Recap the Year so far..

So I've been a busy person this year.

In February I noticed an odd quirk in a Toshiba RD-XS32. Its a DVD recorder with a hard drive. I took the hard drive out and put it in a PC and started looking at the bytes on the hard disk.

Not knowing the binary editor I was using too well.. and messing up on the unicode representation.. I found what I thought were "reversed" bytes in the data stream. Not only that. I didn't understand it at the time but they were (Not) Big Endian vs Little Endian reversals.

Rather they were a straight forward byte swap every 8 bits.

I'd been looking at a data recovery tool called IsoBuster, and decided to open a support ticket and see if he could make sense of the data a little more.

In the mean time I found that the Linux DD tool from ibm UNIX days had acquired a swap bytes while copy option.. and copied the hard disk to another hard disk.. then mounted it as a UDFS.. it turned out to be readable.

It wasn't readable as in title names for recordings.. but rather in some strange and new VR/VRO format I was not familar with.

Fortunately the author of IsoBuster was nearly familar with it.. and with a little prodding and comparing with the VRO format from a Panasonic DVD-RW.. and some clues left on a website years ago.. he was able to knit the files and titles back together in a virtual file system which made complete sense to a newbie like me.

And I thought that was the end of the story... turns out.. not.

I then found the same thing worked for all of the Toshiba model DVD recorders with hard drives.. they had been recently falling in price on eBay.. so I collected a few of them. Each one worked perfectly.

I then noticed you could swap the hard drives back and forth between the Toshiba models and the recordings previously made on one recorder would work on the the other model. Super.

I accidentally found out that an SD card to IDE adapter would also work on the Toshibas and completely format and replace the hard drives in the recorders.. so even if I couldn't find an IDE hard drive.. I could use SD cards in their place and make and play back new recordings.. or eject those SD cards and read them on a PC with the augmented IsoBuster program. Awesome.

In previous years I had discovered that specific hard to get models like the RD-XS54 and RD-XS55 could upload or copy (that is "dub") their recordings in their original format via a built-in function based via a kind of FTP using the hand held remote control to a normal Windows PC, running a python program or Windows Delphi (pascal) program and could in theory to a Mac as well. But directly copying from drive to drive via IsoBuster was far faster and superior.. and from SD card to hard drive just as conveneient.

From the Toshiba things kind of spiraled outwards.. the author of IsoBuster and myself discovered as I collected DVD/HDD recorders that almost all "were not encrypted" and the "filesystems" on these devices were actually in some form of very well understood and published VR/VRO or customized FAT file systems.. there was a pattern that they seemed to not be able to escape.

I think this due to their low power CPUs and using off the shelf "kits" for capturing and encoding signals from camcorders or tv/cable broadcasts to their hard disks. They couldn't stray too far from the intended VR/VRO formats used by camcorders to get them ready for burning to a DVD+/-R blank.

So by and large the differences reflected only those changes to support specialized marketing features like "timeshifting" or "video catchup" or "live replay" modes. This resulted usually in slightly fragmented or "leader in/out" tags at the front and rear of a recording on those recorders that had the feature.. but most of the time a simple trimming of the recording would be all that was necessary if desired to cut it down to exact recording length.

Besides being "Faster" to copy recordings from the original DVD recorder hard drive to a PC hard drive.. the recordings could be made in different Picture Quality modes called "speeds". Some even higher that the "speed" that DVD movies are released in, and of even better quality. So where burning a DVD typically require "downsizing" and "making the Picture Quality (worse)" to fit on a DVD.. and making it necessary to "chop up" DVD recorder recordings so that they could fit on single sided or double sided DVD media.. you didn't have to sacrifice the Picture Quality.. or the program length.. no editing (at all) was required to begin copying the recordings from the DVD recorder hard drive to a PC.

The format of the DVD recorder hard drives recordings were invariably in a type of MPEG2 recording format interleaved with additional program information.. sometimes as .VOB files. The software playback community had long ago figured out how to identify and play these back on a PC.

So once the recordings were recovered it was merely a matter on a Mac or PC of getting something like VLC to play them back, convert them to other formats.. or sometimes Quicktime and Windows Media Player just played them without any additional problems.

As MPEG2 even high bit rate non-DVD standard video files.. editing does have a few challenges.

First it wasn't until "end point" healing or re-encoding only on "cut points" came about in programs like VideoRedo.. that people could venture back and cut out bad scenes, commercials or other unwanted clips.. to save storage space, improve pplayback continuity and make things better for sitting down and watching a program.

Today many programs can "edit" out clips in a long MPEG2 video and even re-encode it to a DVD standard that can be burned to DVD or Blu-Ray blanks.

So.. stumbling along blindly.. we ended up adding support for the Toshiba, all of the Pioneer DVD recorders, most of the Panasonic DVD recorders and some of the Panasonic Blu-Ray recorders, Maganavox, Philips and a few others. It was a massive effort.. but my role was mostly in that of a clean white-room style "testing" of updated versions of IsoBuster.. while providing feedback to the author "didn't work.. or almost worked".

He was located over 7000 miles away in a foreign country.. and we have never met in person. I was simply a customer who bought a copy of his software and inquired about supporting a particular DVD recorder hard disk format.. it kind of grew from there.

Uncompressed bit for bit identical video capture is preferred if your trying to correct or "fix" video capture from a VHS recorder. The truth of the matter however is it still produces very large capture files which few people have the time or money to store and then fix large files. So while its coming down in costs.. its still a very difficult thing to achieve here in mid 2019.

And monitoring and course correcting VHS playback requires an enormous amount of personal time, when most people would rather toss in a tape, play it back and go to the gym and come back to a completed capture. Some won't even look at the capture for years.. long after the tape is destroyed or thrown away. For these situations using a DVD/HDD recorder is ideal.. and being able to offload or export the recordings to a PC more so.

I've read even the United Nations had many historical interviews they wanted to convert from aging video tape to a digital format accessible from a PC in some sort of databank. Using DVD / HDD recorders that IsoBuster currently supports would be ideal for this.

Just two months ago Verbatim announced it would be selling its brand name and all assets to CMC, a competitor who made DVD and Blu-Ray blanks of questionable quality. And not known for making blanks that could be recorded on by older DVD / HDD recorders.. so the end of that media format seems near. It may be possible to continue with PC DVD or Blu-Ray burners in the near term.. but the time to think abut ripping things stored on DVD and Blu-Ray media is here.. ripping back to magenetic storage like PC hard drives.

We never successfully figured out how to "copy" from the hard drive of a JVC - DVD / HDD recorder to a PC drive with IsoBuster. We sort of ran out of time or motivation, and it was somewhat different.. yet another custom file system.

A lot of interest and motivation in the project has fallen by the wayside and not a lot of "good" commentary has followed.. more apathy, or complaints that this should have been done ten years ago.

Hindsight may be foresight.. but in my case.. I was too young, broke or in some countries "poor" to afford touching a DVD recorder.. let along own one.. so it might have been a good idea to do it that long ago. But I simply can't imagine any scenario in which I would have been involved.

There is also a lot of negativity about the idea that it was possible.. many, many people said it was all encrypted and dreamed up conspiracy theories about how hollywood was driving the tech industry and directing what they did. I'm not sure of that.. and don't mean to knock any of that ornate and elegant storytelling down.. but we never found encryption on anything.. technically the CPUs back then just didn't have the power.

We sort of suspect encryption in one or two models and immediately ceased investigating them.. our guiding rule was not to infringe or aide in any violations of laws. Its the plain truth however that this was mostly a data recovery effort of whatever the previous owners had stored on their hard drive. Macrovision and other schemes were not circumvented and the recorders were not modified to enable violations.. this was simple data recovery.

So that occupied most of my time until mid July.

Now I'm not sure of what I'm doing.. I've been engaged in a lot of Raspberry Pi 3+ efforts with a lightning detector to automate safe guarding the power supply and DSL lines to my Moms rural home. DockerPi has played a large part in that.. I really like their Pi "Hats" which offer pass-thrus for all of the GPIO pins.. and a fan module.

Some Apple Mac Vintage Video capture devices from Grass Valley have caught my eye.. since they capture in 4:2:2 mode as Motion Jpeg, Apple Intermediate Codec and Uncompressed.. and still work all the way up to OS X 10.12 Sierra.