I thought I’d start this because I’ve been working on recovery of Teletext data from old Betamax tapes, and it seems to deserve its own thread. I’ve had some mild success with actually getting some readable data from the Seventext service off of a tape from 2 May 1984.
Before the internet there was Teletext. During the late 1980s and the 1990s it was a required accessory if you wanted the latest news, weather, finance, TV guide, TAB odds and results, and other information.
When I was in high school I loved to browse the catalogues of Brashs, Myer and other electronic retailers for TVs which had Teletext decoder.
I remember teletext but I didn’t realize if you recorded from the tv with a vcr that it got recorded too.
Man I miss the 80s/90s tv was such simpler back then.
The data was recorded on tape as part of the video signal (just above the start of the video frame), but the quality of recording was too low to actually permit decoding of the signal in real time with any reasonable quality. You can see the difference when comparing the video of decoding done in real time on a TV equipped with Teletext (the first video in my original post) and decoding the signal (not in real time) via a PC with a capture card (the second video in my original post).
