Is it possible to copy or record 3hours vhs recording in less time

[nusratjaveid]

Dear friends:
Is it possible to copy or record 3hours vhs recorded cassette in less time by dvd recorder or on hard disk by any s/w.
or it will record after 3hours playing.
nusratjaveid

[redwudz]

Maybe with a very expensive commercial VHS deck. But not likely with a consumer VHS deck.

[lordsmurf]

No, not even with a "commercial VHS deck" (does not exist, FYI).
3 hours takes 3 hours, the end.

[greymalkin]

yep..too bad the audio tape "high speed dubbing" feature never made it over to VHS

[solarfox]

Unfortunately, that kind of "high-speed dubbing" simply isn't possible with helical-scan tape. (Well, OK, it might be possible, but the mechanics of it would be so complex and touchy that it's probably not worth it.) That's one reason why retail copies of movies on VHS routinely cost $80-and-up back in the early 80s; until some bright boys at Sony cracked the problem of high-speed mass duplication of helical-scan tape using a contact-print process (which involved, among other things, using specialized master tape with an extremely high coercivity), the only way to get 1000 copies of a 2-hour movie was to connect 1000 "slave" VCRs to a master playback unit, load 1000 blank cassettes into them, then start them all off at once and wait 2 hours for them to finish. (Or if you only have 100 VCRs, do this 9 more times. )

To the original poster: Unfortunately, software can do nothing about the playback speed of your VCR. VHS video tape is an analog medium; it's not possible to just crank up the speed of the drive and read the bits in faster-than-real-time like you can with an all-digital format such as a CD or DVD. While it is possible to pull off a "play the tape at a faster speed" trick with analog audio tape, that only works because audio tape is recorded linearly, i.e. the tracks are a continuous lengthwise stripe, so the "chipmunk effect" of the time-and-pitch shift caused by the faster playback is easy enough to undo just by slowing down the playback speed of the copy. Videotape, on the other hand, is recorded as a series of diagonal "stripes" across the width of the tape, and the placement and angle of the stripes is a function of the tape's horizontal motion vs. the video heads' vertical(*) spin rate. Running the tape at a faster horizontal speed would throw off this relationship, causing the heads to "miss" portions of each stripe or to catch partial amounts of multiple adjacent stripes. If you ever used the "fast cue/review" buttons to skip past the commercials, you know what the result will look like.

(* and before someone chimes in, yes, the heads' alignment isn't truly vertical, but as the wise man once said, "an ounce of inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation." )

[greymalkin]

I think we've covered the spectrum here..from straight to the point (lordsmurf) to the history of VHS (solarfox)

[oldfart13]

As I recall, this was tried by one company but the high speed burned out the heads like running sandpaper across them, so it was abandoned...