Have you ever wondered what to do with all the old cassette tapes that you still keep somewhere in your storage room? While vinyl has turned out to be a highly valued musical medium over the years, becoming collector’s items, cassette tapes have aged poorly . Time has taken its toll on them, deteriorating them and making it impossible to use them even to satisfy our nostalgia.
However, a hacker named Kris Slyka has taken advantage of his confinement due to COVID-19 to try to investigate what other uses could be given to cassette tapes. The result obtained by Slyka is not particularly practical, but it is of great interest in the eyes of technology, since it had never before been considered that it could be done.
And it is that Slyka, taking advantage of his programming knowledge in Java and Python and his old Sony recorder, has managed to record video images on cassette tapes , which were only intended to collect audio!
Genuine, but with limitations
Although the truth is that the images obtained are of very poor quality. Today’s high-resolution video formats contain 8.3 million pixels and display 240 frames per second. A magnetic audiotape format, however, has many more limitations, and Slyka limited himself to experimenting with a screen of no more than 100×75 pixels , (a total of 7,500 pixels) and at a rate of 5 frames per second .
In spite of everything, the finding is novel, since it had never before been thought that video could be recorded on this type of platform. And you never know what kind of unsuspected applications may be given in the future .
And, as can be seen in the video that Slyka himself uploaded to YouTube explaining his project in detail, the touch of the video could not be more vintage .
