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I have a few old-ish porn tapes on the Philips 1700/1702 format. Anyone remember it? Vintage c.1980. Large box shaped cassettes, with one reel on top of the other (if that isnt suggestive of porn I dont know what is!) Anyway, my VCR has stopped working, so if anyone knows of an old time engineer who remembers them it would help. I have a second m/c which could be cannibalised for spares if necessary.

Cheers

Man, someone gave me King Kong taped off the telly on that format over 12 years ago. I never knew what it was - it didn't even have the format name written on the tape anywhere so I had no idea what to view it on. So there you go - thank you jonjon! A 12 year old mystery wrapped up.

Geez, I had a Philips N1700 from 1979 to 1982. It was a wank of a design as I found the tape edges got frayed because of the way the tapes twisted as they wound from one reel to the other. I had some unreplaceable stuff I got off TV that the N1700 chewed up. By the way, I now have a DVD recorder ( a Panasonic DMR-HS2 in Australia ) which is a fantastic little unit. I am currently transfering lots of old stuff from VHS onto DVD were it is much more stable and easier to navigate through. Someone out there must have a means of saving old N1700 tapes.

betamax taps were a nightmare too twisted tapes bad tracking.

Will your DVD recorder transfer from both PAL and NTSC tapes?

I haven't tried NTSC yet but I've just had a quick look through the manual ( which is about 100 pages ) and it seems to mention PAL/NTSC a few times. I have found with analogue signals, as long as you have a signal that works with a normal TV set, the DVD recorder will record it. It seems pretty clever at detecting whats being feed in. But I've only tried transfering tapes so far. DVD's might have reording protection codes in the signal. It can take digital signals straight from a DV camcorder too. A computer based DVD recorder would probably have more ways around this. I like my unit though because it sits in the corner of the room working away without sapping my computer's resources.

Thanks for the reply. If you ever try to tranfer from NTSC tape, please let us know. It's the space-saving aspect that attracts; so copying a DVD is irrelevant.

It seems from my own experience, and from another source, that computers don't necessarily do this properly from NTSC tapes, though some equipment obviously does. In my own experience of playing NTSC tapes to the PC via a PCTV card, you can either have the correct aspect ratio and stable horizontal hold in black and white or have colour and have an unstable horizontal hold with the full image above a black frame line, but compressed vertically. Then when grabbing a still, I have to narrow the width of the image to 85% to get the right aspect ratio.

In any case, when I eventually get round to doing this (not soon, but I'm gathering info in anticpation), I want something to chunter away in another room while I do something else on the PC.

Thanks a lot.