/CBS and FOX main broadcast antennas, so we get about 40-50 channels on antenna (given good weather). Also, the Apex analog-digital set top boxes I have output in S-video, so the ATSC signal converted to analog and going into S-video on the CRT actually looks really clear. It probably looks better than what was being broadcast as NTSC video back when the analog OTA signals were still being broadcast.

[@MrNeverseeme]

when I was young I watched 90210, So many flashbacks just went through my brain seeing it again.

[@Sb129]

I remember for a long time, torrent sites would sometimes have rips of tv shows and you could see the closed caption on the top of them, that was also something I remember early flat panel displays doing, they showed the whole picture after all. I saw it so much that I got used to seeing that changing white line at the time at the top of videos.

[@lapielazoolie]

I still notice it with captures done with Pinnacle devices from that time, CDCB’s VCR comes to mind if you viewed what he’s posted

[@ihsan_lol]

14:27 So that's where you channel name comes from!

[@andrewinnj]

I love that your appreciation for not-quite-mainstream things extends to and includes the boy bands of the 1990s. Your educational/instructional/promotional collection of VHS tapes is similarly charming.

[@rich_edwards79]

Westlife weren't as well known in the US but in the UK & Ireland, Europe, and many Far Eastern markets, they were absolutely huge.

[@Ron2600_]

Our Zeinith TV we had in the early 2000s had a display that said what the current show was. Occasionally it was missing a few letters. Boy meats world became boy eats world.

[@Aeduo]

boy meats world would be a very different show.

[@ericdunn8718]

The Food Network/Disney Channel combo everybody snickered at, but it was really just a plain jane barbecue show 😂

[@TechTokOffical]

A always thought the coalial cable was something that turned out to be an amazing invention. When cable companies started using it to run cable TV they had NO CLUE that 15 years later they would rely on that same cable to provide the entire country with high speed internet service, finally breaking the barriers and bottle necks of dial-up internet

[@twocvbloke]

I remember finding out that teletext appeared to work when playing tapes back in the 90s when I was a young 'un, and it was showing old news and info from the time the recordings were made, it wasn't very accurate as the data was mildly corrupted so text and images (well, the ASCII art!) was often garbled, was an amusing discovery, even got it to work on TV tuner cards later in my life too, finding tapes of Channel 4 (UK, of course) recordings is worth it just to play a game of Bamboozle again... :D

[@siskospaceman]

So cool to see a 411VM vhs cassette in that Funai image. 411VM is a series of skateboarding videos, and they are awesome! Thanks for the great content!

[@SmoothEmJay]

You sir, are a legend. Proud to have been supporting this channel all these years. It's rare you walk away without learning or seeing something new. Appreciate you.

[@ozzie_goat]

I love how the dog in the V-chip commercial has a preferred TV rating of "?" That being said, my sister always employed me and my brute forcing skills to figure out the password so we could watch whatever we wanted

[@Aeduo]

Yeah with a lot of home alone time, and the assumption that the code doesn't lock out, any 4 number pin could be reasonably cracked in time.

[@Vynncent]

Given enough time, anything can be possible

[@zetametallic]

I liked that too😂

[@andrewmorrison6067]

Some European countries used teletext data embedded in the picture information for an analogue-era EPG called NexTView. Channel 4 (UK) in the analogue era used WSS to automatically change the mode of your widescreen TV to remove the black bars on movies and other 16:9 letterboxed content (by zooming which made for crap resolution). I watch output from a satellite TV receiver over RF in the bedroom and to be honest it makes me a little nostalgic for analogue TV. It was better on a CRT than a modern day LCD for sure, but I think imperfections in the picture and a slight softness adds a degree of charm, a bit like some music on vinyl. Television is after all an art form, it doesn't have to be indiscernible from looking at real life. A good analogue picture, on a good CRT TV, is superior to SD on any TV and HD can sometimes be 'too' perfect in some situations.

[@BeefyMon]

The video for REM’s “Electrolite” has some crazy use of advanced CC effects- custom colored and positioned lyrics, etc., at least the version aired on MTV back in the day did. Unfortunately the version on their DVD compilation doesn’t appear to contain closed captions-the Sony DVD player I owned at the time had the option to show closed captions in addition to embedded DVD subtitles. I ought to try again on my current Oppo UDP-203 and see if it finds them, because it would seem logical that the same master (with CC data) that MTV played was also used to compile the DVD.

[@dennisthebrony2022]

Never knew VCRs could ever be THAT ADVANCED, with data showing show and program information!!! Maybe they should also add in a Show Index Search (similar to Chapter Search on a DVD or D-Theater) or even closed captions to REALLY make this thing ahead of its time!!!

[@dyter424]

I remember how our old Panasonic Quintrix CRT would show channel names! So this data was encoded in whatever the PAL equivalent to XDS was (possibly part of Teletext?), and could actually contain programme information, but I only ever saw the channel's name (RAI 1, Canale 5, etc.)

[@eddiepetrick6222]

This feature was also available on Sony Trinitron TV's in the 90's.

[@maxpowers2168]

Yeah, my Sony tv from 1998 has that feature and was able to watch info and some music videos from MTV with the close captions in blue and pink colors

[@BanazirGalpsi1968]

You hooked up to both tech connections and oddity archive! This gives me hope that KZbin still is a community!

[@Nutz0]

very cool. there is more stuff hidden in the vertical interval. on professional formats, the timecode and something called userbits were recorded there, too. the timecode is the frame number and the userbits were optional and often contained the camera id or date of recording. this is usually stripped off by the proc amps during editing but occasionally it finds it's way into the broadcast signal.

[@Jdbye]

I have an old Pinnacle USB TV tuner that displays some lines at the top of the screen and I thought it was a glitch. I never realized there might be data hidden in there. I've never seen a VCR or TV here in Europe that had any of these features, they were all pretty basic, but I suppose the functionality must've existed. We had teletext, and some channels used teletext for closed captioning so you just had to go to the right page on the teletext to see subtitles. But that's about it, I definitely never saw XDS here, and we didn't have separate closed captioning, it was only through teletext. I also didn't see auto clock set, but it's not something you would notice unless you went into the VCR menus, so maybe it was supported and people just didn't know about it.

[@ShayBlez]

That Quasar VCR has the coolest style of loading tapes ive seen in a while, --Nah, more like those 5 CD wallets that used to go in your car's center console. :D

[@vwestlife]

That's called a "toploader" VCR.

[@CamcorderHomeVideos]

​@@vwestlife I typed out a whole comment, but KZbin deleted it for whatever reason. If you don't mind, what FireWire card are you using with your computer? Is it an ExpressCard?

[@vwestlife]

@CamcorderHomeVideos I use a laptop with a built-in FireWire port.

[@CamcorderHomeVideos]

@@vwestlife Ah, got it. I was watching an older video of your earlier. I think I found one that should work with it though. Thank you!

[@altebander2767]

Well Intercast data was kinda high frequency around the colour burst. Decoding was kinda sketchy even for live programes, so I doubt it would work well. As for teletext, that's still alive and well.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

"Back n my day..." Seriously them kids don't know just how good they have it.

[@Doodlebug1996]

Really appreciate your channel brother. Been watching a long time. The first video I watched of yours was the Yorx Speakers video.

[@ElevatorWasher5000]

My Fox 4:3 local Sub-channels have the CC lines at the top 17:41 and those bands are used for 5G now

[@Vuusteri]

Never heard of these technologies. But I guess they weren't implemented in Europe? EDIT: Nice to see my upload of "Windows 98 presentation fail (HQ)" at the end :D

[@1337Shockwav3]

Funnily enough, Teletext still is a thing in 2025 in Germany. My dad uses it to check soccer results every weekend and I stumbled upon it as well just 3 days ago when using the DVB-C Multicast feature of my cable router with integrated tv tuner - fun to display teletext on a Windows PC using VLC. The Line21/closed captioning topic also gave me flashbacks to the very late 80s/early 90s when I was a kid ... some day the TV my parents had (for 10+ already by that point I think) started displaying weird patterns *over* the top 10% of the screen in white, pink and blue. I remember being fascinated by it - to this day I'm unsure whether something actually broke as I was told or if the TV was just too old to discard/interpret whatever data it overlayed. EDIT: I think it may have been Teletext actually as it was rolled out in 1990 in Germany and would fit my memory regarding the point of time.

[@JoshColletta]

I taped ABC's broadcast premier of the Flintstones movie "I Yabba -Dabba Do!" (Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm's wedding) in the early 90's. I had known about closed captioning and teletext, but while I knew of the **existence** of teletext, I had never seen it in action until I accidentally hit the button on the remote while watching the playback of that tape. To my surprise, it was showing a program schedule for the next few hours! I tried doing it in real-time the next time I was tuned into that station, but it must have been a network thing, because the local affiliate wasn't using teletext at all. To the best of my knowledge, no one in Miami was, at least not in the early 90's. That was the one and only case in which I ever saw it.

[@austinorth5549]

I thoroughly enjoyed this. I would love to see a detailed video on digital over the air tv decoding, there seems to be so much going on in a digital tv signal multi track audio TV guide closed captioning. Thank you for making amazing content I've watched for over 16 years.

[@jacknettube]

TEXT-2 of the line 21 signal was once used for embedding hyperlinks that would be read by WebTV boxes for connecting to the website of the program or broadcaster.

[@ntsecrets]

I have a Betamax tape from around 1980 and the captions are “thank you for your purchase of the [brand] closed caption encoder this is an example of text” etc.

[@MiiGameplaysHD]

okay that's just silly

[@thegreatcodeholio123]

I have VHS tapes recorded late 1990s early 2000s that I can pinpoint exactly the time it was recorded because of the XDS data in the signal. Stations here in the US transmitted the current time and date in XDS, which was also how VCRs were able to automatically set the clock on the display. Some stations in the US also did something for WebTV where they used TEXT2 (second TEXT data stream of the caption data) in the caption data to repeatedly broadcast a web address you could open in the browser. If your video capture card lets you read the 21st scan line on both fields, the 16-bits of data per frame are easy to decode and you might find all sorts of interesting things up there. XDS is on the second field of the frame, normal caption data on the first. There is a Wikipedia article about 608 closed captioning that might be a good start on how to decode the stuff, then there are pages on the internet that attempt to describe XDS. Have fun.

[@thegreatcodeholio123]

You might like to know that most consumer DVD recorders in the mid 2000s also preserved closed caption data when recording off of TV. As did some brands of MiniDV camcorder if you hooked up the A/V input to record a video source instead of from the camera.

[@Markimark151]

VCRs in the late 90s and early 2000s were advanced and used XDS and VCR plus, I used it a lot to record shows that data of episodes of Fraiser and ER on NBC, it was such a great feature to know which episode is playing!

[@thevacdude]

As always, Thanks for the video, Kevin.

[@MiiGameplaysHD]

Having a Damn&Hell option in a VCR menu is honestly nuts, who would even use the TV Guardian part of the VCR?

[@rich_edwards79]

The US religious / conservative types. I'm British, married an American. I recall my amusement at learning that many radio and TV stations in the US censor what to us are very mild terms. My late MIL, a devout Catholic, would never say 'hell' but only 'H-E-double-hockey-sticks'. I'm glad we take a much more relaxed attitude to profanity (amongst other things) here and indeed can be pretty creative with it when necessary! We had a morality crusader in the 70s called Mary Whitehouse who'd have loved the idea of the V-chip, but being widely regarded as something of a prude, she was rarely listened to or taken seriously.

[@Authoratah]

If I need archived video of 90's boy bands... I know who to contact 😂

[@flatfingertuning727]

In the 1994 I worked for a company that sold a closed caption encoder/decoder system. The original version connected to the printer port, but I designed an 8751-based version. I don't remember how much the product cost, but I think it was quite a bit cheaper than the card you listed.

[@frankowalker4662]

Here in the UK we had Ceefax, Anything recorded off TV would contain these pages for that time and date.

[@kpc211]

Most of Europe still has that service.

[@frankowalker4662]

@@kpc211 It was shut down here when analog TV was turned off.

[@kpc211]

@@frankowalker4662 Yes, I know, that's quite sad that the country to first have introduced teletext was first to phase it out.

[@THEtechknight]

The original weatherstar machines for TWC used the VBI area for their teletext data, and it used the large majority of the available lines. They moved over to subcarrier because they needed the VBI for other stuff like the above.

[@azjames8789]

My Bible toting scripture quoting dad had a VCR like that would edit out curse words in the late '90s and it wouldn't just edit out curse words but words such as kill, hate, shoot, stab, hit, and hundreds of other common phrases. Ridiculous! It made watching the movie unenjoyable. There were constant pauses in the audio. It was like listening to a radio station from far away where the signal kept going in and out. I always wondered if you're so easily offended then why watch the movie at all?

[@dmcintosh1967]

I have a sanyo DVD player from 2002 and it has TVG too. Miraculously the DVD player still works fine and is the same model as one my grandma used to have.

[@LotoTheHero]

How interesting! I was completely unaware of many of these features!

[@TheMW2informer]

This has to be the only channel I’ve watched as a kid and continue to enjoy over a decade later! Feeding my inner AV nerd.

[@ericariley1696]

Nice Oddity Archive shoutout. Also Westlife on VWestlife!

[@robbieblackmon1801]

Ben has a lot of good videos on his channel but his narration just doesn't top yours with your calm, soothing tone.

[@Mrshoujo]

My aunt's Toshiba VCR she gave me could detect additional data off Satellite TV (DirecTV methinks) Analog / composite video output. I found this out when hitting Display & saw it displaying Trek Nation when I was watching it. My mom's Magnavox MX big screen could detect over the air TV Guide info from channels though it was not conveyed by the local cable system. It was tricky to set up with the remote using buttons which weren't labelled for that purpose but once I had the ZIP code set, it worked.

[@the_kombinator]

Hah, for the years I've been watching you, I think I finally made the connection regarding your handle - An amalgamation of Volkswagen and Westlife. I feel so dumb now :P

[@BricksVids]

My Panasonic/Quasar VCRs have information that pops up on a tape if that tape was recorded on one of those type of VCRs that shows the channel and input as well as the date and time.

[@XMguy]

My Sony 27” SDTV had the XDS functionality. It was cool to see what was on and how much time was left and all. Never had a VCR with the same feature though.

[@rupertthomson]

Teletext was well loved in Britain. Page 888 was the universal page for subtitles, and Channel 4 had great quizzes on the Bamboozle page. Could get local cinema times on the ITV channel, and of course the legendary holiday offers. Booked it, packed it, f...

[@kbhasi]

Yep, similar thing in Australia where, if I recall correctly, Teletext page 801 was the universal page for subtitles. Over in Singapore, where I live most of the time, I seem to recall that Mediacorp never ran subtitles on their Teletext services, likely because of character set limitations that would've meant they could display English and)or Malay text but not Chinese nor Tamil, so when they went to DVB-T2, they used DVB subtitles, which look to me more like sequential images with a transparent background, likely allowing them to render the subtitles server-side and send them out as subtitle tracks for each language. They don't do live subtitles, but instead, bulletins that were produced by CNA for other channels (e.g. News Tonight on Channel 5) have hard-coded subtitles (likely) based on what's being displayed on the teleprompter. I'm not sure about the UK as I've never been anywhere there in person, but in Australia, TV networks still seem to use Teletext subtitles, probably to allow for live subtitles on news bulletins.

[@fungo6631]

Not just bongistan though. Even in other countries it's still used where there's teletext, in the DVB-T2 era.

[@rupertthomson]

@fungo6631 Yeah, we have a new version of teletext on BBC channels (maybe others, I don't know) on DVB but it doesn't have the same old rickety charm for me. Still useful though.

[@kpc211]

@@rupertthomson Well, most of Europe still has this old version of teletext you don't have in the UK any more, sent as a DVB stream.

[@rupertthomson]

@@kpc211 that's very cool

[@ricolthewildcat]

I have seen Closed captions on my old CRT from 2003, and my Samsung lcd TV from 2007, also seen closed captions from other lcd Televisions as well.

[@caseyrevoir]

00:03:00 David's pantomime with the clothing iron is world class.

[@ericdunn8718]

I wonder if this is also related to some tapes having similar information on them, because I remember using a similar (but much lower quality) VCR with an old tape when I was young, and hitting a button on the remote by accident and it showed the name and time remaining of the movie me and my sisters were watching, Muppets from Space. I also found out in the same way that the VCR also had a tuner I didn't know about when the movie was finished and I ejected it, I hit another button on the remote by accident when taking the tape out and suddenly we were watching football with the sound cranked up somehow. Again, this was a low quality VCR from the same era as the one you mentioned, a Funai product under the Sylvania brand (we bought a lot of those because it was cheap at Kmart, where we did a lot of our "high value" purchases lol), but worked surprisingly well for its flaws and cheapness (unappealing black plastic that was easy to bend and a weird back half that was angled off on the corners so it would fit better around other cables on a shelf, where we put it, but also having a free tuner that we never used, connected or knew about until that day, and having a high speed rewind and fast forward that could rival my grandma's higher-end Sony model from slightly before then, she still has hers from when us kids would watch old Disney movies on it all the time because buying old VHS tapes was cheaper than buying new DVDs even though we had the players for them)

[@ntsecrets]

I remember having one of those clock set vcrs but sometimes it would get the wrong time or timezone. I suspect because it found a cable station maybe from another market that had the data. I remember the tuner would show it go through all the channels in reverse order when powered off.

[@AK.16]

I live in the Philippines where the American NTSC-M standard is still being used (transition is supposed to happen this year). I recently went to a hotel in a rural area, and I was shocked it they were still using analog cable tv, not terrestrial. Of course, quality is terrible compared to modern digital tv, but it is not necessarily too bad. It's fun watching CNN with fuzz and snow all over like its the 2000s. I am also surprised that local tv channels picked up by the Analog Cable TV has Closed Captioning. Major TV stations in my country pretty much ignored CC during its analog days and only implemented it when they switched on digital tv, but I didn't know analog tv now also used CC.

[@outaspaceman]

This is where I wish I had the original remotes for my VHS (or any other) machines..🙁

[@Snowcube]

Wow, I was 4 days old when you recorded that WNBC segment.

[@Devo_gx]

My first thought was that it worked similar to RDS for radio, but this is still pretty neat! I remember hearing about Intercast, but I never came across XDS.

[@KennCaesius]

I had a handful of VCRs with ACS and after watching this video, did that system EVER work? In my area, there are two PBS stations it would try to tune into but really, it never did. I knew how to program my VCRs - it was faster to adjust the time that way.

[@TheOriginalCollectorA1303]

Very cool to see these features in action! How can videotape be obsolete when you’ve got so many awesome advanced technologies integrated into the signal? It’s cool to see the XDS data saved on those recordings, almost acting like an archived TV Guide for that period of time.

[@Lachlant1984]

Regarding the Intercast technology, I actually do believe it's mentioned in some of the Windows 98 promotional materials. If you have a Win 98 PC, run the welcome to Windows 98 program and click the option that says something like "What's new in Windows 98, for users upgrading from Windows 95". You'll get a multimedia presentation of the new features, divided into categories and topics, somewhere in there is some information about Intercast, but I can't remember the name of it. I do believe there was a program you couuld install from the Windows 98 CD, I think it was called something like WaveTop Datacaster. Furthermore, I think the tuner card you needed was the ATI All In Wonder Pro. I may be getting confused now, it's been many years since I saw that multimedia demonstration on my family's PC.

[@JeffBilkins]

Broadcast style data and internet services are kinda fun, just send everything all the time and people can grab what they want. It also existed on satellite for developing countries, and iirc there was something on radio as well. Would be even more fun if you can request stuff over telephone or physical mail, although I don't know if that was actually a thing.

[@Aeduo]

"Request over telephone". Plenty of dial-in data services even pre-internet. The benefit of this is it's very very little extra cost to broadcast to everyone and have people subscribe/select what they want, no need for a dedicated line/2 way link. Stuff like Sega Channel worked like this. Or that NABU thing. But also various other things. I guess there was some like, radio thing for "microsoft network watches" or something around 2000 that I remember seeing in a magazine. Just the usual boring stuff that every new tech at the time offered though: weather, stocks, maybe news headlines, that kind of stuff.

[@jimbotron70]

Stuff over telephone was done in the '80s (Minitel)

[@doomedhuh]

i used to turn the closed captions on MTV during music videos cause sometimes they would have the lyrics to the song and i remember sometimes the captions were in different colors

[@deeiks12]

I never thought that when capturing TV shows, I captured the teletext as well. Need to check if i still have the tapes from back in the day somewhere.

[@Lachlant1984]

Some years ago, Adrian Black of Adrian's Digital Basement uploaded his reactions to some programming recorded from MTV in which there were advertisements for a programming guide type feature found on Zenith TVs, I can't remember the exact name of the feature.

[@vwestlife]

StarSight.

[@KanawhaCountyWX]

This makes me wonder if any of the later tapes recorded by my father might have some of these signals on them, but I'm pretty sure my Philips combo unit does not decode XDS, and even if it did I don't have the remote.

[@IainDavies-z2l]

The ACS signal was sent on the carrier from the TX, it was never recorded onto the tape. Even when the signal off tape is re-modulated to RF the ACS signal was not on it.

[@vwestlife]

But according to the info I've read, it was transmitted via line 21 in the VBI, just like closed captions and XDS.

[@IainDavies-z2l]

As in the UK TELETEXT was transmitted on the first few lines, but you could never retrieve it while watching a tape. If you pressed the TEXT button while watching a video tape all you got was a lot of jumbled letters. I think you could get it with high quality SVHS decks and tapes.

[@TheLucidLuxray]

I remember getting this exact VCR new for my 7th birthday. Cool find.

[@bigsky1970]

I had a Toshiba DVD/VCR combo that had many of these features including show title, length, and time remaining, it also had a really nice feature that it would grab the current date and time from a broadcast and sync the clock and calendar accurately, much like a computer would do from time to time by synchronizing it's clock with an internet NTP server.

[@kennethevoy]

Westlife on "Extra". Were you named after a boy band?!

[@Israelischer_Bobfahrer]

I really enjoyed the ASCII art featured on german teletext. Especially the ones on the pages who advertised XXX hotlines ;D

[@kpc211]

Interestingly they still do. I was in Germany like 2 weeks ago, browsed through the teletext on some (mainstream!) commercial channels, and it turns out they still have those adult hotline adverts with adult ASCII art xD

[@Israelischer_Bobfahrer]

@@kpc211 ohh wow :D

[@joltdude]

This reminds me of another service that used the VBI to broadcast to pagers called CUE paging

[@UpLateGeek]

I've been hunting on and off for a closed caption generator box for a while now. I've got a Philips PM5518-TX which can generate teletext, and an ISA card that can decode vertical interval timecode, but I'm still not able to generate CC or VITC. At least not in hardware. In theory it should be possible to get line 21 out of my BM Intensity Pro 4k composite output, but I've never tried it. What I really should do is ring around the studios at work and check if any of them have an old AI-Media box that they've decommissioned or planning to decommission. We're currently building a new studio, so I'm guessing they'll need new AI-Media boxes that work with SMPTE 2110.

[@AndrewMackoul]

My old Samsung CRT has a PBS station setting in its setting menu. Now I know why!

[@GeoNeilUK]

The Teletext signal is not reliably recorded onto VHS tape, it's taken several VHS recording to archive singular teletext pages though they are somehow managing. It does make me wonder if XDS was ever used in the UK though, I can imagine it now if it was and you had a Britsh VHS recording... "So the XDS signal was also comptible with the PAL standard as you can see here... if I press the XDS button, you can see it identifies the station as ITV TTTV... TTTV stands for Tyne Tees Television which was an affiliate of the British ITV network..."

[@lapielazoolie]

16:58 Oftentimes, that’s usually how it displays at the end of the programme. I remember awhile ago (probably late 2000s), watching a show on demand and the captions would appear all over the place in random spots and the usual black border was multiple different colors each time new text came on. Now _that_ I have never seen before, not that it was supposed to happen to begin with I’d imagine

[@jouniko]

I got a vague recollection that by adjusting the tracking, I was getting a less garbled teletext time and date decoding from non SVHS tape, but I'm not sure about if I had to actually misalign the tracking completely or was it that my VCR was misaligned and the auto tracking was off sometimes and I had to adjust it manually for perfection. Some tapes did better with that data, sharper image perhaps. I've been wondering if it was about the head switching noise, or whatever that noise is that shifts across the screen when you adjust the tracking.

[@richardh100]

thank you a very interesting video a clever vcr I wonder if it can detect teletext text and show the text on a teletext tv set😊

[@Thiesi]

15:26 - A true Jetta aficionado does not just _drive_ a Jetta but also _watches_ it! (I know you bought a new car recently, but still...)

[@themirrorsofmymind]

I had a few VCRs that showed the name of the program I was watching on the screen, which was nice, but I shunned 'em all for Mitsubishi VCRs because of their HIGH SPEED fast forward/rewind (in as little as 55-60 seconds) feature!

[@victorlacerda9659]

On brazil a few years ago whem we abbonded analog television we use this sistem for captions a lot of, as i do remember this was by law for deaf people.

[@fungo6631]

18:45 Yeah, ain't gonna happen chief. VHS tapes are known for not being able to properly record teletext due do bandwidth limitations. Even S-VHS struggles! You're gonna need some more modern equipment to extract that from VHS.

[@loganmacgyver2625]

i had some success grabbing bits of Teletext off of some tapes, sadly my VCR is a low end 1990 sony with only dual heads and no SCART (i am in PAL land) and the tapes i tried are moldy and has been chewed by the teeth of time so it came out really garbled. I'm hoping to thrift a better VCR

[@jimbotron70]

No SCART in PAL land? 🤔

[@irtbmtind89]

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft Actimates (animatronic dolls) were another thing that used data in the VBI.

[@Roxor128]

I have to wonder how much could be played around with if we could apply Software-Defined Radio techniques to television. It probably wouldn't be too hard to generate an analogue video signal in software, just from the specifications of the encoding, though the files it'd spit out would be huge. Channels went up to 8MHz of bandwidth, so you'd probably need a sample-rate of at least 16MHz to be able to store it. At 16 bits per sample, 20MHz sample rate, that'd be 40MB per second of generated signal (enough to fill a CD in 16.25 seconds), and then you'd have to find a way to get it out of the computer and into the analogue equipment you want to play around with. Decoding it would probably be a good deal harder, though.

[@So1]

How in the hell am i just noticing my vcr has this feature. i need the remote asap

[@KanawhaCountyWX]

If I could find one of those hubcap devices that would be really useful for me, since even if I can't see the TV screen I could get the rs232 text, either with my computer reading it to me, or in hard copy Braille with my embossers

[@So1]

Oh hey bud

[@AMDRADEONRUBY]

Let's go Vwestlife time I love these VCR videos thanks I miss that era . Ah man Ive had 3 VCR a high end Sony this one and Goldstar (LG)

[@richardthunderbay8364]

Another enjoyable video. Thanks.

[@jsnsk101]

One thing that bothered me in the US in the late 90's was the fact they didnt use different color text for different people speaking on the closed captions. I was surprised it wasnt world standard

[@leftymuller]

its like a tiny version of teletext

[@mindaugasstankus5943]

more comparable to data coming with FM radio signal than most barebone teletext out where.

[@kpc211]

@@mindaugasstankus5943 RDS

[@Gunbudder]

i'm still wondering how the hell my last gen VCR could auto detect commercials perfectly and cut them out of my scheduled recording. i had my VCR set up to record the first season of CSI (i loved that show). i wonder if it used this signal?

[@meetoo594]

Here in the uk a little box with strobing lines used to appear in the top right of the screen just before the ad break. I think it was used to cue up whatever machine played the ads at the broadcast studio but could also be used to pause a recording. Not sure how the end of the ad break was detected, maybe it was timed?

[@vwestlife]

Some VCRs did indeed use the XDS data to identify commercials, as well as detecting when the picture goes completely black. But my Sanyo does not -- when you push its "commercial skip" button, it just fast-forwards 30 seconds.