Comment by bigiain

Somewhat related, there are people doing amazing things by modifying VHS players and tapping into the raw output from the tape heads (bypassing all of the player's other electronics), and then using modern signal processing techniques to extract unbelievable great footage from old tapes.

Check out this extraction/decoding of a 1987 VHS recording of The Cure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks1wE_NXWv8

Play if full screen at whatever the highest resolution your screen can take advantage of, It's amazing! Check out the quality of the big headshots of Robert Smith, the resolution of stuff like his hair is way beyond what I believed VHS to be capable of - based on growing up recording similar music acts in the 70s and 80s.

Here's the software (and descriptions of the hardware and VHS player mods) they use:

https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

I suspect the recording technique/format on those is a similar analog signal on the tape - and from The Reg's article (quoting various sources) it sounds like they're already planning on similar approach:

"The software librarian at the CHM is the redoubtable Al Kossow of Bitsavers, who commented in the thread that he is on the case. On the TUHS mailing list, he explained how he plans to do it:

taping off the head read amplifier, using a multi-channel high speed analog to digital converter which dumps into 100-ish gigabytes of RAM, then an analysis program Len Shustek wrote: https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape

It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable."