The HBO is time compressed, it runs slightly less than two hours even accounting for the missing Fox Fanfare on the recording. Not as sped up as a PAL video would be. This can be slowed down if need be?

Upon closer examination, the second more problematic tape is not time compressed. I'm leaning towards the idea it's a bootleg of a pre 1985 video release. Might be the 1982 "for rental only" which I have in my collection, and would be a better source for the vintage look, or to patch the HBO recording?

The recording starts right on the movie fanfare ends right before the warning would appear.

I'll look for the other tell tale signs on the DVD capture I made later this weekend.

Depending on the cable company involved it could be very nice for analog tv, or incredibly crappy. (Even better if you had one of those big dishes in your backyard!) I saw and recorded things at both ends of the scale back then.

The family didn't get a VCR until well after the big fuss over Star Wars on tv though.

Going to capture the old '82 rental Beta while I'm at it. The time compressed LD would look way too good for this. ;)

Thinking about this stirred up another old cable tv memory, which led to finding this on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMSXOlWt3qc

Looked over the '82 rental version and a later early Beta HiFi release, (pre '85) and they are different from the HBO version. No squeezed macrobinocular shots, and much different pan and scan in many shots. Just how many fullscreen transfers were there? I'm going to have to dust off my ancient LD version at this rate.

I contacted the guy who sold me my "new" beta, and apparently linear audio reproduction can vary quite a bit over all the models Sony made. So I may have to capture everything twice.

I might also try recording audio from the headphone jack, which is something I did once or twice back in college. Although I can't recall exactly why I needed to do it at the time. ;)

Wow! Have you documented other notable differences?

I like that Spanish logo and crawl! They should have collected all the foreign crawls, and made a Blu Ray extra out of them.

Got an adapter plug today, and it looks like capturing the audio via the headphone jack is going to work. I'm tempted to use the simulated stereo mode on the amp section, but I won't. ;)

The tracking is finicky on this machine, but I'm getting a better picture over the older deck. Wish me luck!

Is anyone keeping up with this? ;)

I can say with confidence that the HBO recording and the 1983 Laserdisc are from the same time compressed master. Even the film scratches are the same.

The whole custom 16mm transfer made for HBO story is full of holes now. ;)

Where the heck the second betamax copy I have was recorded from and when, I have no clue. Unfortunately, it has hopeless tracking issues that don't clear up until several minutes into the movie. I think the '83 Laserdisc would be a much better option than using this to patch or replace the HBO. You also won't have to speed the video up.

My second pass off the "new" Beta got me as good a capture of the HBO as we're probably going to get. Spots where I knew there were dropouts previously didn't have them this time around.

I will try to post screenshots later this week.

No watermarks or bugs. That didn't start until later in the 80's.

I wouldn't know for certain. My father cancelled HBO right before the final season of Fraggle Rock. Never give a kid a cable descrambler box as a birthday present. ;)

HBO Beta

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Mystery Beta

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1983 Laserdisc

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Note these are not the exact same frames time-wise, but pretty close.