Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

ntsc.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 131 posts

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#111

Post by reactordev »

sharperguy wrote: post #98
npunt wrote: post #34

Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out…

So in future we will have "retro" streaming platforms that buffer with the spinner a random times for nostalgia and have menus full of promotional material that are impossible to navigate to just find what you're looking for.

You mean CrunchyRoll?

Yes, yes we will. And we'll throw random ad breaks in there in the middle of the dialog just for shits and giggles, unskippable of course, at a +10db volume too.

Yes, just like we make remakes of Windows 95 in typescript, we will make retro video streaming platforms with spinners and buffering effects.

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#112

Post by genewitch »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #100
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #14

Idle thought: I don't think I've ever seen one of these TV emulator things implement the situation where the vertical oscillator was slightly wrong and you get the picture slowly looping up the screen.

There is, but there isn't one that puts in realistic "teletext sparkles" at the top. I'd donate heavily to one that would actually let you send decodable teletext pages in the output ;-)

like the ones in Holland in the 90s? I don't remember if i noticed it in other countries at that time, but for sure there was like whole text areas on TV channels you could go to, and i think someone at the time told me there was interactive chat through the TV too but they may have been yanking my teenage chain.

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#115

Post by ramses0 »

1xn wrote: post #63

this is really good effect, fantastic output. I had VCR as a kid :-) Gonna have a look at it, specially as it is a Rust project. :clap clap: Thanks for posting this.

I'm stupefied by the accuracy of the SP/LP/EP rendering differences. Apart from how "accurate" everything is, that one pushed it way past the uncanny valley and into "oh yeah, that's pretty much exactly what it looked like!"

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#116

Post by Ylpertnodi »

alok-g wrote: post #89

Could this be used for training AI to do the reverse, i.e., generate high-quality videos from older analog TV and VHS artifacts? Start from high quality videos, use this or a similar library to generate analog/VHS videos that now have the ground truth available, train AI from the data.

Reddit - ukrainewarvideoreports - the Ukrainians are taking their relatively poor 'Last frame' drone shots and ai-ing them to be shockingly-detailed images of people about to die.

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#117

Post by cf100clunk »

reaperducer wrote: post #27
stevesimmons wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why NTSC was often said to mean Never Twice the Same Color!

In my decades working in TV it was always "Never The Same Color." See also: Picture At Last! See also: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method

Going way back, in Canada the jokes were:

NTSC = ''never twice same colour''

SECAM = ''système électronique pour confondre les americaines.''

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#118

Post by cf100clunk »

mgaunard wrote: post #95
emayljames wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interlacing is synonymous with 80's/90's video

PAL and SECAM are also interlaced. Except PAL/SECAM don't have any of the color issues of NTSC.

PAL's lower frame rate made for visible flicker, which viewers conditioned to NTSC could wearily detect.

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#119

Post by giantrobot »

phire wrote: post #73
BretonForearm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...] I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of…

Yes, they loved the compactness and convenience (well, I’m not sure anyone ever loved the rewinding/fastfowarding experience) But the quality/color was always a noticeable downgrade from broadcast quality video (and that was a noticeable downgrade from film). But the sacrifice was absolutely worth it. It is notable that LaserDisc only came out two years after VHS (and before it reached mass adoption), and it could pr…

For me and most people I knew at the time, VHS didn't have a noticeable quality loss over broadcast unless you were watching LP/EP recordings.

Many TVs people already had in the 80s didn't have RCA connections so VCRs were connected via twin lead to F connector adapters. They had the same noise as the antenna or cable input. So your commercial tapes usually looked about as good as broadcast. If you actually read the instructions with your VCR to set the timing correctly recorded broadcasts in SP mode also tended to look pretty good.

In absolute terms the VHS video was worse than the original broadcast but on the TVs we had it was hard to notice.

This definitely changed through the 90s. Larger and brighter tubes made the deficiencies of VHS more noticeable. Moving to cable TV from antenna was also very noticeable and made VHS quality more apparent.

If you happened to see a LaserDisc video as a comparison to VHS then the quality difference was stark. As much as VHS and DVD by the late 90s and early 00s. However I think that direct comparison was out of reach for most people.

Re: Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

#120

Post by throwaway2046 »

grishka wrote: post #113

Relatedly, I recently made a software decoder for SECAM and PAL: https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/tree/master/AVDecod... Though in my case the purpose was to digitize my video tapes and teach myself about DSP.

Looks interesting... Is there an equivalent encoder that can be used with this to generate VHS footage purely in software?
Post reply on HN