England needs you knighted. Sir. Hunkin. National treasure

Rex’s classic and memorable line “this is recorded on sticky tape and rust”.

This show changed my life.

Its interesting how in the 30 years since this show was made, we've gone from our shows and other programs being stored on a load of rust to them being stored on a load of silicon.

Tim Hunkin: The principles are really very simple The Machine: Captures and records imagines from the magic picture box

Looks like I'm not the only one refreshing this channel to see when the next one will come out!

Just been pondering... Of all the machines featured in the SLOM series, it occurs to me that the VCR had one of the shortest lifespans of 'ruling the roost' in the home. It really was only popular and a must-have item from 1979 to 2006 when they generally went off sale; 27 years. Think of the sewing machine, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the television, the telephone, the radio, they are ALL still present in people's homes (except maybe the sewing machine but that was popular for over 100 years). The VCR's light shone bright but burnt out /relatively/ quickly.

I was really not expecting the sticky tape and rust demonstration to sound so good. The part with Rex talking about tiny modern electronic components being hard to work with made me smile because he reminded me that I felt they signified the end of hobby electronics. Spoiler: they did not. We all adapted and some of our tools changed too.

This was yet another episode that, as a kid, showed me how a common household item was based on fairly simple principles. I remembered bits of this episode and when our own VCR ate the odd tape the knowledge had taught me enough to be able to extract the tape through the slot without damaging anything.

As an avowed geek, these are absolutely amazing. I love this entire series. They're fascinating and spectacularly well done. I wish programs like this were still on TV that really explained how things work.

These were the best shows ever. So happy you’re rereleasing them!

I`m a simple man. I see "The Secret Life of the Machines" and press like and play button. Wish to have all the episodes when I was a kid, it`s wonderfull. Commentary was like another episode showing electromechanical magnetic data storage at it`s finest. I have ( Somewhere :D ) the smallest HDD in the world, it`s Toshiba 4GB capacity drive originally mounted in Nokia N91 smartphone. Just like you said, Tim - It`s piece of jewelry. Fun fact - Phone had built in accelerometer and when it detected gravity loss then the HDD heads were parked to safe place to protect the drive.

I'm still recording on tape (LTO8 is 15TB in on tape!), it's nice for backup. You can't trust hard drives for long term backups. I recently digitized 30 years old VHS, and I was bluffed by how the quality was still here like it was just recorded (after adjusting the tape alignment of the reader). I'm glad to have digitized last year because quality VHS players are harder to find than 10 years ago and the later ones were of bad quality.

Me: Look, one of my fafourites, how a video recorder works. Daughter: A what? Now she knows more then I did when I used one. This series is priceless!

I'm still a fan of this old analogue stuff. I acquired a still working Sony Handycam from 1998 last year.

The demonstration using your bandsaw is simply inspired

This is the sort of You Tube video that you click the like button before watching it.

Bravo, bravo, bravo. Hunkin is the best explainer I've ever seen.

I saw this when I was 14 years old and it is partly responsible for the work I have right now in maintenance for professional video tape preservation! There's more to say but I'm going to wright it up properly before I post it.

Honestly I don’t know if I am more impressed with the explanation of how things work or with the introduction and end credits they made to go with the series.

Shoutout to Cathode Ray Dude for mentioning your work/channel in one of his videos. I love these old documentaries on technology of the times. I know what I'm watching all day! #subbed

Coincidentally, I wore out my VHS copy of this, taped off -air all those years ago and played on all kinds of junky machines I picked up at car boot sales and fixed. Plenty of white mis-tracking lines add to the charm! As concerns the legendary sticky tape and rust - Ironically, some 1970s and 80s audio tape (Ampex etc) suffers from a binder which has deteriorated and absorbs moisture, making the tape now stick to the heads when playback is attempted. Sticky tape is very much still around!

It's worth noting that the lowly "sticky tape and rust" has continued to be improved and used for storing extremely large amounts of data for archival and backup purposes. The state of the art LTO tape cartridge, half the size of a VHS cassette, holds 18 terabytes (18,000,000,000,000 bytes!) on more than a kilometer of thin, precisely manufactured tape. Of course, solid state technology has now given us 1 TB microSD cards costing only a couple hundred dollars and are the size of literally a thumbnail. I really cherish the Secret Life of Machines for showing us so visually how technology works, back when you could actually SEE the technology! ◡̈

I remember in the early 70s having a video recorder at school that was in a big wooden box under a tv that was wheeled from room to room. It was the cutting edge of science to us children. Going home talking to parents who had been around at the birth of tv about it now seems slightly surreal. We only had 4 channels when we first got one, if not 3, yet there was always something to record. I haven’t a clue how many hours of TV we can record on our new Q box, personally I only record "The Repair Shop."

I had always assumed that "AMPex" was named after the electrical unit "ampere;" I was surprised to learn that AMP are Ponyatov's initials.

It's remarkable how equipment shown in secret life of machines such as telephone, radio, word processor, television and video recorder converged into a single device called 'mobile phone' just in few decades.

Watching your show, Connections and Modern Marvels taught me so much about the world. I feel sad for today's youth, a lot of them have no sense of wonder and discovery anymore. I hope that changes and people understand how their world works. When you know things you have power, people can't take advantage of you so much.

22:21 I would not have been able to do this scene without laughing.

Great to see this programme again. I made a living repairing VCRs, an era where repair of electrical items was the norm.

I actually learned something here. I knew the head was tilted but I didn't know why and how it effects the playback and those bits where you held a piece of tape and moved it through (both the home-made one you recorded Rex's voice and the video tape) was really fascinating!

Yes the sticky tape and rust comment of Rex's. I always rem that. Thanks for uploading Tim.

Tim scratching with the channel 4 logo by pulling videotape through the machine is pure genius😁

I love how the documentary continues with the hard drive part during Tim’s ending comments

A brilliant rediscovery of a great show. I always remembered Tim & Rex taking a bunch of old TVs and getting most of them to work simply by plugging in random valves! It sparked a career in electronics. May you never grow old guys.

I'm a simple man, I see a load of rust, I give it a like!

The helical tape head still amazes me. Not just the idea to pack in way more tracks on the same tape, but that it ever worked reliably enough to distribute millions of the mechanisms to households everywhere.

I knew about the German Audio Tape Recorders and that Bing Crosby was an early adopter to get his radio broadcasts recorded to send to radio stations across USA for playback at the correct time for each time zone. Also recorded programs can have retakes edited and trimmed or padded to fit time slots.

The programmes were utterly fascinating when they first came out on the BBC. I remember eagerly waiting for each one to come on.

It looks like Tim Hunkin has been digitally remastered. Respect for you Tim.

Back in the day my instructor told us that there were 30 (thirty) lines of information (tracks) in the width of human hair. The precision for the laser mechanism to follow that with a moving disc is incredible. Especially considering that not all discs are exactly centered and they are warped up and down thru changing heat cycles. Ronn

Thanks Tim for showing the world your brilliant career. I am amazed at all of your accomplishments. 🍺🍺

I’ve always enjoyed watching this particular episode of Secret Life. Thank you so much for making it available again. Truly great stuff.

I fondly remember watching this program when i was younger. Love it just as much now.

I remember this series shown on Ireland's national state television service, RTE, during the early 1990's. This episode about VCR's was my favorite, probably because I used to take my own VHS recorders apart to see how they worked. I also owned Betamax machines which worked slightly different than VHS ones in the way they laced up the tape to the head drum, and were much faster to play back a video once the play button was pressed compared to VHS recorders.

Oh.. my mind back to the day when I was kid while watching this.

I luv that the demonstrations aren't the best of 100 takes, so we can see how freaking difficult this stuff really was to create, make and use, and to appreciate advancement as an invention in itself.

I remember watching this on a VHC recorder. It’s good to be able to watch it again

The secret life of the pinball machine would have been an interesting episode. Maybe a bit specialist, but a lot of history, and many people are intrigued how the pre-solid state ones work when I mention I repair them. Once they went digital of course, there's an uninteresting one-line answer - it's a computer.

I remember that four from when I watched this episode as a kid. Fascinating stuff. Thank you for releasing these remasters.

This is an incredibly interesting series , I remember this watching it I loved it, still do ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ this remastered version is brilliant to view and actually I have some original episodes on Vhs 📼 thank you Tim and Rex for your Incredible work and Great knowledge in presenting this Brilliant series best wishes

This was such a great and entertaining show....I've seen things on here as a teenager some 30 years ago that I've never forgotten and never seen anywhere else.

The video head demonstration with the pens installed in place of the heads is just pure genius. Thanks, Tim and Rex.

the bandsaw method is such a smart and simple way of showing it ! great !!

Thanks Tim for sharing your experiences in the end credits of the making of the Secret Life of the Videorecorder, very interesting. I am now 56 and still to this day miss the Secret Life of Machines TV programs which really inspired me to go into engineering. You are far from over the hill for making some more incredible documentary films and I think that you should really conciser it. The younger generation as always no more knows the origins of the new technology they proudly embrace as a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Doc Company to quote Douglas Adams.

Spinning rust is still alive, at least in the background of cloud computing companies. Solid state is too expensive for certain forms of infrequently accessed data, so hard drives and tapes are still used at places like Amazon and Google.

Yet another great remaster Tim, thanks so much! Like many here I always look forward to seeing your next video, and this one sure brings back memories with the sticky tape and rust recording you and Rex did! I was always amazed by how well it worked!

Why did the demonstration of generation loss terrify me as a kid? I was just a weird kid, I guess. At the risk of ending up screenshotted on r/lewronggeneration, we did lose something in the transition to all solid-state and flash memory. There's no opening up your iPhone and showing how the camera takes in the picture and records it to memory, not in the same way Tim and Rex were able to demonstrate here. We've definitely gained a lot since then, and I'm not saying we should go back to hard drives and magnetic tape, but we lost the ability to easily teach the concept of how things work.

So good to see this again, I could watch this over and over. I was 15 when this first came on TV and I still have it on VHS. Sound and tape recorders is a passion of mine, personally and professionally. Thank you Tim and Rex for explaining their workings in such a relaxed and easy to understand way, yet packing the half hour with such an amount of information.

I love that the VHS format is the one that won, because it should technically be HVS for 'home video system' but is instead 'video home system' because it was a Japanese invention. And that quote: "what you've been watching for the last half hour is basically a load of old rust." Hilarious!

We got our first camcorder in 1994: a Sharp VHS Slimcam. I got it out and used it for fun a couple of days ago. Still works great. But it sure seems heavy compared to the newest equipment. I think the battery is about 3 pounds by itself.

I thought it was an interesting statement that the VCR head was the most precisely manufactured thing in the house. That got me to thinking about what is currently the most precise thing in my house, I recently got a half-terabyte microSD card so I can store music albums losslessly on my phone. I've ripped hundreds of CDs and they fit with plenty of space for more. I think it's interesting that both devices are used for data storage. Before VCRs, some of the most most miniaturized (and precise) things in my home were my Kodachrome slides. Now all the photos I ever took will fit on one microSD.

So happy to be able to watch these again and with the added bonus of Mr Hunkin himself afterwards. Quality TV!

Seeing these videos makes me want to pull apart machines, but there is hardly any hardware left that is this exciting or accessible I think :(

I'm hoping to get my first bandsaw in a few days. I'm absolutely planning to try 'recording' a magnetic signal on it one day.

Absolutely love how forward-thinking the program was. In particular, the demonstration of the rapidly degrading Channel 4 ident is a perfect illustration of its governance and quality of programming over the years. The audio and video signal being distorted of that Channel 4 ident at the end was really the perfect analogy to the ongoing privatisation efforts.

i love "The secret life of the machines" i watched it when i was a child :) now i repairing tv's, computers, etc and i love old electronics and precision mechanism like video or camera recorders, and still use it, and tape recorders too :) thank You! greetings from eastern Poland!

It's taken me 7 mins but it suddenly hit me how good this remastering actually looks - bravo and thank you

One thing I learned recently is that the spinning drum in the VCR is synchronized to the TV signal’s vertical sync pulse. Each stripe on the tape is one field of the video, and in normal play only one head is used to read the video.

My career was built on these machines. Now even museums are not interested in them. I can record 18 hours of high definition in a memory card smaller than a postage stamp. A postage stamp? What's that?

Yes! I was waiting for this version. I actually wonder what my life would have been like if I never saw this episode.

I remember hearing that Ray Dolby was working at Ampex in California during the development of videotape recording, and he came up with the idea of reducing the recorded noise by frequency-modulating the video signal onto a carrier frequency before feeding it into the helical-scan video heads. This was before he left the US for Great Britain, where he earned his doctorate.

anno domini -1987...mid twenties American male stumbled onto this show. ..sparked an imagination, and obsession.

I recall bringing VCRs to the repairman quite often. They were so expensive it was worth spending $100 or more for repairs.

I loved this program. So glad i can watch them again. How time`s have changed in so little time. Who know`s ` THE SECRET LIFE OF MOBILE PHONES ` Now that`s a rabbit hole you don`t want to get stuck in. :)

I always just loved this show. Sadly, there is nothing like it on the market anymore

24:26 - pretty much the same today, kids born with the knowledge how to handle an iPad and browse youtube and only later they learn how to walk or talk :D I thought the end will transition over to today's Tim watching the episode on video :)

What a lovely gentleman! These sorts of programs are what I used to love watching as a kid growing up, and still do today! I absolutely love the animated front room at the end with the record player speakers bobbing around. Such clever ideas and abilities people had back then given the limitations of technology available. Who else would have had the idea to chuck some rust on sticky tape and make it record audio! I had no idea you could just drag video tape across the head and it still play like that. Makes me want to drag out my old VCR and have a faff around with it :D Love it!! Thank you so much :D

I just found this channel, and I can't help but think that the fellow at 11:59 is similar in looks and job as al borlen, played by Richard karn, from home improvement, to Tim hunkin's Tim "the toolman" Taylor, played by Tim Allen. Lol

Yes I am amazed they work, and I made my living diagnosing and servicing them.

Your videos are so realistic and convincing that it's hard to believe they are only strings of 0s and 1s.

Well done Tim, for remastering these classic films! You are a inspiration to any young budding engineer or scientist! It is a real pity to see your backwards clock was taken down at the warehouse at Ellough a few years ago, always smiled when I drove past looking at "the bloke" on top of it in his hi-vis jacket trying to mend it!

Your videos are amazing and keep me inspired and willing/excited to learn about life and technology! Looking forward to the secret life of components. You're my hero.

When I first saw this episode about VCR's I was around 30 years old, and I thought back then this is the way recording television pictures and watching movies at home was going to be like for the rest of my life. Just over a decade after seeing this episode I bought my first DVD recorder with a built in HDD which could store over 130 hours of TV recordings in a quality similar to a videotape recording. Nowadays I can just plug a tiny USB stick or portable SSD into the side of my TV and record hundreds of hours of TV shows.

Thank you. I love it when things are explained clearly and effectively. It takes skill. Video recorders were things that made me realise I couldn't fix my own stuff any more.

I loved this show as a kid.

The episode I watched the most often! 16:09 the segment where you move the tape backwards and forwards I spliced into a short clip and brought into Resolume VJ software to toy around with. Looped it and scrubbed it hundreds of times, even at live shows.

8:56, wow, I used to have one of those Philips machines as a child

"...this razor sharp steel would fly all over the room" Jesus! This is just fantastic. Giving me a nostalgia rash. Thank you Tim.

I love your shows! I’m as old as they, 1990. It is so nice explained. A shame I did not come across this in my younger days! Greetings from Switzerland 🇨🇭

I never had a telly, never mind a VCR. But cassette tapes... oh boy. I have some from my mother with recordings my grandfather made of conversations with his older family members. They're quite special, I'll soon be converting them from rust to silicon...

Fantastic remastered videos and I enjoy the commentary at the end. I've been a Secret Life Of Machines fan for years, and have recorded most of the original episodes on VHS for watching later. My favorite has to be the light bulb episode, where you made actual working lightbulbs using milk bottles! Watching the remastered versions, I see there were some bits edited out (probably by the US Public TV network folks) in my original recordings. I have also visited your display in the London science museum many many years ago. Thank you for these educational and fun videos.... sorry to hear Rex is gone. You two were a fantastic team!! Looking forward to watching these again and again. Thank you Tim!

Keep 'em coming Tim - brilliant!!!

23:28 I put a jam sandwich into on when I was 4 or 5. I distinctively remember thinking I would see jam up close on the TV. I'm pretty sure I got this vision of jam on the TV from another kids TV or film in the early 90s, as kids tend to copy and experiment.

Yay a new episode!

This was my favourite episode, looking forward to watching again.

I seem to know several older people (often with hearing difficulties) who came to me for "help" about setting up Android devices, PCs, Apps etc during Covid19. It is possible to do some of this over the phone. But in many cases I simply say "ask your daughter or granddaughter to do it for you". Because these youngsters run rings around me. So little has changed in the last 40 years.

Best doc series ever.

His house would be so cool.. full of wacky moving contraptions

Brilliantly simple explanation and examples with a few surprises, thank you for sharing!

It was a joy to see this video again - and with the extra bit. Anything involving magnetic recording has always interested me, since I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder when I was a child, and ran a pretend 'radio station', broadcasting to exactly one person (me). I still have the booklets that go with this series.