Alec is probably my favorite YouTuber. I remember catching his videos before he really blew up and they ticked all my nerd boxes! Unlike other youtubers I enjoy, I never seem to get tired of his content — keep going!
His channel is a fresh breath of air on today's YouTube. No clickbait titlea/thumbnails, no exaggeration, no drama, no filler content? That's rare these days. Everything is well organized and clearly explained. His videos are often long, but every minute is valuable. His videos are like the opposite of CNET -- you learn more after watching 2 minutes of Technology Connection compared to 20 minutes of CNET.
him and "cathode ray dude" are likely my favorite youtubers for this exact reason. When their videos come out I'm cracking out the snacks and watching it on my OPS tv
YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you:
Not from the same Youtuber but that video reminded me of another great one about how mechanical bowling alley machines work: https://youtu.be/Iod6uwUGM2E
I've been a huge fan of these videos. They explain electro-mechanical pinball machines incredibly well plus they're beautifully photographed. A remarkable amount of effort, thought and care went into creating them.
I have my name listed in all of his videos going back to right around when he started his Patreon. You can find me on the first "page" as it scrolls by. Love his videos.
Lots of youtubers with Patreons do have tiered credits, with bigger doners having separate credit sections with fancier titles, and usually their names are bigger and/or stay on the screen longer, which kind of seems similar
A big difference here is that EPs on a feature can get ROI on their money. Of course the cliche about Hollywood account can play games with that, but I doubt any Patreon supporter at any level would ever start to see any kind of revenue sharing from the YouTube's monetization.
Posy seconded. He's weird (and I'm certain he would agree), but in a fun and interesting way. The music used in his videos is composed and recorded by himself, btw.
A recommendation of mine is Bad Obsession Motorsport. Two men in a shed put a Celica engine in an Austin Mini. So far it's taken 12 years and 41 episodes. Some astonishing engineering going there.
If you're into cars, I'll also recommend "driving 4 answers". Very well researched and presented videos about engine technology.
He's very Dutch indeed. His English is also full of dutch-isms that maybe only dutch people recognize. I'm Dutch, but live in Canada. Watching his videos make me miss my home country.
Seconding Bad Obsession. Not only is their build quality outstanding, their video production efforts are top notch. Their dedication to the concept and execution of Project Binky is nothing short of amazing.
I got a little less interested in the videos once they got to the trimming out the car part. I liked when they were building the car and were doing (what seems to me) like excellent work. then they got to the dashboard and it became what ever goes. like the dashboard clock in the latest video...
I know it's a cliche to say a Youtuber is unique, but Posy really is quite incredible. He's certainly not the only one making videos about vintage 80s technology but his great videography, calm tone, odd manner of speech, occasional goofy humor, and beautiful custom-made audio soundtracks make for a mesmerizing presentation.
Ahoy is essential just for how well produced their deep dive content is. The great art and music really elevate it from a "Watch something for an hour and learn some computing history" to "Have an experience for an hour"
The first time I came across his channel I felt similarly, but coupled with the dry humor, passive aggressive offhand comments, and intentionally long pauses waiting for the joke to land, I began to feel like it went with the tone of the content. I wasn’t sure at first, but he seems very self aware.
The whole thing reminds of some 80s PBS and Wes Anderson mashup in the best way.
Yeah, he rides right up to, and sometimes crosses, the line of being a bit too hokey/jokey for me. But the other 95% of the content of his videos are so amazingly good that I can get over the eye-rolly bits. He absolutely deserves his success.
I am a big fan of his channel but in a lot of his videos lately, the tone has been somewhere between holier-than-thou and outright preachy. Just because you spent a week researching a semi-obscure topic enough to present about it on YouTube of all places doesn't make you an authority on the matter, and it absolutely doesn't mean you're suddenly qualified to dismiss people who disagree with your conclusions.
I prefer his videos where the vibe was more along the lines of, "Hey, I've been playing with this neato old technology lately, what say we nerd out about it for 38 minutes or thereabouts?"
It's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings.
Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.
With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.
It happened 20 years ago, so some folks around here might be too young to remember the Sony rootkit fiasco [1]. Sony decided it would be a good idea to put on their music CDs an auto-run program that would install a rootkit on your Windows computer, whose job it was to be a watchdog for Sony's copyrights.
I have a non-smart budget TV. It doesn't have many features but it does let you record over the air digital TV to a USB stick. Unfortunately, the playback is incredibly janky.
I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle.
Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know.
I'm fond of the HDHomerun devices. They just expose a set of URLs over the local network corresponding to channels. You can point VLC to them or just download a chunk of the bitstream to process later.
I'm sure you could appliance that up to trigger an automatic recording on conditions like "card inserted".
I will admit I haven't tried this, so I don't know if there's some encryption that would be problematic but there are definitely HDMI video capture devices that are very reasonably priced and would let you record content. BUt most all content is online so it seems there would be very little demand for the feature you are talking about. I can just go to my friends house and log in to whatever app and watch the same stuff I can at my house, or use something like a Chromecast.
TVs in Japan let you do exactly this. You just plug in any sufficiently fast USB mass storage and can record tv to it. There’s some sort of encryption scheme bound to the tv though so it’s not portable. There may be someway to transfer the recordings to other tvs but it’s limited.
There’s even a companion app that will stream recordings on your tv to your phone.
I have such a huge nerd crush on this guy. Witnessing the incredible skill of making even the most humble and obsolete of technologies seem like an absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity is always a pleasure.
I actually think that "old tech" is pinnacle of human ingenuity.
When you see the inside of a camcorder, or a VCR as per his latest videos, those were object humans had to design not only for aesthetics but also for their function.
I'm not sure I'm clear but now, I feel like everything is just a randomly designed box stuffed with circuit boards. And more importantly, I really frequently feel like most objects I buy today are never tested by real people before being sent to production lines. If it was the case, somebody, somewhere would have noticed that a tactile snooze button alongside the buttons to change the hour on an alarm clock is stupid, or that the screen is too bright for you to sleep.
When objects were a complex arrangement of things that moved smartly together to create a function, the people designing had to test them. They also had to think actively about ergonomics because there were real constraints to solve in creating a camcorder that you can use with only one hand so you'd better place the buttons in an ergonomic place.
I'm currently in the middle of cleaning/ rehabbing, a 30ish year old Kenmore vacuum cleaner that I inherited from my grandparents when they died a decade ago. It's not precious or an heirloom or anything, but it's still works perfectly.
The thing that struck me when completely disassembling it to clean it was how well and how simply engineered it was. The vacuum is held together with four screws which once you remove them The top simply lifts off and everything is right there. The only "electronics" is a single relay. Everything inside comes apart and goes back together very easily with no tools. There is even a wiring diagram on a sticker inside the case. The powerhead is similar, two screws and two clips (with text and an arrow pointing to the screwdriver slots to release them). Again, very simple and modular and repairable inside with another wiring diagram and instructions for replacing the belt on the inside of the case. The "headlight" bulb is incandescent and socketed. The rubber bumper around the edge is attached with tab-and-slot and not overmolded so it is easily replaceable. I haven't looked, but I'm sure there's a comprehensive catalog of replacement parts available.
It's apparently been a very successful design for them because they're still selling models which are extremely similar[0]. It looks like some of the molds are probably the same.
Because at the time it may have been the pinnacle of ingenuity. Engineers had to figure out a new thing, or a way to do a thing in certain constraints, with what they had on hand, and had to be clever about it.
And they don't have to do that now designing things like folding phones to be super thin with no gap and with cameras with optical zoom and all that? The engineering of a bleeding edge folding smartphone seems pretty ingenious to me.
This video was recommended to me yesterday and I refused to watch, I believed it would take me into some kind of rabbit hole. Either this guy videos or about VHS (or worst, both).
From the comments here, it seems I was right. But now I regret, I could live with a couple of hours of sleeping depravation (I guess).
Technology Connections is a rabbit hole of its own, and if you let it it will send you into a billion more.
You watch 2h30 about RCA's CED (video disc format from the mid 60s which didn't see production before the early 80s at which point it was DOA), and when the playlist ends you're sad and wonder if you should watch it again. It's great.
It upsets me that so much video was recorded on tapes instead of film, because it didn’t wear well and looks awful today. The only hope we have now are approximations using AI.
Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.
One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.
I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.
Film can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness.
80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.
TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.
The end result of a modern film "transfers" looks so good that people massively the amount of effort that went into the restoration.
The color has always faded. They have to color-grade it back to what they think it originally looked like, though it's more common to use artistic license what they it was originally intended to look like. Artistic interpretation always leaks in, and it will never match what someone saw in the theatre (and there was massive variation between prints even when they were brand new).
At least with TV shows like TNG, we have the tapes to use as a reasonably solid reference for what color was actually broadcast.
And then there is scratch and dust removal. They do so much in-painting to get the clean result that we associate with 35mm film today.
The color has always faded - well, not always. The gold standard for movie archiving is to store the movies color separated on three reels, one for red, green and blue, but not use color film, but a special black and white. There's no fading at all on these.
Sometimes the original negatives are in really good condition, but you still have to redo the color-grading, because the original color-grading was done chemically onto some transfer which now has faded or was just pretty bad to begin with, if you even can find it.
In the UK, indoors studio shots were on video, but outdoors location shots had to be on film, so there was an obvious difference in look when they cut between them.
Monty Python lampooned this in a sketch where Graham Chapman goes outside, exclaims "Good Lord, I'm on film!" and then flees indoors to the safety of video
A lot of TV classic shows were shot on tape just because it was so much cheaper, and everything live has either always been tape or just wasn't recorded at all as far as I know.
For a period of time there was TV but no way to record it onto magnetic tape, so you'd use a telecine (closed box with a film camera pointed at a TV screen) to record what was being broadcast. To air it again, you'd use a cinetele (tv camera pointed at a projected screen).
Major movies, yes. But a lot of B films were on tape, and most of the distribution of movies in the early 80s was tape, so as companies went out of business, what was left was tape.
I’m over 50 y.o., but I remember movies from Blockbuster that I can’t find now because they were minor and only distributed on VHS tapes which were dumped over the years. I can find just about anything that was on film.
It wasn't. 80s TV shows and movies were overwhelmingly recorded on film. Primarily because it was much easier to edit film than tape.
And we are streaming a ton of them now that they've gone back and scanned the original film in 4K.
It's awesome. Heck you can watch I Love Lucy from 1951 in glorious high definition, sharper than anyone ever viewed it originally. It's basically magic.
If you want 1980's, go watch St. Elsewhere or Cheers. They have cinema detail now instead of the fuzzy TV detail you would have seen in the 80's.
Film needs to be developed to be able to see the content at all. Regular color films after shooting is covered in extremely photosensitive, opaque gray paste, and it needs to be washed and cleaned in temperature controlled acid bath to remove the reactive part and only leave the image on the film.
Tapes, on the other hand... You can just rewind it, play it, and overwrite a few times. Cost differences are significant to say the least.
Very few movies were shot on tape, and those that were did it deliberately for the effect of looking awful (Blair Witch Project).
For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.
Blair Witch was shot and edited on tape, converted by telecine to 35mm film for release and then they did a transfer of the 35mm for release on home media. It was only last year that we got a release straight from the tape master.
Memory unlocked. Around 1980, our local, government mandated, public access program for cable TV would loan out the first over-the-shoulder camera he showed, along with the sorta-portable battery VHS recording rig. White balance was always a challenge with those. AV nerds could go out and tape random events that nobody would watch but it kept us off the street.
I remember as a kid we had a whole bookcase of those small cassettes for the family camcorder. I always loved getting to put the tiny one into the full-sized VHS, felt like magic that it actually worked when you popped it into the VCR.
This is my main problem with the modern Youtube meta, every single "serious" topic video is +30 mins length. 10 years ago we were perfectly fine with 10 mins stuff but of course algorithms and advertising and nowadays most Youtuber is pushing longer and longer videos as if we are watching peak evening television reporting...
Evening television reporting spends about 30s on any one topic, so much so that the dominant effect on the viewer is however the presenter framed the topic initially. This is nothing like that.
Typical package in the U.K. is about 3 minutes, the main story will have 10-15 minutes on it, with probably two pieces from different correspondents on different angles, an in studio interview, and a live.
There’s then the in depth programs which spend half an hour or an hour on a specific subject (dispatches, panorama etc)
People are less interested in long form news though, so public service broadcasters in the U.K. have a duty to reach as many people in as many ways.
There's a perfectly good format for long-form dives: An article. But no, everything needs to be a video because otherwise, how would anyone bother to consume it.
No, for the kind of content he produces video is absolutely essential, since much of it is either demonstrating audio and video playback (including things like artifacts and color distortions), and showing how the internal mechanisms operate on partially disassembled machines.
You can do that just fine with the occasional video inside the article, though. I mean, significant parts of the video is just panning by some device while he's talking.
His videos have so much higher information density than texts can offer. Videos are just much more efficient and can explain things better for those topics.
I can read an article about 10x faster than watch a video. I don't have a problem with Alec's videos per se, but it's crazy to claim that video is the medium with higher information density. Text is always going to be the better medium for transmitting information, except for cases where the unique advantages of video (moving pictures and sound) help.
Articles are capable of using both. The main content can be in text, with an image, a gif or a short video or audio clip here and there to help explain if an illustration is better suited.
I wouldn't want to read a phone review that was text only, but one that has a set or two of images and video to show of the camera, a size comparison to a different phone, and you've got most of what you'd want to put in a video anyway. The rest of many youtube videos are just talking heads and stock footage. The substantive parts of many videos, the stuff that actually should be video for better information density, is rarely a majority of any given video.
Video is definitely a more engaging form of content for me, but claiming it's more effective at information transfer as compared to text is ridiculous.
You probably don't need more than one or two video clips unless you're writing about video itself, say, comparing Ffmpeg renders or phone cameras. You certainly don't need any video for most subjects.
He's doing a video about a format, not about video itself. How much of this video is comparisons of video itself? None that I could see. He's already done that video way back with his Betamax vs. VHS comparison.
All the cases of him comparing the form factor, that is, the size of the casette, with something else, are easily shown with either pictures or diagrams.
I respect the guy a lot but I'm not going to watch 2 45m video about gas lanterns. But that's a good thing that we have choices and people like Alec who will put that much effort into the research
Alec is probably my favorite YouTuber. I remember catching his videos before he really blew up and they ticked all my nerd boxes! Unlike other youtubers I enjoy, I never seem to get tired of his content — keep going!
His channel is a fresh breath of air on today's YouTube. No clickbait titlea/thumbnails, no exaggeration, no drama, no filler content? That's rare these days. Everything is well organized and clearly explained. His videos are often long, but every minute is valuable. His videos are like the opposite of CNET -- you learn more after watching 2 minutes of Technology Connection compared to 20 minutes of CNET.
him and "cathode ray dude" are likely my favorite youtubers for this exact reason. When their videos come out I'm cracking out the snacks and watching it on my OPS tv
I just wish cathode ray dude would sometimes put out a 25 minute video instead of always 90 minute videos
he did, on his second channel for a little while in the little guys era
I like his humor as well.
YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg
Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.
Not from the same Youtuber but that video reminded me of another great one about how mechanical bowling alley machines work: https://youtu.be/Iod6uwUGM2E
I find myself randomly recommending his videos to friends in the middle of conversations. Content like this is why I love YouTube.
Early arcade video games (pre Space Invaders) also didn't use universal microprocessors but relied only on circuit boards without software.
TTL logic, timers, oscillators, triggers, and more.
The circuit is the game.
I've been a huge fan of these videos. They explain electro-mechanical pinball machines incredibly well plus they're beautifully photographed. A remarkable amount of effort, thought and care went into creating them.
I have my name listed in all of his videos going back to right around when he started his Patreon. You can find me on the first "page" as it scrolls by. Love his videos.
That has me wondering, do any youtubers sell Executive Producer credits for funding like films?
Lots of youtubers with Patreons do have tiered credits, with bigger doners having separate credit sections with fancier titles, and usually their names are bigger and/or stay on the screen longer, which kind of seems similar
A big difference here is that EPs on a feature can get ROI on their money. Of course the cliche about Hollywood account can play games with that, but I doubt any Patreon supporter at any level would ever start to see any kind of revenue sharing from the YouTube's monetization.
Well, you deal with that the same way you deal with Hollywood accounting: you negotiate a cut of the gross for any episodes you sponsor.
*donors
Defunctland offers EP credits but is currently sold out.
C&Rsenal (~hour long historic firearms documentaries) does
His videos are so interesting. I went out and bought a rice cooker after watching his explanation of its mechanism.
Same here. I used it every day during COVID
I can also recommend:
Posy seconded. He's weird (and I'm certain he would agree), but in a fun and interesting way. The music used in his videos is composed and recorded by himself, btw.
A recommendation of mine is Bad Obsession Motorsport. Two men in a shed put a Celica engine in an Austin Mini. So far it's taken 12 years and 41 episodes. Some astonishing engineering going there.
If you're into cars, I'll also recommend "driving 4 answers". Very well researched and presented videos about engine technology.
>He's weird
He's just Dutch :)
He's very Dutch indeed. His English is also full of dutch-isms that maybe only dutch people recognize. I'm Dutch, but live in Canada. Watching his videos make me miss my home country.
Seconding Bad Obsession. Not only is their build quality outstanding, their video production efforts are top notch. Their dedication to the concept and execution of Project Binky is nothing short of amazing.
I got a little less interested in the videos once they got to the trimming out the car part. I liked when they were building the car and were doing (what seems to me) like excellent work. then they got to the dashboard and it became what ever goes. like the dashboard clock in the latest video...
I feel like some of that wonkiness (like the ridiculous clock) has to do with their drive to keep the car's feel as "80s Mini" as possible.
+ Techmoan
If the idea of just chilling out and appreciating old tech with a slick presentation sounds good to you, you might like https://youtube.com/@PosyMusic
I know it's a cliche to say a Youtuber is unique, but Posy really is quite incredible. He's certainly not the only one making videos about vintage 80s technology but his great videography, calm tone, odd manner of speech, occasional goofy humor, and beautiful custom-made audio soundtracks make for a mesmerizing presentation.
A couple more, adjacent:
Ahoy (if you like Amiga and old video games, I cannot recommend enough)
Ben Eater
Majulaar
Tantacrul
And of course Veritasium with the consistently super interesting science videos.
Ahoy is essential just for how well produced their deep dive content is. The great art and music really elevate it from a "Watch something for an hour and learn some computing history" to "Have an experience for an hour"
Majulaar's Ultima retrospective is one the highlights of my subscription feed
Ooh, nice to find someone who is following that too ahahah
Ultima Underworld is my favourite so far, that's an outstanding game.
It's a shame that Druaga1 stopped posting on YouTube because he should be on that list.
CelGenStudios and Usagi Electric are good channels for vintage computing stuff.
+1 for LGR. Also adding TechMoan to that list.
Calum, LowSpecGamer, Mustard, Rhystic Studies
I find his content wildly good but his voice to be so grating I can barely stand it.
Don't watch Aging Wheels then. Love both of them, but my wife complains when I watch either on the living room TV.
Then you'd really be missing out, because Aging Wheels is awesome
Same!
The first time I came across his channel I felt similarly, but coupled with the dry humor, passive aggressive offhand comments, and intentionally long pauses waiting for the joke to land, I began to feel like it went with the tone of the content. I wasn’t sure at first, but he seems very self aware.
The whole thing reminds of some 80s PBS and Wes Anderson mashup in the best way.
Yeah, he rides right up to, and sometimes crosses, the line of being a bit too hokey/jokey for me. But the other 95% of the content of his videos are so amazingly good that I can get over the eye-rolly bits. He absolutely deserves his success.
Thankfully YouTube allows you to 2x the playback. That was the only reason I watched most of this video.
I don’t know his experience with academics but if the stars aligned, he would be an amazing university lecturer.
I also just seem to like the guy. He exudes knowledgeable and level headed.
I am a big fan of his channel but in a lot of his videos lately, the tone has been somewhere between holier-than-thou and outright preachy. Just because you spent a week researching a semi-obscure topic enough to present about it on YouTube of all places doesn't make you an authority on the matter, and it absolutely doesn't mean you're suddenly qualified to dismiss people who disagree with your conclusions.
I prefer his videos where the vibe was more along the lines of, "Hey, I've been playing with this neato old technology lately, what say we nerd out about it for 38 minutes or thereabouts?"
Every time I hear about VHS I like to bring up Marion Stokes : https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
It's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings.
Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.
With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.
The future has been monetized.
It happened 20 years ago, so some folks around here might be too young to remember the Sony rootkit fiasco [1]. Sony decided it would be a good idea to put on their music CDs an auto-run program that would install a rootkit on your Windows computer, whose job it was to be a watchdog for Sony's copyrights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
I have a non-smart budget TV. It doesn't have many features but it does let you record over the air digital TV to a USB stick. Unfortunately, the playback is incredibly janky.
I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle.
Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know.
Anyway, it is very sad.
I'm fond of the HDHomerun devices. They just expose a set of URLs over the local network corresponding to channels. You can point VLC to them or just download a chunk of the bitstream to process later.
I'm sure you could appliance that up to trigger an automatic recording on conditions like "card inserted".
I will admit I haven't tried this, so I don't know if there's some encryption that would be problematic but there are definitely HDMI video capture devices that are very reasonably priced and would let you record content. BUt most all content is online so it seems there would be very little demand for the feature you are talking about. I can just go to my friends house and log in to whatever app and watch the same stuff I can at my house, or use something like a Chromecast.
> BUt most all content is online
Ha! Joking?
TVs in Japan let you do exactly this. You just plug in any sufficiently fast USB mass storage and can record tv to it. There’s some sort of encryption scheme bound to the tv though so it’s not portable. There may be someway to transfer the recordings to other tvs but it’s limited.
There’s even a companion app that will stream recordings on your tv to your phone.
That’s a wild story I’ve not heard before, thanks for sharing.
That's incredible - what a project!
I have such a huge nerd crush on this guy. Witnessing the incredible skill of making even the most humble and obsolete of technologies seem like an absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity is always a pleasure.
I actually think that "old tech" is pinnacle of human ingenuity.
When you see the inside of a camcorder, or a VCR as per his latest videos, those were object humans had to design not only for aesthetics but also for their function.
I'm not sure I'm clear but now, I feel like everything is just a randomly designed box stuffed with circuit boards. And more importantly, I really frequently feel like most objects I buy today are never tested by real people before being sent to production lines. If it was the case, somebody, somewhere would have noticed that a tactile snooze button alongside the buttons to change the hour on an alarm clock is stupid, or that the screen is too bright for you to sleep.
When objects were a complex arrangement of things that moved smartly together to create a function, the people designing had to test them. They also had to think actively about ergonomics because there were real constraints to solve in creating a camcorder that you can use with only one hand so you'd better place the buttons in an ergonomic place.
Re "old tech": some of it is still being made!
I'm currently in the middle of cleaning/ rehabbing, a 30ish year old Kenmore vacuum cleaner that I inherited from my grandparents when they died a decade ago. It's not precious or an heirloom or anything, but it's still works perfectly.
The thing that struck me when completely disassembling it to clean it was how well and how simply engineered it was. The vacuum is held together with four screws which once you remove them The top simply lifts off and everything is right there. The only "electronics" is a single relay. Everything inside comes apart and goes back together very easily with no tools. There is even a wiring diagram on a sticker inside the case. The powerhead is similar, two screws and two clips (with text and an arrow pointing to the screwdriver slots to release them). Again, very simple and modular and repairable inside with another wiring diagram and instructions for replacing the belt on the inside of the case. The "headlight" bulb is incandescent and socketed. The rubber bumper around the edge is attached with tab-and-slot and not overmolded so it is easily replaceable. I haven't looked, but I'm sure there's a comprehensive catalog of replacement parts available.
It's apparently been a very successful design for them because they're still selling models which are extremely similar[0]. It looks like some of the molds are probably the same.
[0] https://kenmorefloorcare.com/products/vacuums/canister-vacuu...
Because at the time it may have been the pinnacle of ingenuity. Engineers had to figure out a new thing, or a way to do a thing in certain constraints, with what they had on hand, and had to be clever about it.
And they don't have to do that now designing things like folding phones to be super thin with no gap and with cameras with optical zoom and all that? The engineering of a bleeding edge folding smartphone seems pretty ingenious to me.
I still look at every folding smartphone and you can see the crease.
It's always true, that's the point.
This video was recommended to me yesterday and I refused to watch, I believed it would take me into some kind of rabbit hole. Either this guy videos or about VHS (or worst, both).
From the comments here, it seems I was right. But now I regret, I could live with a couple of hours of sleeping depravation (I guess).
Technology Connections is a rabbit hole of its own, and if you let it it will send you into a billion more.
You watch 2h30 about RCA's CED (video disc format from the mid 60s which didn't see production before the early 80s at which point it was DOA), and when the playlist ends you're sad and wonder if you should watch it again. It's great.
I suggest you start with his dishwasher content
People at work still don’t believe me when I tell them that there’s no point using the pods that say they have rinse aid built in…
Oh boy, I foresee conflicts at home after watching it. But a person who runs away from conflicts is a coward :)
I've been wanting to get off pods since that video, but I still have a Costco size stash of them.
Technology Connections always puts out quality content.
It upsets me that so much video was recorded on tapes instead of film, because it didn’t wear well and looks awful today. The only hope we have now are approximations using AI.
Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.
One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.
I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.
Film can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness.
80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.
TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.
The end result of a modern film "transfers" looks so good that people massively the amount of effort that went into the restoration.
The color has always faded. They have to color-grade it back to what they think it originally looked like, though it's more common to use artistic license what they it was originally intended to look like. Artistic interpretation always leaks in, and it will never match what someone saw in the theatre (and there was massive variation between prints even when they were brand new).
At least with TV shows like TNG, we have the tapes to use as a reasonably solid reference for what color was actually broadcast.
And then there is scratch and dust removal. They do so much in-painting to get the clean result that we associate with 35mm film today.
The color has always faded - well, not always. The gold standard for movie archiving is to store the movies color separated on three reels, one for red, green and blue, but not use color film, but a special black and white. There's no fading at all on these.
Sometimes the original negatives are in really good condition, but you still have to redo the color-grading, because the original color-grading was done chemically onto some transfer which now has faded or was just pretty bad to begin with, if you even can find it.
In the UK, indoors studio shots were on video, but outdoors location shots had to be on film, so there was an obvious difference in look when they cut between them.
Monty Python lampooned this in a sketch where Graham Chapman goes outside, exclaims "Good Lord, I'm on film!" and then flees indoors to the safety of video
A lot of TV classic shows were shot on tape just because it was so much cheaper, and everything live has either always been tape or just wasn't recorded at all as far as I know.
For a period of time there was TV but no way to record it onto magnetic tape, so you'd use a telecine (closed box with a film camera pointed at a TV screen) to record what was being broadcast. To air it again, you'd use a cinetele (tv camera pointed at a projected screen).
> 80s movies would be near universally film
Major movies, yes. But a lot of B films were on tape, and most of the distribution of movies in the early 80s was tape, so as companies went out of business, what was left was tape.
I’m over 50 y.o., but I remember movies from Blockbuster that I can’t find now because they were minor and only distributed on VHS tapes which were dumped over the years. I can find just about anything that was on film.
What are a couple that you'd like to find?
It wasn't. 80s TV shows and movies were overwhelmingly recorded on film. Primarily because it was much easier to edit film than tape.
And we are streaming a ton of them now that they've gone back and scanned the original film in 4K.
It's awesome. Heck you can watch I Love Lucy from 1951 in glorious high definition, sharper than anyone ever viewed it originally. It's basically magic.
If you want 1980's, go watch St. Elsewhere or Cheers. They have cinema detail now instead of the fuzzy TV detail you would have seen in the 80's.
Film needs to be developed to be able to see the content at all. Regular color films after shooting is covered in extremely photosensitive, opaque gray paste, and it needs to be washed and cleaned in temperature controlled acid bath to remove the reactive part and only leave the image on the film.
Tapes, on the other hand... You can just rewind it, play it, and overwrite a few times. Cost differences are significant to say the least.
Film is far from stable at rest. We probably lost more content on film than tape.
Just need to take over the TV station:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2efhrCxI4J0
Very few movies were shot on tape, and those that were did it deliberately for the effect of looking awful (Blair Witch Project).
For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.
Blair Witch was shot and edited on tape, converted by telecine to 35mm film for release and then they did a transfer of the 35mm for release on home media. It was only last year that we got a release straight from the tape master.
Memory unlocked. Around 1980, our local, government mandated, public access program for cable TV would loan out the first over-the-shoulder camera he showed, along with the sorta-portable battery VHS recording rig. White balance was always a challenge with those. AV nerds could go out and tape random events that nobody would watch but it kept us off the street.
Interesting that camcorders were produced before the widespread use of ccds. The early models used cathode ray tubes to detect the image. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube
I remember as a kid we had a whole bookcase of those small cassettes for the family camcorder. I always loved getting to put the tiny one into the full-sized VHS, felt like magic that it actually worked when you popped it into the VCR.
Preferred video8 and its successors, they were so much better.
We had VHS and used it just to ingest tapes into Video8, keeping our collection purely video8.
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I wish I never got rid of my VCR and tapes.
This video nerd-sniped me so hard. All these mechanics put a smile on my face.
He should make "shorts" of his own videos that are 8 minutes long.
This is my main problem with the modern Youtube meta, every single "serious" topic video is +30 mins length. 10 years ago we were perfectly fine with 10 mins stuff but of course algorithms and advertising and nowadays most Youtuber is pushing longer and longer videos as if we are watching peak evening television reporting...
Some creators still do 10 minute videos but whenever I watch one I feel I'm left with more questions than answers, I really prefer the deeper dives.
Evening television reporting spends about 30s on any one topic, so much so that the dominant effect on the viewer is however the presenter framed the topic initially. This is nothing like that.
Typical package in the U.K. is about 3 minutes, the main story will have 10-15 minutes on it, with probably two pieces from different correspondents on different angles, an in studio interview, and a live.
There’s then the in depth programs which spend half an hour or an hour on a specific subject (dispatches, panorama etc)
People are less interested in long form news though, so public service broadcasters in the U.K. have a duty to reach as many people in as many ways.
And people click on the those videos, and YouTube recommends them because people like them.
There's a perfectly good format for long-form dives: An article. But no, everything needs to be a video because otherwise, how would anyone bother to consume it.
No, for the kind of content he produces video is absolutely essential, since much of it is either demonstrating audio and video playback (including things like artifacts and color distortions), and showing how the internal mechanisms operate on partially disassembled machines.
You can do that just fine with the occasional video inside the article, though. I mean, significant parts of the video is just panning by some device while he's talking.
His videos have so much higher information density than texts can offer. Videos are just much more efficient and can explain things better for those topics.
I can read an article about 10x faster than watch a video. I don't have a problem with Alec's videos per se, but it's crazy to claim that video is the medium with higher information density. Text is always going to be the better medium for transmitting information, except for cases where the unique advantages of video (moving pictures and sound) help.
there are things you can communicate well in text as well as things that make more sense with visuals.
Please, stop thinking in binaries.
Articles are capable of using both. The main content can be in text, with an image, a gif or a short video or audio clip here and there to help explain if an illustration is better suited.
I wouldn't want to read a phone review that was text only, but one that has a set or two of images and video to show of the camera, a size comparison to a different phone, and you've got most of what you'd want to put in a video anyway. The rest of many youtube videos are just talking heads and stock footage. The substantive parts of many videos, the stuff that actually should be video for better information density, is rarely a majority of any given video.
Video is definitely a more engaging form of content for me, but claiming it's more effective at information transfer as compared to text is ridiculous.
And I don’t want to switch between reading and watching short video clips constantly. My brain doesn’t work that way.
You probably don't need more than one or two video clips unless you're writing about video itself, say, comparing Ffmpeg renders or phone cameras. You certainly don't need any video for most subjects.
But that's exactly what he is talking about. He's not doing, like, car reviews.
He's doing a video about a format, not about video itself. How much of this video is comparisons of video itself? None that I could see. He's already done that video way back with his Betamax vs. VHS comparison.
All the cases of him comparing the form factor, that is, the size of the casette, with something else, are easily shown with either pictures or diagrams.
Please no.
His videos are long but every minute is worth it.
Let someone else make watered down videos that appear to cover everything but don't actually explain anything.
I respect the guy a lot but I'm not going to watch 2 45m video about gas lanterns. But that's a good thing that we have choices and people like Alec who will put that much effort into the research
I think the problem is that a lot of creators had ran out of low hanging fruit contents. I feel his script more repetitive than before.
Why?