Anything with a motherboard can be modified. I have an old VCR, a lot of electronic parts and a small hard drive I took out of an mp3 player (about 10 gigs if I recall). Any way to put linux onto my VCR? I have enough time on my hands and I am bored. Throw some ideas at me! Thanks
if u can do it +1, if not....well hey it didn't work.... not the worst thing that could happen
Those are my feelings as well. Don't know if I don't try.. The smell of old metal and VHS tapes is nostalgic and horrible at the same time. XD
Not going to happen, however you could hook up the VCR as a slave to a machine so in theory you could process the data from any tape/cassette to your machine.
Uhm dude that just isnt happening unless you can right for a freescale microprocessor (which most contain). However a linux machine can be hooked up into a VCR to process data into a file on the computer. This will take extensive linux background knowledge and remember you will need the resticted codecs if you use fedora or ubuntu
I know how to get VCR video onto linux.. to do it the other way I was thinking of replacing a microprocesser with an ARM or finding a way to make it think it wasn't a microproccessor (maybe QEMU)
Old electronics usually has a lot of spare space in it, so you would probably just put a raspberry pi in there. You would just need to find a DC power line on the VCR's circuit board and put that through a voltage regulator to power the pi.
Actually with the Pi's GPIO pins you would be able to use those to control the VCR. Now if you could feed that into a video to usb capture system you would have a pretty decent system for capturing video out of old tapes.
Sadly the amount of work you'd need to do to replace an embedded processor is insane, and would require more precision equipment then a normal man has. Sorry, but I don't think its gonna happen :(
You would be better off with a Pi or even an arduino than trying to mess with the motherboard on that thing,.
Yeah, now if you could set it up with software where you could put in an SD card and a tape and the pi would capture the tape to an MP4 on the SD card, THAT would be cool! Especially if it was all self contained and the pi just automagically wrote to the thumb drive or SD card or whatever. But that would take lots of work