LIlinuxkernal·Sep 27, 2026Submission
2 points · Open discussionoyvindln
vhs-decode
Jupyter Notebook2022–2026
oyvindln / vhs-decode
vhs-decode
Software defined VHS decoder - Fork (maybe temporary) of the ld-decode Laserdisc rf decoder
21Distinct people
22Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Software defined VHS decoder - Fork (maybe temporary) of the ld-decode Laserdisc rf decoder
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
- happycube/ld-decode · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year22 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-12-11 12:07:50 UTC to 2026-09-27 17:33:54 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
22 sourcesI am going to finish such a project soon myself, including some old Video8 tapes! Sounds like you're on macOS, Any reason you didn't use iMovie for the capture itself?
The Video8 tapes have already been digitalized via a Digital8 camcorder, but apparently you can get even better quality out of old analog tapes with the vhsdecode project. Let's see if I ever get around to that, but at least it bypass Firewire entirely:
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode
https://www.reddit.com/r/vhsdecode/
In Bring Back MiniDV with This Raspberry Pi FireWire HatSomewhat related, there are people doing amazing things by modifying VHS players and tapping into the raw output from the tape heads (bypassing all of the player's other electronics), and then using modern signal processing techniques to extract unbelievable great footage from old tapes.
Check out this extraction/decoding of a 1987 VHS recording of The Cure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks1wE_NXWv8
Play if full screen at whatever the highest resolution your screen can take advantage of, It's amazing! Check out the quality of the big headshots of Robert Smith, the resolution of stuff like his hair is way beyond what I believed VHS to be capable of - based on growing up recording similar music acts in the 70s and 80s.
Here's the software (and descriptions of the hardware and VHS player mods) they use:
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-deco
Read the rest
de
I suspect the recording technique/format on those is a similar analog signal on the tape - and from The Reg's article (quoting various sources) it sounds like they're already planning on similar approach:
"The software librarian at the CHM is the redoubtable Al Kossow of Bitsavers, who commented in the thread that he is on the case. On the TUHS mailing list, he explained how he plans to do it:
taping off the head read amplifier, using a multi-channel high speed analog to digital converter which dumps into 100-ish gigabytes of RAM, then an analysis program Len Shustek wrote: https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape
It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable."
VHS-Decode did get a mention in these comments previously but probably beyond the reach (or patience) of even most hackers. But good information on decks and theory:
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/
In the (original) spirit of this site, where people get curious and go off and solve impossible problems, I can point to this guy who gets it. He rants better than I do.
https://www.reddit.com/user/TheRealHarrypm
Read on for my rant if you care.
The last useful decks were built 25 years ago. Even then there's acres of bad advice on the internet, specifically around prosumer decks with built-in TBC that isn't sufficient to provide a proper signal to a modern video capture card.
So find any S-VHS deck that actually runs well, S-Video out into a external TBC. Blackmagic owns the cheap-but-great category for capture. Then ffmpeg to sui
Read the rest
t your storage budget.
Beyond that, things are so screwed up online around preservation technology and knowledge that my advice is to seek the services of a professional if the material is important. Or go ahead and DIY if you're just doing amateur stuff or you're a hoarder trying to justify your conditions. But try to refrain from posting your secret sauce; it likely isn't. Organize and post the videos instead. Most won't, because they know they look like shit and they can't handle the feedback.
I just did a quick Google search and found this on a formal preservation website: "This means that S-VHS tapes are playable in VHS decks but VHS tapes are not playable in S-VHS decks." https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/videot...
Exactly backwards.
I don't think I've ever read an article about analog media of any type on the internet that didn't have me screaming at the screen.
This also worked for me. Crucially, the cheap composite capture devices are rubbish and have terrible drivers as well, while the cheap HDMI capture + OBS Just Works.
There is the ultimate solution https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode , but that requires modifying your VCR.
In Automating our home video importsCheck out Domesday Duplicator, LD-decode, and VHS-decode!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU
https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator
https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode
https://www.domesday86.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
In Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorderThis is wonderful and important work. Are there audio restoration gurus who make their services available to the average person? I've found many "transfer your memories to DVD"-type places, but I haven't been able to find people/companies that specialize in doing the best-possible digitization of formats like Yamaha 4-track cassettes and Super VHS HiFi Stereo tapes. (I'll be doing the audio restoration part.)
[Edit: Oooh, I see that https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode now supports HiFi audio decoding! Sadly for me, this appears to require some light VHS deck hacking.]
In Recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapesThere's also a usecase of using flac for non-audio data: anything that looks like a waveform compresses quite well. e.g. analog signals, data logging, etc. One example is https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode - capturing high-bandwidth signals directly from analog tape with SDR-like hardware, for later software demodulation. Those waveform signals compress quite well with flac.
Currently there's flacCL, which compresses on the GPU, so this is one more option.
In FLAC 1.5 Delivers Multi-Threaded Encodinghttps://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode + 10 of those $35 a pop https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/RSP1 + 10 VHS players + someone on a night shift feeding tapes every couple hours = ~100 days
In I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with themProbably the highest quality retrieval is with: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode
which reads the raw data off a variety of tape formats and converts it to video. Grew out of the domesday project for lasterdiscs
In I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with themTo save folks the search query:
ld-decode - https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode
Also worth mentioning the fork, vhs-decode - https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode which was discussed here previously.
VHS-Decode – Software defined VHS decoder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942490 - September, 2022 (81 comments)
Edit: Thank you @LocalH for the link typo correction.
In The LaserDiscMartin Scorsese should sponsor https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode :-)
It's the ultimate in VHS preservation.
I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make this happen!
In Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivistShowing the 15 most recent of 22 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.