Retriving Teletext from VHS

[nwtv2003]

Basically I got a new TV this week and when I was watching a video earlier, I pressed the Text button on my TV and after a few seconds it was bringing up signs of Teletext from that channel I recorded it from and the day and time etc. Now I was shocked when I found this, I knew it could work on SVHS, but on a normal crap VCR it was odd. Though this never happened on my old TV or any other TV's that I've had. Though it's not a full thing, it struggles to survive, like when you try to recieve Teletext with a bad picture.

Though to make sure it was working I popped in a tape which had stuff from ITV recorded in 1989, which was displaying Oracle, whilst it was going mad, with the colours and the digits etc.

Any explanations or any other people had this sort of thing?

[James Martin]

I've got it to work on some TV's to an extent... only really works on SVHS though.

I've popped in a recording from 1990 and had mental shit on the screen but clearly had it displaying ORACLE at the top.

God damn bring back ORACLE!

[Neil Jones]

Basically I got a new TV this week and when I was watching a video earlier, I pressed the Text button on my TV and after a few seconds it was bringing up signs of Teletext from that channel I recorded it from and the day and time etc. Now I was shocked when I found this, I knew it could work on SVHS, but on a normal crap VCR it was odd. Though this never happened on my old TV or any other TV's that I've had. Though it's not a full thing, it struggles to survive, like when you try to recieve Teletext with a bad picture.

The signal, the whole signal is recorded, including the portion of the signal that contains the teletext pages.

But as you may know, you only need a slightly degraded signal from the transmitter to screw up the teletext signal. VHS picture quality sent from the video is well below the quality needed for a decent text "reception" (because VHS is basically crap compared to SVHS which is higher quality and so why you can grab the teletext off it) so from VHS you'll have a scrambled text picture which will usually be unusable.

[nwtv2003]

Basically I got a new TV this week and when I was watching a video earlier, I pressed the Text button on my TV and after a few seconds it was bringing up signs of Teletext from that channel I recorded it from and the day and time etc. Now I was shocked when I found this, I knew it could work on SVHS, but on a normal crap VCR it was odd. Though this never happened on my old TV or any other TV's that I've had. Though it's not a full thing, it struggles to survive, like when you try to recieve Teletext with a bad picture.

The signal, the whole signal is recorded, including the portion of the signal that contains the teletext pages.

But as you may know, you only need a slightly degraded signal from the transmitter to screw up the teletext signal. VHS picture quality sent from the video is well below the quality needed for a decent text "reception" (because VHS is basically crap compared to SVHS which is higher quality and so why you can grab the teletext off it) so from VHS you'll have a scrambled text picture which will usually be unusable.

I know what you mean, it takes longer to load and really to an extent worse when I get it from an tape on LP. Though it doesn't help if I stick in a 16 year old VHS tape, which luckily is still in very good condition, though I found out from the scrambled like data at the top of the screen that the ads that went out during the edition of The Hit Man and Her (on the tape) were shown at 2.55am on a Sunday morning in June 1989! Though I stuck in a tape from 13 years ago which has a poor picture quality and I got little Teletext, sorry Oracle information from that.

Though even the Fast text options go mad, when I pressed text when watching a video from BBC1 in 1992, the yellow option said 'ThamesLWT', which I think the TV was getting confused with Pg600 on Ceefax.

I understand that VHS is nowhere near as high quality as normal TV transmission, but still all the recordings I've used are in good nick and were recorded from a good picture, you'd still think the Teletext reception would be better, though not perfect.

[cwathen]

I've never been able to recover actual teletext pages from a VHS recording, but my TV always manages to pull the channel ID out of the recording - put in a mid-90's recording from ITV and 'westcountry' appears on the screen!

[russnet]

I had this happen with a tape from 1991 and the channel ID came up with "ITV ORACLE"

[Neil Jones]

I understand that VHS is nowhere near as high quality as normal TV transmission, but still all the recordings I've used are in good nick and were recorded from a good picture, you'd still think the Teletext reception would be better, though not perfect.

The picture from a VHS source could be as clear and clean as a raw signal from the transmitter.
But you still won't get any teletext from it because it doesn't provide a good enough teletext signal to the TV set that can be decoded.

[nwtv2003]

I had this happen with a tape from 1991 and the channel ID came up with "ITV ORACLE"

I haven't had the Channel ID come up yet, but you get some interesting stuff at the top of the screen when you hit text, such as 'GRA', 'ITV+', 'ORACLE' and rather oddly 'Teletext on 3'

[russnet]

I had this happen with a tape from 1991 and the channel ID came up with "ITV ORACLE"

I haven't had the Channel ID come up yet, but you get some interesting stuff at the top of the screen when you hit text, such as 'GRA', 'ITV+', 'ORACLE' and rather oddly 'Teletext on 3'

Well for it to say Teletext on 3 is very early 1993 as you probably know they decided to call themselves ..on 3 and ..on 4 from the beginning but didn't last long until they rebranded the service.

The ITV+ comes from the 600s service before one of the regional companies did their ancilliary service. There was a test page on all the 600s except for the GMTV pages which was pretty similar to the ORACLE clock cracker page except the change in name. We had that in the Anglia region until 1995 when they took up an ancilliary service.

[harshy]

That is amazing, I didn't even realise that Teletext was recorded with SVHS/VHS recordings, unfortunately a lot of my recordings were taken off poor analogue sources, so I very much doubt mine will have survived, but a very interesting thread to read.

[Andrew Wood]

For more information,try:

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/
http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/appeal.shtml


An example of what you can get from old SVHS recordings - this from 1987:



Courtesy Me!