The cloud doesn't exist, it's just someone else's VHS tapes.

This is... a hilarious idea.

Not really, you could make a 1080p video with a 128x128 checkerboard pattern for example, then read it in a program, bit by bit. Black square = 1, white square = 0.

The video would have to be raw uncompressed surely?

I actually think the idea is notable, and despite the potential data loss it can potentially be made up by using Parchive. It'd make the backup process longer but allow for all the files to be recovered assuming it can restore any data at all. Clint, since you have the hardware on hand would you try that experiment for us, take a 10MB dataset, generate a Parchive of said data set, backup the dataset along with the generated Par2 files, upload it to youtube, then take the output of it and see if you can recover any data and if so can Parchive repair any data lost.

yeah it was a great solution I think.

It says 1500 mb. So thats what 1 gb and 300 mbs? 5 tapes could store more then a 5gb at a fraction of the cost. I would not say for “free” im not sure if you recall the cost of blank tapes but depending on the store. It was not cheap. If i recall correctly an 8 hour tape costed around 10-12 per tape. A 6 hour one costing around 6-8 a tape. Radio shack always charged more for that stuff tho. That and tv coaxel cables

I had one of these. The time required to perform a reliable backup made this less "free" than you'd think.

Tape was and still is to this day the highest density storage medium - in recent years there have been tape drives developed that have capacities up to 580 TB

@@calebbenedict5587 Yes but the drives are insanely expensive.

Wouldn't surprise me if what Google/YT are doing causes a storage demand spike next year.

No, he should use this to back up his files to youtube!

B0Boman Awesome.

J Blahut Lol he should've made a bonus video where he uploads a full 6 hour video of some files he backed up with it, and in the video the files he should've backed up would some of the recent LGR KZfaq videos just for the hilarity of it all

LMFAO!!!

Heh.

This product reminds me of the Sony PCM device that they sold, that recorded CD audio PCM data to VHS. The on-screen data looks very much the same even. PS: I was backing up data to VHS back in the day, but not with one of these, I was using a JVC D-VHS deck and used Firewire to transfer. I had some kind of program that converted data into what was essentially MPEG2 video with colorful blocks all over the place, and it represented data in such a weird way. I can't remember the name of the software though, now. It was for Mac OS.

Whoa with D-VHS deck you could get around 50GB per tape wasn't it (tho that was the tape capacity, not necessarily what you would get with that method)? Tape backup has always been quite epic on the size classes. Even nowadays you find many TB sized tape systems for business backups.

DVHS tapes were made of a different material, so they weren't exactly quite like VHS. But, I have successfully used SVHS tapes as DVHS tapes, but the playback sometimes broke up more as a result.

DVHS still used oxide tape, but it was a higher quality formula then standard VHS and SVHS tapes.

@@dgpsf Also D-VHS was introduced in 1998 and could store up to 50GB on tapes that where backwards compatible to S-VHS and VHS, however it was never widely used for data storage. Actually according to Wikipedia you could even use S-VHS tapes for storage instead of D-VHS tapes which was cheaper but maybe also less reliable.

That sounds interesting can I get a project link?

I am interested, too!

Is it possible to convert Data into a modern hd mp4 Video and decode it afterwards? That would be nice.

Is it upstreamed in the Linux kernel?

And Sony did it first, in the early-80s with PCM audio recording... the same thing DAT employed.

That's actually not the worst idea, or at least wouldn't have been at the time. You could turn the encoding rate way up and have something with the transfer speed of a pair of 10mbit network cards, or a Zip or 2x or better CD writer (plus a fast-ish read rate), for somewhat lower price. Be useful for bulk data transfer / duplication or mass imaging etc.

@@markpenrice6253 I guess if you worked in a TV studio that already had video links all around the building / between locations, it could have been useful. Pretty niche use-case though

Back in the day, combining it with a wireless video sender might actually be a good way to send files!

Yep, the receipt for the capture PC. I keep all my receipts!

Haha I do too, just not in PCs xD Great video. Working on VHS archiving this year myself, so interesting look - even if it's the opposite direction I'm archiving.

EposVox I thought maby you mixed it up for a IDE cable until I took another look, there really is a recipt lol

Garfield There's no such thing as a perfect boyfri- "Yep, the receipt for the capture PC. I keep all my receipts!"

5:40 is that the only one

Replying to a 3 year old comment, but oh well. I have one of these (somewhere) and it showed a frame or block number of some kind at the bottom of the screen (when you play the tape to a tv). When restoring files, it would say what block it needed and you could ffwd to just before that number.

I think this is a job for Vinyl Video actually!

@@sweetestperfection90: If he had a professional vinyl cutter that would be even more interesting, but I _know_ he has a Laserdisc recorder.

(9 months late to the party) Damn I would kill for a CED/VHD recorder!

LOL! WWMD... What Would Macgyver Do.

/highfive

I did that with "Skinemax" lol

Legend.

Just how? That's brutal Do I even want to know?

thegamerguru97 My husband had to drive 5 miles off site to store them "in the bunker." Government back up can be... Interesting 🤣

I worked in a Verizon (then GTE) data center from 98-2001 as a "tape ape" and we had a library of about 800,000 data tapes and 12 large tape silos (and dozens of smaller systems all over the place). We even had some processes that were still using reel-to-reel tapes (which held about 2mb as I recall) that we had to then physically mail to the customer (Missouri state medicaid being one of them). We also housed the GM OnStar servers and they required physical tapes too (though they were normal cassette tapes). If the mainframe requested a tape not in the silo a message would come up on a series of TVs hung from the ceiling and we'd have to go chase it down and manually load it. Some days that was as many as 60 tapes a minute so you were constantly running (literally... we had to maintain a certain "mount" time of less than 60 seconds... we usually kept it under 40) around a football field sized area filled with was looked like 8 track tapes. The silos would also generate a pull and eject list every day that was generally 1000-3000 tapes that would go to off-site storage about 5 miles away and load a combination of blank and additional data tapes to replace them... EVERY DAY. Keep in mind this was well into the era when 256MB USB drives were dirt cheap and widely available. I once did the math on what it would take to replace the entire library with CDRs put them in a silo of their own and it was a shocking low number. Something like a couple thousand discs. I ran the math out over a year for the expense of replacing 1/2 of the discs every single day and it was far less than the cost of paying us all to mess with the tapes. Even at that, it took them until 2009 to finally kill almost all of the tape operations and perform their backups digitally to server farms all across the US. I'm not surprised that your university hasn't figured that out yet, but I am disappointed.

Maxwelhse it's England so everything's slow to adapt, that and from what I gathered from the team leader they need to have physical backups they can hand over to law enforcement should the need arise. They did digital backups from what I recall as well but being a college (UK equivalent to the US's last 2 years of high school) it was fairly small scale.

I was in a junk store and saw an old AES Plus word processing system and decided to pick it up on a whim. It weighed over a hundred pounds, the keys were bakelite, and the monitor would glow for up to ten minutes after being turned off and depowered. It had two 8 inch floppy drives, but it didn't come with software, so I called AES in Montreal. No one there recognized the serial number of the machine, but a few days later I got a call back from a woman somewhere in Europe who had been with AES for decades and recognized the model. She told me that Honeywell-Bull owned the rights to the software, and still sold it. I contacted Honeywell-Bull and they confirmed that they had the AES Plus operating system and software on 8 inch floppies and that they'd be pleased to sell me a copy... for something like $400. I politely declined, but it's amusing and frankly amazing to think that somewhere, in a dusty corner of a warehouse which probably looks like the one from the end of Indiana Jones, there is an old, cobwebbed crate filled with shiny new shrinkwrapped 8 inch floppies for a word processing system which became obsolete in the 1970s.

That was my job back in 2002, shuttling tapes from the server room to the off-site vault.

That is exactly what I thought the first time I saw it.

dont know if that was a valid time though..

Why is everyone so mystified by this? Sure, I didn’t know when my family were still using a VCR to timeshift, but we stopped when I was like 5, so I never learned. Nowadays though I know exactly how to set it on my laptop, I figured it out almost instantly, I didn’t even want to change it; I just saw it and I figured it out. Not that it makes any difference though, some internal battery failed years ago and now the clock doesn’t save.

Do you know what kind of error correction this used?

Sean H I work at best buy, and yes we do. We still sell walkman CD players. The 90's are still real.

I guess it means people are still buying them?

Just for the record, and I say this only because old tech like this is becoming more interesting to younger audiences who never had it the first time around, you're better off cleaning the heads by hand and they're usually very easy to get to by simply removing the top cover of the machine. A standard issue alcohol wipe from a first aid kit is usually all you need. If it leaves some lint behind, hit it with a can of air duster. You'll probably want to replace the belts anyhow so you may as well just do it all at once when you're inside the machine. A bigger issue with old VCRs is that the heads may have become magnetized, especially if it was left with a tape in it for the last 20 years. You need to degauss them in order to fix that and your money is probably better spent on the tool for that (about $20) than a head cleaning kit.

I went into my local Best Buy and they had a couple fax machines and ancient yellowed landlines standing up still.

I want one of those walkman players.

I'm watching at 360p on an old Win XP netbook, so I can't even see the jumper settings.

cool

Dma Adress stuff suuuuucked.

@@michalnemecek3575 You can watch KZfaq on a Windows XP netbook? At 360p? Is it Internet Explorer?

@@aidancommenting No, it's an old version of Firefox ESR

CD mastering was usually done on studio Umatic tapes using the PCM1610/1630 format. Beta later had the PCM-F1 format which was used more as a backup and transport medium than for CD mastering. VHS was rubbish so was rarely used for digital audio except for some very low volume designs. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor

S-VHS was used for the ADAT system.

Actually audio CD - and the raw data on a CDROM including the copious second layer of error correction code - is rather higher rate than that, at 1411kbit/s or approx 173kb/s. 44100hz sampling, in stereo (so x2) and 16-bit resolution (so 2 bytes per sample per channel) = 176400 bytes per second. The rate on the disc itself is slightly higher still as there are various additional subchannels, but those are usually added in by the mastering hardware alongside what's coming off the master tape holding the audio proper. What we're seeing here, however, is indeed probably equivalent to the situation of audio CD vs CDROM. You could afford to have the occasional small dropout in your audio master, notwithstanding that the quality of both the tapes and the recording & playback hardware would have been a touch above typical consumer equipment (what they mainly wished to avoid was the R&D cost... VHS fit the bill just nicely and had already been developed to maturity, they just had to build *good* VHS decks and tapes). For data, you absolutely cannot allow any non-correctable errors, thus you shove in as much EC as is needed to guarantee that, and then a little bit extra for safety. So a 2352 byte audio sector (2552 byte including subcode, IIRC) becomes a 2048 byte data sector, and in fact "Packet CD" type CDRWs hold even less as each sector also has to include a bunch of sync data. The Backer software could adapt the output signal to have quite a range of output densities and thus transfer speeds, between variable pixel clocks, line widths, lines per frame, amount of repeats, and how much detection/correction code was added, but it kinda makes sense that its defaults, at least, would end up sort of aping that of CDROM. Early CDs probably weren't materially much better than VHS in terms of how many dropouts you might get from even a pressed disc, so with an overall recording frame set to be about the same as audio CD, and the error protection set to be about the same proportion as CDROM... voila, 150kb/s. Though I do doubt it's *exactly* the same. Merely close enough for the similarity to jump out at the pattern-and-connection-obsessed human mind. FWIW, there seem to have been two variants of the VHS based system, one of which ran slightly slower at approx 44056hz (which was just written at the same old 44100 at mastering time, with the assumption that no-one would notice the 0.1% speedup)... which was basically for compatibility with cheaper setups that were literally just a consumer or at least prosumer grade VCR plus a Backer-type device... namely, an *NTSC* con/prosumer deck, and thus one that was made to fit the *colour* NTSC standard, so running at 59.94 fields/sec instead of 60.00... With all else being equal, and the system otherwise adapting the CD audio signal to fit 60 fields of 240 lines instead of 50 fields of 288 lines per second (or whatever the cross-compatible rate actually was - there's a Wikipedia page somewhere that has the detailed spec, all I can remember is that it used the somewhat odd figure of 98 bits per line), 44100 is divided by 1.001, same as everything else with colour NTSC, to give 44056... (or was it 44075, with a different number of bits... and that was as close as they could get to 44100? Who knows... it was a lazy bodge, anyway, as a quick bit of Windows Calculator work shows all they really needed to do was shove in an extra line every 4 or 5th field, which should have been easy to keep track of and well within the capability of the NTSC VHS system (which would have recorded at least 241.5, maybe 243 lines per field), not to mention any electronic device sophisticated enough to convert a 1.411mbit/s bitstream to or from 44.1khz analogue stereo audio... eh...)

Well yes, I actually have a Alesis deck here, but that was an 8-track studio format like DTRS (I have those too), it wasn't really used for CD mastering directly.

It wasn't the reliability, it was just how much data would fit per PAL video frame on the U-Matic tapes. Despite NTSC having a higher frame rate having 100 fewer lines per frame made it only capable of a 44.056 Khz rate while PAL just happened to come out at a nice even 44.100 Khz. Any other reason ever said for why CD audio is 44.1 Khz instead of 48 Khz is BS. Had things been different like NTSC working out to 42Khz and PAL 42.352 Khz they would've chosen NTSC because the number of samples would be easier to work with despite there being a very slight reduction in ultimate audio fidelity.

Maybe the unreliablity

Wilson Solt stuff like that and Tape in General is only worthwhile for backing Up stuff, Not normal Data usage. It's very slow and often unreliable in it's mechanism. Also Back then the average User had No real need for large backups.

As far as I can tell, it just was poorly advertised. I would have absolutely bought one had I know about them. I was busy saving up the $400 for a CD-R at that time instead.

no audio maybe?

then again you can backup stuffs other than videos

I know its a 2 year old reply... But there was a Disney movie of the week called Cloak and Dagger where they did that on a video game cartridge.

@@480JD Cloak and Dagger is a series though..?

@@aidancommenting this was like back in the 80's, it was just a 2 hour standalone movie, there are some clips of it on youtube.

The Movie Cloak and Dagger was based in small part off the Atari video game and starred Dabney Coleman and it was about spies using the cart to transport secrets while the TV Cloak and Dagger was based off Marvel Comics of the same title. EDIT and Cloak and Dagger movie was a full on theatrical release that made about 9million

LOL - yeah hopefully there was some sort of encryption :P

DMA no - MDMA yess!! :)

Ah I don''t need to print while gaming. This DMA and IRQ is fine. - Printing page 55 - Windows: "DING!" - dammit

IRQ conflicts were always worse for me

Freako Last time I saw anything of yours, you still had a fry looking avatar.

So happy to see you here off all places.

Clint's early videos used to be recorded on tape!

Freako I want a proper VCR add-on for my desktop PC.

Yo Killgruz!!! Quit watching LGR and make more Super Mario Game Genie videos

This concept is actually melting my brain, just a little. Only issue is that you can't draw the video file in real time, like you could with a VHS movie. Just need to spend five and a half hours transferring an iso file from your VCR to your computer. :^)

IrenMasot There's a thing called D-Theatre, it had hd video on vhs. So it is possible.

PiersyPiersy It is possible, but not with the hardware used by the Danmere Backer, and also not with a normal home VCR, you’d need a D-VHS machine with special hardware and S-VHS/D-VHS/W-VHS tapes.

@@HP-pg5vg D-Theatre is not on your regular VHS, its like saying you can have HD movies on CD because Blu Ray exists.

Well yes, you can't play a d-theatre tape on a regular vcr, but it is still the same exact media.

13:47 too, it fitted pretty great!

I like how you're the only one who really noticed. I also thought it was a nice touch.

6 hour was pretty much the standard as I recall. I routinely had 3 movies on a tape. The would have been SLP recordings though.

Or one movie if it’s Lawrence of Arabia XD

A T-120 tape is 2 hours in SP mode, 4 hours in LP mode and 6 hours in SLP/EP mode, but the quality goes down as well, obviously. I think the longest that was usually available was T-240, which would be 4 hours in SP, 6 hours in LP, and 8 hours in SLP/EP.

Nihil Quest I had the entirety of Dragon Ball GT on two VHS. Ah, the bootleggery of late 90s!

Zzyzx Wolfe I remember the longest tape you can get at somepoint was 12 hours

Hold on. Just need to load my SimCity save off this video tape. *Failed* shit!!!!

The best noises

Except when the tape got stuck ;) It Danmere (read: damn near) sucks! lol

@@billant2 Get outta here!! 😂😂

LOL 👍

Edward Bell Okay, but don’t touch my N64! 😡

Edward Bell I'm stuck in the 60s/70s. lol

you was trying to find any excuse to tell everyone that you have a Nintendo 64 dont you?

Edward Bell im stuck in the 2010s

Yushatak Unlikely to work - the MPEG compression on video DVDs is designed for use with realistic video. It'll probably fail horribly on essentially "random" pictures like this. Would be interesting to try though.

That is a good point, but if there's a way to control the "resolution" of the data so that the "pixels" of the backup become larger it might still work. Depends on exactly how the decoder is written. Anyway it's clearly just an exercise in curiosity to try it - if I really needed to back up to a DVD I'd just plug a drive in externally or internally and write software if necessary, lol.

Well, there is, but not in any meaningful way on a home deck. Because essentially you'd have to capture it as raw video to some other computer and encode it to a different video format before saving it to DVDR. DVD video itself is pretty limited. You've got a choice of 352, 704 or 720 pixels across, and either 480 or 576 vertical pixels recorded as an interlaced stream of 240/288 line fields (or with 352, you can also have 240 or 288 progressive... essentially just cramming everything into a single field then pausing everything for a field's duration), with a data rate somewhere between about 1mbit/s (a little less than that used for MPG1 VCD, taking advantage of the increased efficiency of MPG2) and no more than 10mbit/s including the audio. Now, if there's some way you could cajole the recorder into making an "i-frame only" stream (which is essentially MJPEG), instead of using any of the motion-compensation and prediction algorithms, and you recorded at 352x480 or 352x576, with the (near-)maximum data rate (which would fill the disc in just over an hour... in fact, *absolute* maximum DVD video rate on a regular 4.3-metric-Gb disc ends up storing *exactly* the minimum amount needed for a film to class as a "feature" rather than a "short", 55 minutes... but normally the max is pegged a little lower-rate, at "1 hour", usually 60 minutes and a few seconds, for convenience), and also in monochrome rather than colour, with the minimum allowable audio quality, I figure you could probably record Backer data just fine. Each horizontal pixel would cover roughly 2 DVD pixels, and the contrast would be enough that even with each horizontal line changing almost completely it should record each seeming 4x8 pattern accurately. It'd be dreadfully inefficient, but it should work. I can't say however that I know of any consumer DVD recorders that can pull off any of those tricks; for starters, you're very much locked into the standard "GOP" for key and deltaframe encoding, which is IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB (I=fully encoded keyframe, P=high quality motion/difference encoding delta frame, B="bidirectional", low quality, mostly motion-encoding delta frame) and is essentially one of the main reasons MPEG is at all able to provide acceptable quality video at a practical bitrate, and would also be the reason that the encoder would go *utterly apeshit* when faced with what looks like high contract but oddly low frequency static. It'll be hunting like crazy for all the differences and movements it thinks might be hiding in that signal, and doing a really bad job of it... *any* MPEG encoder will do badly here, but your DVD recorder will be double bad as it'll be encoding in realtime (a desktop converter might be able to spend several seconds on a particularly difficult successive set of odd or even fields; a realtime consumer chip gets 1/50th or 1/60th of a second and not a jot more), and will likely be using hardware built down to a price with software that was baked into a ROM chip, or a custom DSP, many, many years ago, rather than being relatively up-to-date desktop software. On top of which, your choice of encoding rates will be limited and closely tied to the resolution (HQ, SP, and probably whatever the medium-length option is will be 720x480/576, LP will be 352x480/576, and super-long-play will be 352x240/288, with the rate being fixed at some constant determined by the advertised recording length of each mode on a standard 4.3Gb disc - so typically 1, 2, maybe 3, 4, 6 and maybe 8 hours), most particularly you aren't going to get 352x480/576 at maximum rate. 720 might be an acceptable substitute however. Also, colour will be locked in as the encoding mode even if the material is completely monochrome, and you won't be able to do anything about the audio, which on most home DVD recorders is locked at 256kbit AC3 regardless of the video mode, eating up more than a fifth of the entire Backer data rate doing nothing at all. Of course, even if you somehow managed to record a data pattern out from the source system that the MPEG encoder was entirely happy with, and was able to save to disc with no corruption at all in 352x480/576 mode at its locked-out 1/3 to 1/6 of maximum bitrate, you'd be wasting bits, because of the audio and because even the lowest available rate on any typical recorder would be about 150kbyte/sec itself if not a little higher (VCD was about 172kbyte/sec including video, audio and control track, with just a tiny bit more EC than audio CD). But that's the best case scenario - a much more realistic one would be wasting a *huge* amount of data in order to save into that form. I'd suggest a much more practical solution, if you had many tens or hundreds of megs to get out of some other system where your only other practical option is the floppy drive, would be to get hold of another Backer, or an internal (not USB!) capture card which could then either record raw uncompressed video or pass the data to some custom made bit of software that could do the job of the Backer hardware, and bypass the DVD part altogether. Or just hook up a serial cable between them and accept that it might take a few hours. It'll still be quicker than all the fannying around trying to get the data out this way. And then you can save it to CDROM, or DVDROM, or a memory stick, memory card, hard drive.... basically anything is a more secure way of saving it than on video DVD in fact. Video DVDs are horrible, nasty, unreliable pieces of shit. Even VHS itself is a better choice...

I like this idea, I have a combo VHS and DVD player in my room still! :D Someone tell me if it works

I have some unopened betamax tapes

The receipt for the computer!

LOL

Forget about pornos, get a tape full of cracked warez!! lol

Jos sredinom 80ih sam narucivao kasete sa igricama od njih, za Atari 800 xl. Kasnije i nekoliko za Commodore 64, ali secam se da su bile jako loseg kvaliteta, verovatno presnimavane na kasetofonima sa dve glave. Sa nekih nije mogao da se ucita program za stelovanje glave kasetofona a kamoli igrica. Kao sto kazes bivsa Juga je bila meka za kompjutersku pirateriju.

No kidding! Although this wasn't even a P&P card in this case, so it was even worse :)

MissingNo (?)

I am visitor -7.55E-4.

I always have my old VCR set to SP, as I never liked or ever got a decent video with SLP. It's better to buy longer tapes than switch to a slower speed, if you really needed more than 2 hours. I often use T-160 tapes, as you get an extra 40 minutes to that 2 hours. I don't suggest any tapes above T-160, as the film gets thinner and unreliable.

Hell, T160's had a tendency to break (just like how those 100min high bias audio cassettes were. I HATED trying to repair those! With video, I always stuck with 120's. Way back then (in the 90's), I mostly recorded in EP (SLP) mode. But it was mostly video games lol. Except when we rented a video camera. That was in SP. I swear, no idea why I recorded all those stupid games. lmao.

I just recorded MTV and other old stuff that isn't really around nowadays. The reason why I mentioned T-160 as being an option, is because if a show exceeds over the 2 hour limit, it would be okay. I had a VCR that was picky about tapes in the SLP mode, it would constantly change playback speeds. It's too bad there was no switch or button that controlled it manually, or it wouldn't of been a problem. So I had to use SP all the time, which I would reuse tapes that didn't have anything worth keeping. The VCR kept going up until 2007, when a simple head cleaning wasn't enough, a fuse popped. It wasn't a huge problem finding another VCR, as long it would play my old tapes. I make sure I use my stuff until it completely breaks, I wasn't really poor but just didn't replace things until I needed to. Lol

I dunno about EP / SLP, but I did enough backups in LP mode on E300 (5-hour) tapes using the device. Just have to use slightly more conservative settings for safety, but that lets you fit a 4~5GB dataset (most of a 3.2 and a 1.something GB hard drive... or possibly the non-reinstallable data from a larger pair... it's been 20+ years, I can't remember so clearly) onto a single tape whilst running it overnight and not having to mess with it or have it interfere with daytime use of the machine. (yay for more efficient PAL encoding which let us run the tape slower... E300 is probably equivalent to T180 or something, and LP is hard to tell apart from SP, unlike the degradation of EP recording...) With shorter tapes in SP you could turn the encoding rate up somewhat. Dunno if I made it as high as 300KB/s, but certainly 180~200 was easily possible, maybe low 200s, which when your only alternatives were floppies, or Zipdisks that ran at a similar speed but cost quite a lot of money for just 95MB of usable space, seemed pretty good. Especially as you could get the equivalent of two 10-packs of Zips (which would cost more than the Danmere, maybe even that plus a cheap VCR, all by themselves, never mind buying the drive) onto a cheap and actually less bulky 3-hour (or 3h15) cassette.

@@horrortimeproductions5504 I had no real complaints with recording for 8 hours on a 4 hour tape. Though that's with late 90's PAL machines, and I've heard PAL in general had different quality implications than an NTSC machine. (Also innately longer recording times for a given length of tape for some reason. Hence the 4 hour tapes. E-240 or something...) I still have most of these tapes and they still work, so I don't know what to say in that regard... XD