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Show HN: VHS Camera – Run your camera or videos through a simulated VHS signal

17 points wookashin 1 hour ago 10 comments

simonjgreen 1 hour ago | parent

Love this. Really want it as a webcam filter now :)

xattt 1 hour ago | parent

This creates a paradox as live video, as would be the case with a broadcast/video call, didn’t go through tape. The discerning viewer would pick up on that and think you’re blowing them off by playing back a pre-recorded one-sided interaction.

The effect is more sentimental when applied to older videos, but that’s only because it’s what millennials are used to.

whywhywhywhy 1 hour ago | parent

Is this a new simulation or just https://ntsc.rs/ in a wrapper?

valadaptive 1 hour ago | parent

> The effect is based on ntsc-rs, which simulates how analogue video is encoded and recorded: colour bleed, tracking noise and soft detail, not a picture laid on top.

It looks like they just took ntsc-rs, added a bunch of SEO text, and did not link back to it in any way.

fipar 1 hour ago | parent

I can’t reply to OP because that comment is dead and I don’t see a reply link on it.

It doesn’t look like how I remember VHS but I think that, other than finding a setup that works (crt included), you probably won’t get useful feedback from people who were around at the time.

In any case, this really does look like a digital filter to me and not like how I remember VHS (I watched those in both ntsc and pal n, and with adapters meant for those who snuggled ntsc hardware into pal n countries).

I can’t find the link now but recently there was a post here about a GitHub Project that takes an audio file as input and gives you as output an audio file as the original would have sounded in some specific cassettes and let me tell you, that one also didn’t sound at all like the originals (I feel more authoritative on this because I still have working hardware).

joenot443 1 hour ago | parent

This is from Shadertoy, right?

InsidiousWombat 1 hour ago | parent

It looks like someone that doesn't know how VHS looked thinks it looks; text and any other overlay should also be passed thru filter at the very least, and they are too small (would look like blurry mess at VHS resolution)

dubbie99 55 minutes ago | parent

As someone who was around in the vhs days and has also written filters to approximate vhs, you are correct this is a very poor imitation of how vhs looked.

camies 56 minutes ago | parent

This is a lot of fun. The tracking lines and color bleed really bring back the feel of old home videos. Nice work.

valadaptive 46 minutes ago | parent

It seems like you used my ntsc-rs library for quite a bit of this.

I would like to note that while the ntsc-rs library is permissively licensed, the ntsc-rs-web repository (which implements the web UI) is not.

There appears to be quite a bit of code in this app which has been taken from ntsc-rs-web. Not only does the Rust-side wasm-bindgen wrapper appear to have been copied, but a lot of the architecture seems...heavily inspired by ntsc-rs-web. Can you clarify exactly how much you had Claude look at ntsc-rs-web when designing this?