Hi! Long story short, I have some French pre-records that I want to capture as native SECAM. Maybe it's ridiculous - I have PAL captures that are fine for what they are - but I wanted to properly document this information since it's seemingly quite obscure, even on this forum. I'll update this post as I go.

Anyway, as others have said, there don't seem to be any SECAM-compatible decks with line TBC. You're just stuck on that one. I'd imagine lordsmurf's guide for SECAM is about is authoritative as it gets. I bought a Samsung SV-5000W when I got in a hurry and forgot that it can't handle SECAM-L. I thought I had flushed US$250 down the toilet. It turns out I didn't, and I'm getting some interesting results.

If anybody out there has SECAM pre-records, you should be able to save some money and pick up the AG-W2 / HV-MX100 / SV-5000W. They're relatively cheap compared to the other recommended decks, and more importantly for my purposes, I don't think SECAM pre-records use SECAM-L. (The ones I own don't use it, at least!) I think I read somewhere that many SECAM pre-records, if not all of them, are not SECAM-L. So far, that seems to be true. When I pop in my tapes and force PAL output, I get perfectly acceptable picture and audio. :) If I pass through the signal, the tape plays but my cheap composite-to-HDMI converter produces a funky picture. It's technically watchable, just black-and-white-ish with a slightly flickering picture.

My next step will be running a tape through my capture gear and seeing what can handle a native SECAM signal. I don't think my TBC-1000 will handle it but the AVT-8710 presumably will if I ever pick one up. I don't know about my capture card. I'll poke around and see if I can find any good ones that can handle SECAM. I'll either edit this post or add some replies as I go along.

I make no promises regarding your pre-records, dear reader. :) I'm just saying that if you're not dealing with SECAM tapes made from French TV or whatever else was known to use SECAM-L, it shouldn't hurt to give the AG-W2 / HV-MX100 / SV-5000W a try. Who knows, maybe if you're really adventurous, you can mod it to work with vhs-decode (Domesday86-related) and try to add TBC later. (I've lost track of where that team is at with their TBC work, and I have no clue if it's SECAM-compatible.)

Thanks.

-- merged --

Good news: I popped in a tape and ran the VCR through an ATI AIW USB clone and into VirtualDub. After setting the capture to SECAM-B and fiddling a bit with the capture setup, it worked! I can capture a pure SECAM signal and have it look right. :) There may be other capture cards that aren't ATI / ATI clones and can handle SECAM. I'm just saying that recommended ATI hardware should be fine.

(The picture is a bit "snowy" but that's a project for another day. I know it's not the tape because somebody with an SV-7000W that he had just serviced made a PAL-converted transfer for me last year. The picture isn't snowy at all.)

As far as I know, legacy capture cards and pro devices are the only ones that can handle SECAM properly, none of the modern or chinese stuff would work, SECAM chroma is a nightmare, this is why the French territories that used SECAM before dropped it in favor of PAL and MESECAM for consumer camcorders. The JVC S-VHS SECAM machines should handle SECAM if you have the right capture device, Albeit no line TBC as I've read.

Colin from video99.uk.co YT channel made a video about machines that playback SECAM properly, you should check it out.

Heh. If you're talking about the video he posted last year, that's one of my tapes in the background. :) I'm pretty sure he had the VCR convert to PAL before capturing. I might be wrong. I'd have to go back through the correspondence.

In any event, I think if I can get the snow fixed (I'll post a sample later), I'll be happy with what I have. Tracking down a good JVC S-VHS SECAM deck that's confirmed to not be broken seems like far more trouble than it's worth, especially since line TBC will be turned off. (That said, I do have an HR-S9700 coming soon. Maybe I'll give it a try just for laughs.)

For a long time i worked with a Terratec 250 pci card on XP (win7 aswell) that can handle secam B/L, PAL/NTSC60 amongst others that i've personnally tested.
Secam B for retail tapes (sold in france) / Secam-L for tv recordings.

I did my research a while back but gave up acquiring one of them given the high price and/or scarcity:
* The ACE converter Box handles Secam
* CTB-100G (which is a clone of the AVT 8710 handles Secam->Pal) ( online manual HERE
* Cypress CDM-800 handles Secam -> Pal

Video Mixers:
CMX 112 (handles all formats, Hdmi,yuv,composite,s-video in/out etc..) more infos HERE
cost ~ 2750€


Also supposedly a high end Toshiba DVD/HDD combo (Toshiba-rd-xs32) but the seller did not confirm this to me so i don't believe it (i mean the TBC part that handles secam)

Now i'm impatient to see your Ugly Secam caps ! Héhé

Looks like all of the "analog input" Snell and Wilcox standards converters and TBCs (The TBS line - Timebase Stabilizer as they call it) will take SECAM - but in most cases the output will need to be PAL in the form of composite, S-Video, or SDI. However, the full size rack-mount units can accept SECAM OR convert anything TO SECAM. Examples of those are the CVR250/450/550. I am also pretty sure that their standards converters all contain TBCs as well. In some or possibly all cases, they are both line AND frame TBCs, but I haven't gotten that far in my testing to say for sure.

On the cheap side of things, i can use my transcoder secam->pal on the jvc hr-s7700ms (or 8600ms)

https://imgsli.com/MzI0OTk0

note: The chroma noise reduction is essentially made by a sony rdr-hxd 890 at the end of the chain
Some jitter is reduced
Colours remain about the same to the naked eye (this is a tv recording, Secam-L, no macrovision)

Hi! Thanks to everybody who has been replying. I appreciate it and will try to get a proper reply up later today.

Quick update: My HR-S9700 came today. (I said it'd be soon!) I got excited when I skimmed an online manual and saw that there was a claim regarding the deck's ability to play SECAM-B tapes. (SECAM-L was explicitly marked as not compatible.) With the caveat that I skimmed and may have missed important info (menu setting, specific model, etc.), it looks like it's a no-go for SECAM. The tape plays but, as expected, it's black-and-white. I tried capturing as both SECAM and PAL in VirtualDub. No dice. There may be JVC S-VHS decks that can either output a clean SECAM signal or transcode to PAL. I'm just saying mine doesn't do that. :/ Either way, it did confirm that my 5000W needs a bit of TLC to get rid of the snow. I'll post a sample later and see if anybody can suggest a fix.

Thanks.

I think you are mixing between TV standards and VHS standards, SECAM on VHS is just SECAM and yes it is a.k.a SECAM L, What you think is SECAM B is probably no other than a MESECAM tape format, SECAM tapes play in B&W on PAL only VCRs, Not sure where you live but if you want to send me one of these SECAM B tapes I can help identify it since I have a VCR capable of reading native NTSC, native PAL, as well as MESECAM and NTSC 4.43.

But as far as native SECAM tapes, you can't play them back without a native SECAM VCR.

Edit:
Poking around, I think from this post it looks like MS letter designation is for SECAM VCRs that are capable of playing back MESECAM tapes. The S designation is for VCRs that can only playback SECAM tapes.

As far as TBC for SECAM/MESECAM, it appears that it is not possible from this post, It makes sense because of the nature encoding of the SECAM chroma, it is too complicated to build a chip that digitizes and converts back to SECAM without an added cost to the build, However it is confirmed here that if you set a -MS VCR to convert to PAL, it will take advantage of the line TBC.

@latreche34 - I'm pretty sure my tape is a proper SECAM tape. Maybe it's just me but it'd seem odd to manufacture MESECAM pre-records and sell them as SECAM tapes in France. Anyway, thanks for all the other info. That basically lines up with my understanding.

On a related note, does anybody know the technical reason for why the 5000 won't play French tapes (presumably over-the-air recordings since it plays my pre-records just fine in passthrough mode)? I wrote something here about vision modulation but realized it's probably wrong, so I deleted it. Maybe I missed something but I can't seem to find the specific technical reason why it doesn't work. As best I can tell, it's some sort of audio carrier and/or chrominance/luminance issue.

Thanks.