About

The PXL2000 is a video camera manufactured by Fisher Price in the late 1980's. It's unique in that it records on cassette tapes instead of video tape.

This project's aim is to convert a WAV file of such a cassette recording into the corresponding video with as high of a quality as possible.

Using

Currently, the interface is entirely via command-line. Here are the typical steps.

1) Digitize a PXL2000 tape at 192kHz (audacity is a good match for this task) 2) Export the file as _YOURFILE.wav 3) Move that .wav file into the src directory of this project 4) From the src directory, run: ./process.sh _YOUR_FILE_.wav

Expect FFT and frame extraction to take 2 to 10x realtime. For a full PXL cassette, this could take a couple hours.

You can track processing progress by comparing the size of the _YOURFILE/fft.wav to your original file: _YOURFILE/fft.wav will end up approximately 1/2 the size of the original.

When process.sh completes, there should be a playable video file in _YOURFILE/out.mp4

Related

I've considered writing this tool for a while, and as I started getting more serious, I came across the work of Kevin Seifert. He's already done a ton of work decoding the format and written a decoder here: https://github.com/sevkeifert/pxl-2000-decoder

My experience with that decoder is that, while it does an awesome job in that you can make out what is on the video (truly a big accomplishment), it struggles to reliably find line and even frame syncs. I started this project with the intent of improving that project, but quickly realized that my overall approach was different enough that it would be easier to start coding from scratch.

Another project to decode PXL2000 video can be found here: https://github.com/TroyMcQuinn/pxl2000-converter There's a related video for that project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hM5X7m5_k

Approach

With the overall goal of "the best video quality possible, given the original signal," I chose to limit this project to using WAV file as the input (no streaming support). It is built as a series of filters that run one after the other. It identifies the sync signals by running a Fourier Transform on the input stream, looking for the 15 Khz sync signals. This approach appears to work very well for identifying the signals, but at the cost of taking a long time to compute.

In this image, you can see the original PXL 2000 signal in the top two rows. First is the video signal, followed by the audio channel. The third row is the output of an FFT transform looking for the sync signal, and the fourth row is simply a smoothed version of the third row.

I'm decomposing the problem by first trying to reliably detect the sync signals-- especially the frame syncs. Once the frame sync signals are captured, I can treat each frame as an object. I know that each frame will have the same number of scan lines, each terminating in a short sync pulse. And I know that each of those per-line sync pulses will be evenly spaced (since each line in the video image is obviously the same length). This allows me to reliably decompose the frame into scanlines. And then, I can treat each scanline as an object itself.

Example

Here's an example image from a video that was shot in 1989 of me blowing out the candles on my birthday cake.