Cast-Away: A DIY Platform for Video Capture, Automation, and Various Antics

Adam Tannir presents Cast-Away, a hobbyist platform for recording and analyzing television, both from old VHS tapes and from live broadcast signals. He explains the motivation: vintage tapes hold unusual shows and commercials, and once cable providers encrypted over-the-air channels, he turned to an antenna and a digital tuner box instead.

The hardware section covers inexpensive USB capture dongles for digital and analog video, VLC settings that favor low latency and MJPEG output, and a Raspberry Pi 4 that needs a heatsink and fan. The board's infrared receiver can be enabled through the kernel to act as a remote control, and the same setup doubles as a compact keyboard-video-mouse solution for a second machine. For analysis, OpenCV and imutils handle frames from live or recorded sources, and a background-averaging filter highlights motion while isolating static scenes. Ideas include commercial detection, barcode-style visualizations of episodes, pose estimation for fight scenes, and automated caption capture.

The talk closes with archival examples, including a recording from about 1983 featuring stations that no longer exist and a rerun carrying an ad for NeXTSTEP. Tannir notes that the code is still small, starting from a Flask streaming example, and presents the project as a work in progress that others can extend.