Recreating a Fictional Minitel-Based VHS Downloader Device

The Internet as we know it was not the first computer network to gain widespread usage. In the US and several other countries, online bulletin board systems (BBSs) were the most well-known Internet precursors. But in France they had Minitel, which was a very successful online service that became available throughout the country in 1982 and that didn’t shut down until 2012. Inspired by a comic from French author Boulet, Ghettobastler built a Minitel-based device that downloads YouTube videos and copies them to VHS tapes.

The inspiration comic imagines a France stuck with technology from the ‘80s and ‘90s. In the comic, our protagonist wants to pirate an episode of Game of Thrones. So he hops onto his Minitel terminal and heads to a torrent service to download the episode onto a VHS tape. Such a thing was not plausible on the real Minitel network, which only provided download speeds of 1200 bits per second. At that rate, it would take hundreds of hours to download a single hour-long episode in VHS resolution. But Ghettobastler didn’t need to rely on the real Minitel network, because he had modern technology to close the gap.

The devices used to access the Minitel network, including the popular Minitel 1, were terminals and not personal computers. They could display text and very basic graphics sent over phone lines through the Minitel network and send back text strings, but couldn’t do any processing of their own. That is actually ideal for this project, because Ghettobastler was able to use his Minitel 1 as a terminal connected to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer. The two communicate through serial via a level shifter and the Raspberry Pi provides a simple interface that shows up on the Minitel 1's CRT screen.

In that interface, the user can type a search string. The Raspberry Pi will then use a simple Python script to search for that string on the YouTube website, scrape the results, and list them in the Minitel interface. The user can then select the video title they want and the Raspberry Pi’s will use another script to download the video to its storage.

Once the video is in storage, the Raspberry Pi begins playing it through the composite video output. That feeds into an old VCR with a VHS tape already in place. As soon as the video starts playing, the Raspberry Pi pulses an infrared LED to mimics the “being recording” command from the VCR’s remote control. From there, it is a matter of simply waiting as the entire video plays and records onto the VHS tape for later viewing.

This doesn’t have any practical purpose in today’s world, but it is fascinating to see a silly fictional concept from a comic brought to life as a real device.