

- Smplayer framestep not working how to#
- Smplayer framestep not working code#
- Smplayer framestep not working series#
- Smplayer framestep not working tv#
The idea was that you’d tape the show, then just hit pause when the info came up.
Smplayer framestep not working series#
They played a series of information pages at the end of the programme, for a couple of seconds each. Well, they had a novel way of providing information at the end of the programme in a pre-internet way but something that might need to have a bit more of a data dump than some teletext pages.

Smplayer framestep not working tv#
How do I know so much about still frames? Those of a certain age might remember a TV programme hosted by… God, what was her name? Something like Aleks Krotosky… And some other less cute people. It wasn’t cringe making embarrassing, no, not at all.
Smplayer framestep not working how to#
There was a TV programme with the bloke from Red Dwarf where he gave lots of tips on how to use your video camera. Do you remember the days when video cameras had loads of gimmicks? Like being able to take a 1bpp snapshot of something, giving it a colour like bright magenta, then overlaying it on the video from the imager in a way that looked so utterly naff. Hi8 could also do decent still frames, but this might have been due to such devices having a heck of a lot of on board processing. I made a naff version of the original C4 logo by recording each frame from a Beta recording ( HCCS Vision digitiser), shrinking the frames with ChangeFSI, then just plotting the sprites quickly one after the other. My Sony had a frame step button, which did exactly what it promised. My Sanyo could be unpaused and paused again, skipping around 1/3 second. The problem with Betamax was how good it was at stepping forwards. This is because the C wrap (remember all those grinding noises as the deck threaded a tape) placed enough of the tape around the heads that as one transitioned off the tape, the other was already in position to pick up data. My Betamax decks, on the other hand, could manage perfect still frames. One might have noticed the colours were a bit “flatter” in pause, but then VHS was pretty rubbish so maybe not.

When proper freeze became available, it was often a digitised sample that was switched in place of the data coming from the heads.

The reason for this is purely technical – as it is an M wrap system, there simply isn’t enough tape in contact with the heads. The problem here is that VHS is a bit rubbish, and for a very long time was unable to produce a good static pause picture.
Smplayer framestep not working code#
These recorders index each individual frame with SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) timecode, which can then be used to trigger a digitiser board whenever a frame with the required index code is being displayed: As the digitiser board does not capture to disc in real time, the videotape is played several times, with different frames being captured on each pass: Hehe, there’s a document that talks about making Replay video… Unfortunately, it is not sufficient to simply use the freeze frame facility found on most video recorders, as the quality of the still image is so low as to produce an unuseable result when subsequently compressed ( digitiser boards are genlocked to the video, the pause button on a domestic VHS recorder is not!): Broadcast quality videotape recorders such as the Betacam SP (£15,000) can be used to capture still images at the appropriate level of quality for Replay movies.
