Memories Of Video

AIUI most RF pass throughs apply some amount of amplification to the signal output to mitigate the effect of splitting. Presumably this was done internally between the two tuners?


I can't quite remember which one - but one of the SD DTT recorders I've seen actually had two separate RF loop throughs on the rear with a tiny coax cable bridging the output of the first tuner with the input of the second. I'm not sure what flexibility that arrangement was meant to offer.

I can't remember what recorder it was, but I do remember my parents having a pirate copy of ET around the time it came out in cinemas - and just how ubiquitous pirate videos were in the early 80s (and the "video nasties" moral panic).

There was a video shop on a corner near us, but it didn't last long must have been converted into a house at least 30-35 years ago (!) now.

You could watch TV whilst recording another channel. You needed the physical acble to do it - from memory one had a 'female' and the other a 'male' connector'. Our VHS machine also boosted the signal slightly. As our aerial terminated in the living this was handy as I could split the feed from the VHS to another cable under the floor to a second TV in the dining room.

Around Christmas 2019 year I got regular ads on Facebook promoting that listing for some reason.

Seem to remember them being on sale in the Tesco extra near me until about 6-7 years ago.

Amazon were trying flog TDK tapes around the same time for me also. I looked out of curiosity and they were charging the best part of about £10 a tape.

To be fair those TDK tapes were very good.

Sadly I disposed of most of my tapes due to moving house and sizing down over the years, but I still have a handful and my Asda/Pacific VCR I bought for £35 in 2004 as my other machine died sadly. I haven’t whirred it up for a few years now, luckily for my sake it’s safe in storage but whether it may work fully if I get it going, then who knows?

I still have a load of tapes that I haven't got round to fully "digitizing" (no idea what's on most of them). I have got one of those two in one video players/DVD players that I managed to find in Argos about five years ago. It did cost me £300, but it was the convenience I liked of being able to go straight to DVD from tape as opposed to coming out of the video, into something else, into the computer and then out to DVD which would have been much slower. At least with the machine I could have just started it, gone to work or whatever, and then I'd just have to finalise it, and then cherry pick anything of interest, considering most of the blank media I have cost me nothing...

Did anyone own a betamax

Time to open a can of worms:

Techinically Beta was better quality on the B1 speed, but they ended up taking that off players quite early on because the running time ended up being so short.

Some DVB-T set top boxes had two RF outputs - one to feed a VHS VCR (to allow it to record analogue channels and also possibly DVB-T stuff modulated onto C36 etc. if the box had a modulator) There was a second loop through that was there which bypassed as much processing as possible to let you feed a DVB-T signal at the best quality possible to a DVB-T TV. (You'd then feed the VHS to the TV via SCART)

Some dual tuner devices have separate RF inputs and loopthroughs for each tuner to allow you to feed them with two aerial feeds. Whilst in the UK all our TV broadcasts typically come from the same transmitter mast - so we can point an aerial in a single direction - in some countries this isn't always the case (and having one tuner for each aerial can be a useful feature).

It's also a feature used in modular PVRs that can take multiple DVB-T/T2/C or DVB-S/S2 modules in modular tuner slots - which then don't have internal RF connections between two DVB-T/T2/C tuners.

We recorded so many films from sky circa 1994 onwards we had to write what we had on what tape in a book. Taught me about how to log recordings using the memory function. On a side note I don't even have any DVD's anymore as I copied them to HDD.

Yes, I did, in fact several over the years