Instead of a tape adapter for a CD player to your tape deck, make a VHS tape adapter for "DVDs" to VCRs. It doesn't have to be only "DVDs" either, you could take output from any video source with the right connections (TiVo?).
-- mhh5, Nov 14 2000

Why?
-- jutta, Nov 14 2000


A no-brainer - literally.
-- nebulo, Nov 14 2000


Are there any integrated VCR/TV combos without inputs for external video sources?
-- egnor, Nov 14 2000


As the owner of a VCR and a cheapskate, I like this idea. I'm not willing to shell out for a DVD player and library quite yet, and owning a DVD player and VCR simultaneously seems like overkill. With something like this, I could keep my VHS collection while purchasing new titles in DVD and gradually change formats.

Friends of mine with in-car tape decks found the equivalent CD-to-tape adapter to be (and still is) an excellent stopgap measure for the underfunded.
-- Uncle Nutsy, Nov 14 2000


I still don't get it. [egnor, you're making sense as usual; I mean UncleNutsy or the original poster.]

You'd either have to purchase the adapter in addition to an existing DVD player, or the adapter would have a DVD player built in (and hence cost more while being less flexible to use, and while losing signal quality on the unnecessary way through the VCR.)

The car situation justifies adapters because the effort needed to reconfigure a car stereo is much larger than that needed to reconfigure a home entertainment system. Very few cars have built-in VCRs.
-- jutta, Nov 14 2000, last modified Nov 15 2000


Would you need an entire DVD player for the adaptor? Since the VCR is going to lose the picture quality of the DVD anyway, the adaptor doesn't need anything like the same quality of playback as a real DVD player and could therefore be built with inferior components and engineering tolerances. Some early CD-to-tape adaptors were cheaper than a CD player for this very reason, IIRC.
-- Uncle Nutsy, Nov 15 2000


First of all, I'm not aware of any CD->Tape adapter that was cheaper than a CD player which did not require the use of an external CD player to function.

More significantly, the technical obstacles that must be overcome to make something like the described device work are enormous. While audio casette players use a non-moving head which is in the same place on every player, video casette players use a head that rotates at 900rpm (15x/second) and is not always in quite the same spot; when a tape is loaded and played, a mechanism draws the tape out of the casette and wraps it around the head. I can imagine no remotely practical way of having a tape head in the adapter which would "interface" with the pickuphead on many different VCR's. Even if there were a few TV/VCR combo units without audio/video inputs, an RF modulator would be a much easier way of interfacing than a tape adapter thingie.
-- supercat, Dec 28 2000



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