Kris Slyka Abuses Audio Cassettes, Python, and JavaScript to Record a Music Video to Tape
A Python encoder and JavaScript decoder bring — low-resolution, low-frame rate — video to classic audio cassettes.
Musician and programmer Kris Slyka has published Python code for encoding video into a format suitable for recording onto unmodified audio cassette tapes, then a JavaScript applet for decoding it again for playback.
While long out of favour for their originally intended purpose of music recording and playback, though still produced in surprising quantities for use in police stations around the world for tamper-proof interview recording, audio cassettes aren't the first thing you'd think of for video playback. Slyka, however, has demonstrated that it's entirely possible to record and play video back on the magnetic tapes - providing, that is, you're happy with five frames per second at a 100x75 pixel resolution.
Brought to our attention by TechXplore, Slyka was inspired to create the tool as a means of producing something a little special for his self-made EP: Where the first side of the tape includes the song in a standard audio format, the second features a music video decodable with a JavaScript tool embeddable in any HTML webpage and executable on any modern browser.
The EP, and the B-side video, can be found on Slyka's Bandcamp page; the encoder and decoder, meanwhile, have been published to GitHub under the permissive MIT License.