Historically important interview with a key engineer in Philips video technology development.

[@Witheredgoogie]

Thank you Colin and Rudolf for 'recording' a piece of history and it is nice to see Rudolf get some recognition for his part in the amazing day when we pushed a button and could playback a television picture.

[@janmos5178]

Excellent video and interview with Mr. Drabek. If there was ever a re-interview, it might be worth asking him about the history of the Video 2000 system. As far as he remembers it from the Philips concern side. Including the fact that they knew about the system's technical problems and its early reliability issues, and the superiority of the Japanese on the subject. And about their dumping policy. Apart from their actions in the EEC trade commission of those years , did they try to do something about it. What was the reason for all this and why they did not get along with Grundig to make decks for these VCRs in one M load format or just together. Regards.

[@martinda7446]

That was wonderful. A delight to hear. The engineers are often forgotten and not given their due. Many throughout the history of our field were responsible for so much yet are never given much consideration. Thank you Rudolph. I often think of the remarkable Edwin Howard Armstrong who along with Alan Blumlein invented just about everything in radio and audio...He ended up jumping out of a window after RCA unfairly bypassed his FM patents. Blumlein unfortunately perished testing airborne RADAR when the Halifax equipped bomber they were using crashed. If we had taken more care with these chaps, who knows what they would have come up with?

[@frankowalker4662]

Wow, What a brilliant interview. Well done and thank you.

[@KR1275]

Great! Very interesting. Philips was a very innovative company with many technical experts.

[@neilmart1]

Great interview Colin. As Rudolf said it is really important that voices like his are captured for posterity.

[@mendelpearl8066]

What a wonderful addition, real info! Maybe you can have him talk some more as he seemed to really enjoy it!

[@video99couk]

More is planned...

[@Capturing-Memories]

Wow, Quite an interview. Most of these old A/V technologies were proprietary and under secret developments, so most of its history died with the death of the people behind it unfortunately. Thanks for revealing some of those historic decisions of the format through this interview, much appreciated.

[@moow950]

Wow Colin , that’s indeed a very important interview for history. Nice to know how the VCR and V2000 format were developed from an engineering point of view ! Please do more of these kind of interviews.

[@TheFleetz]

Great to document living history. Fascinating! Thanks for arranging and sharing.

[@rodrigobelinchon2982]

Congratulations Colin on this amazing interview , and special thanks to Rudolf, for sharing with us his experiences , I am sure he enjoyed being interviewed by such an expert on this technology . So interesting , to develop a product like this, all the entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking by Philips, and all the know how, expertise and determination of the men that led the project to fruition. Very impressive, I wonder if I can I find a company and people with this spirit nowadays.

[@polyman2]

Very interesting interview. It answered a few questions I had in terms of the difference between the 1500 and 1700 series. Great video.

[@williamsdavid5243]

That was a brilliant interview Colin so informative just keep up the good work with uploaded content on audio video equipment its fascinating to watch you work on these old machines ._ Stay safe best wishes to the family too ...

[@griswold67]

What a fascinating man he is. Enjoyed that

[@xaverlustig3581]

At 08:00 Rudolf speaks about a field-skip recorder. I assume the purpose would be to reduce cost as opposed to full-field recording. But I wonder how purposefully skipping part of the video signal should be possible without advanced image processing, which would defeat the whole purpose of cost cutting?

[@video99couk]

More about reducing tape consumption so giving a longer running time.

[@lorevids_]

I guess the challenge was to reduce tape speed, and giving up one field (and keeping the guard band) can achieve that. It would then read the same track twice by the two heads (non-azimuth), so a frame would be composed of two identical fields with no delay or memory required. Luckily they came up with the azimuth offset to eliminate the need for the guard band, otherwise N1700 would have lost the format war faster than you can say VHS...

[@srfurley]

Very interesting interview. I have read a small amount of material about the development of Quad at Ampex, but nothing for Any other formats. I’m also impressed at how well he can answer questions in a language which is not his own. I have tried to learn several languages in the past, but always found it very difficult, yet I learned English without difficulty. I wish I could have learned other languages in the same way. Very interesting man, I would like to hear more from him. Soon after the VCR-LP format was introduced I read a magazine article about somebody who had converted a 1500 series machine, I think it was a N1502, to the new format. It wasn’t a trivial process. I wonder if Philips produced the prototype 1700 the same way? Skip field, I think they called it suppressed field at the time was used for a while by the BBC. This was long before video tape and was a system for recording on black and white 35 mm film. One field was displayed and photographed and then the film would be pulled down in the camera during the time period of the other field. At least Cartrivision would have had a 525 line signal to start with, the BBC had only 405 lines in total and by the time you remove one complete field from that, plus the vertical interval there weren’t many lines of picture to record. I think this was in the early ‘50s. Some years ago a video was released featuring three Quatermass programmes; I think it was on DVD but it may have been VHS. The subject matter was not of particular interest to me, but technology was developing rapidly at the time and each episode was recorded by a different system and I was interested to see the results so I bought a copy. The first was recorded by a Mechau. This was a machine of German origin, originally designed as a film projector with a continuously moving film and a system of rotating mirrors inside a metal drum. By using this optical system in reverse it was possible to record a monitor display onto film. The second one was recorded on the suppressed field recorder. The third was recorded by a stored field recorder. From memory I think this displayed the first field at an increased beam current on a tube with a suitable persistence, so that it was brighter but by the time the second field was displayed at normal beam current the first had decayed so they were both of equal brightness. They were then photographed and the film pulled down while the first field of the next frame was being displayed. This would still have had the problem that the bottom of the picture would have been brighter than the top. I don’t know how they got around this, maybe they used a gradient neutral density filter, or some sort of variable shutter. I don’t know if these systems produced a negative or if they displayed a negative image on the tube to produce a direct positive, nor if they recorded sound on the same film, or if this was recorded separately. It is possible to play a sound track negative, you don’t hear negative sound if such a thing could exist, but the sound quality would be poor. To modern eyes and ears both picture and sound from these machines were pretty terrible, but they are historically interesting. 16 mm black and white telerecordings were still being made by BBC Enterprises for export even in colour days, that is how some of the lost Dr. who episodes were recovered. The BBC experimented with there own VERA video tape system but Ampex introduced Quad in 1956 and I think the BBC bought their first machines in 1962.

[@Oldgamingfart]

A fantastic insight! Yes that end panel certainly looks a lot like the signal-side of one of their television chassis. Perhaps they simply dremelled it out and shoved it in there (I jest, of course!). I suspect the later Panasonic VHS Hi-Fi mechanism mentioned was probably a variant of the G-Deck (under their joint-ventutre).. I still have two Philips S-VHS machines (VR-813) knocking around with that mech. A lot of the gears etc aren't actually interchangeable with the Panasonic original (thankfully, I never discovered this the hard way!), as you get weird faults..and the last thing you want is a timing error with a G-Deck, argh! Also have a late-eighties 24" Panasonic telly with a Philips (Mullard) CRT, so I guess the exchange wasn't entirely one-way! Anyway, great stuff! I sincerely hope we'll get to see and hear more from Rudolf in the near future. Perhaps something like a slideshow of pictures (and not because I have the attention span of a goldfish!) - I think it would be great to document more from that era before it's all lost to time..

[@JacGoudsmit]

Great interview! I wish at the DCC Museum we could have an interview like that with some of the DCC engineers. I worked in Hasselt Belgium in 1995/96 on a firmware project for a satellite receiver and there were some other engineers on the team who had worked on DCC before. I wish I had recorded their stories but I'm afraid I don't even remember their names.

[@video99couk]

DCC Museum has done an interview with an engineer involved in the format: kzbin.info/www/bejne/a3LKd6ZrjLR3gc0 That was partly what got me started on this interview. I'm told that the DCC project leader was a Mr. Sygall, if that helps. Oh, I had a Philips BSB DMAC satellite received which I later modified to D2MAC. Wish I had kept it now.

[@JacGoudsmit]

@@video99couk We had several interviews with people involved with DCC. But most of them (with a few exceptions) were managers, not engineers. They still make for investing interviews, but they usually don't go down to the technical level as much as this one. Especially not compared to the stories I heard from the Belgian engineers; for example about them testing the hardware with regular analog cassettes because there weren't any DCC cassettes yet. I would also like to know how early they started on the development of 2nd generation decks; we just found out that a German magazine already had a picture of a second generation recorder in September 1991, two years before they came out. That sort of thing.

[@sfjoos]

Very nice to listen. I now have 2 N1500, but both not really in running condition. Would be happy to find a full working one.

[@rafaelgruber6133]

A teacher of mine was also involved in developing V2000 and the CD/ CD Players at Philips in Austria.

[@lorevids_]

Great interview, good to hear some background technological stories from an engineer. I have always been interested in VCR technology and repair. As an 11 year old I already knew how to "fix" the N1500 not completely threading by removing the top cover behind the lift and completing the last centimeter of threading by hand ;-) Not knowing by then the threading mechanism would inevitably fail on each and every one of them :-( One question I still have is: what is the story behind the very first Philips VHS's that looked like second generation V2000's, the VR6460 and VR6560?

[@video99couk]

Rudi did mention that it was quite easy to change to VHS, so it seems that Philips recycled a lot of the last V2000 machines in their first VHS.

[@Super8Rescue]

Very interesting to listen to.

[@Channel405]

Cracking video & interview Colin, thanks for sharing. I still don't fully understand the theory behind DTF and the tones for positing the heads. I've downloaded a manual which includes a section on V2000 system principles.....but my understanding of German is not very good alas! I may be interested in those V2000 heads. I need to check which Philips (and clones) models I've got. It's a shame Philips could't foresee VHS domination and make the video drums the same diameter and loading mech to take VHS (or design V2000 tapes to similar dimensions) so they could play pre-rec rental VHS tapes, record only on V2000 with it's unique double sided tape. Yes the drum would have to shift angle but that's not impossible if somewhat expensive for mass production. V2000 main selling point was the rec time. What could have been......

[@video99couk]

They would have run into huge licensing issues if they had "bent" the VHS format for their own purposes. Now if Philips and Sony had worked together on a video format like they did with CD, then VHS might have lost.

[@TheRealAndreasBartel]

Akai was first in Germany with VHS, they sent their JVC made OEMs by plane - instead by ship as JVC did. One questions: I have seen RCA VHS tapes using a „VK 250“ instead of the T-xxx. What is this?

[@Ragnar8504]

VK sounds like an abbreviation for "Videokassette", the German spelling of video cassette. The 250 though... no idea! An E-180 (PAL) VHS tape has slightly over 250 m of tape, as does a T-120, so maybe that's it.

[@TheRealAndreasBartel]

@@Ragnar8504 it makes sense, but RCA didn't sell in Germany, and you can find these VKs in US eBay only. E-180 has 258m of tape But the T-120 is 247m, so 250 make sense here; but why VK?

[@Ragnar8504]

@@TheRealAndreasBartel Apparently the VK250 was a T-120 that holds 247 m of tape, which does round to 250. The VK doesn't make much sense though, unless RCA deliberately used a foreign-looking spelling but even if they had, why would they write the regular "Video cassette" right next to it?

[@PhilipvanderMatten]

I really enjoyed watching this video!

[@mdftrasher]

wow, nice interview!

[@crashbandicoot4everr]

I heard there was a prototype small V2000 cassette format that went into an adaptor then you could use it on a regular VCR kinda like VHS-C. Curious on why this didn't go in production...

[@video99couk]

That's true. I could ask about that in a future interview.

[@Wakeupproductions]

Very interesting interview, Colin. We still own four V2000s, very good machines from new, but too sophisticated electronically and therefore not reliable in the long run.

[@zx8401ztv]

What a nice man and he didn't mind answering questions :-D At 80 he still sounds sharp as a razor :-D I thought the picture was better on the N1700 on your tv, shame that the philips system wasn't the winner of the format war. We will have to invent a time machine and sabotage the vhs and beta systems lol :-D Ooops we would be stuck in a loop there lol.

[@Ragnar8504]

I sometimes do wonder how V2000 would have developed had it won the format war. I think we can safely assume machines would have gotten much cheaper and simpler over the course of the 1990s, to the point of having one single PCB instead of the dozens of cards found in the machines from the first half of the 80s. Early 90s European machines would still have been a maze of wires I'm sure, considering the state of Grundig machines from that time. DTF might have been done away with in an attempt to reduce cost, following the example of the Grundig V1600. The one crazy question remains whether it would have been possible to design an auto-reverse mech that could record both sides of a VCC in one go, with only a brief pause at the end of one side. Recording 16 hours straight in LP on a VCC 480 would have been a crazy feat, although few home users would have had any need for that.

[@Ragnar8504]

PS: I guess Colin answered the question about auto-reverse later in the video.

[@sfjoos]

Grundig did a prototype Auto-Reverse when they launched their 3rd gen. Model 2xxx. You can see the tape direction indicator on the display of the Video 2x4 Model 2000 and 2200.

[@video99couk]

There are two ways auto reverse could be accomplished: 1. Flip tape over, cumbersome. 2. Duplicate most of the mechanism so have two head drums, two audio heads, two pinch rollers and capstans. Very expensive and complicated. Of the two, flipping the tape is actually the more practical. I can't see how this was much more than a pipe dream.

[@sfjoos]

But what about the PCM HiFi prototype? I saw pictures from both, Philips and Grundig.

[@video99couk]

Presumably they had to add extra heads for that.

[@sfjoos]

@@video99couk They added a 2nd pair of PCM heads to the piezoelectric element with some distance to the video heads. 1 read an article years ago about that. They used the cue track in the center of the tape for the PCM signals. Although I can't imagine that a 0.3mm track was enough for the PCM signals. But it only was 8 bit stereo PCM. They decided for the separate heads with distance to the video heads to avoid changes in the drive mechanism. Because with just one head, they would have needed more than 180° for the drum/tape contact, just like Sony did with Video 8. Also the problem was that the heads first needed to read the DTF signals for adjustment in the beginning of the track. So reading PCM signals before the video track in the same rotation was impossible, because the heads were not yet adjusted

[@moow950]

So, according to this brilliant engineer, back in 1995 it was already clear that video recording technology was on its last legs?? That soon?

[@video99couk]

Maybe it was a little later than that, but DVD was invented in that year and I'm sure Philips could see that it was the beginning of the end for analogue recordings.

[@raythomas4812]

Interesting and depressing at the same time !