P> On Thu, 29 Jan 1998 11:41:38 -0600 John Payson <supercat@MCS.NET> writes:

 P> The idea is probably about a week newer than the personal computer and
 P> the VCR.  Over the years, there have been several devices marketed to do
 P> this, but none very successful.   Juno sent me something a few months ago
 P> advertising one.

Check http://www.arvid.ru for good example of the successful implementation
of the videobackup. They manufacture such devices from 1992 (?), two ISA models
available now, USB version will come in near future. Total volume manufactured
- tens of thousands.

 >> VCR backup solutions are a pain in the tusch to use.  If you
 >> want to make the thing work at all reasonably, you'll need to have a
 >> fair amount of RAM on your encoder/decoder board for buffering [e.g.
 >> 1MB] and have it incorporate enough intelligence to read/write large
 >> amounts of data unattended.

 P> The seemingly high speed of VCR tape needs to be considered in light of
 P> by the poor quality of the media.  An agressive error-control strategy
 P> involving interleaved Reed-Solomon recording as well as possibly even
 P> recording the same data twice at different places on the tape should be
 P> used.  Even a very cheap backup system needs to be highly reliable.

ARVID-1052 have the following parameters: 4.5 Gbyte @ E-240 tape,
backup/restore speed 20 Mbyte/min, typical positioning time 2 min.
Infrared LED used for VCR control, VCR type choosed from library or learned
>from VCR distance control. Reed-Solomon encoding used. DOS, W95, NT software.
LINUX/FreeBSD/OS/2 support also exists.
Probably, new DVD-RAM technology (4.5G rewritable) will kill this devices in
some future.

Alexey

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