UA-cam is good for this kind of video lecture -- nerd appeal, no need to appeal directly to advertisers or public service commitments, and flexible on time.
If you're having trouble memorising the table at 6:39, remember these things (note: that all times are in format of mins:hrs): 1. L-x refers to length of tape in feet, x0.3 for meters. 2a. BII(I) or B2(3) has twice(thrice) as much recording time as BI (B1) speed, which provides 0.12x as much recording time as the tape length in feet*, eg. 0:15 for L-125 B1. b. Whatever recording times you get for the same tape length at different speeds, each next length down(up) provides those times doubled(halved) from the previous. To provide a base set of values, the possible recording times for L-125 tape are 0:15, 0:30 and 0:45 at B1, 2, 3 respectively. 3. L-830 doesn't support B1, on the other hand the tape must be used inside machines with B3 capabilities, even for B2 speed. Recording times for those combos are 5:00 and 3:20 respectively. The numbers below, therefore, are slightly higher for this type of Betamax. *B2 speed provides 0.24x as much recording time as the tape length in feet, for B3 the factor changes to 0.36.
I've gotten tons of cheap Beta porn from Ebay sellers- a whole box of tapes for a pittance. Last time though it was left outside my door while I was at work, and it was GONE by the time I got home! Whoever swiped it probably had no way to play them!
Neither Beta nor VHS were content controllers. The myth is due to RCA's CED, but that was also because there was not a high player sales volume for a third party to be interested in producing CEDs.
19:09 yeah, but what would the producers pick, cheaper or more expensive format? so if you end up with more pr0n on vhs, then it indeed affected the war outcome, and not by small margin.... also, you probably never had the situation that same movie was released on both formats, right?
Great episode, as always...one indirect drawback of playing standard VHS cassettes in a S-VHS unit was that it made onscreen artifacts more prevalent, as I found out firsthand. Also, had no idea that prerecorded movies were ever released in Video 8 format, or that Amstrad manufactured all sorts of electronics (only ever knew them as a computer company!).
15:40 I know of one S-VHS usage. When I was in high school (99-02) I did filming for the school PEG channel on the local cable system, which was a joint venture of the cable company and the high school A/V department. The whole system was S-VHS: the auditorium was multi-camera with a director's console, pumped into an S-VHS deck, sports games were filmed on portable cameras that took full-size S-VHS tapes, the editing system was an Amiga running VideoToaster with two S-VHS decks and an editing console (the kind where you old ENTRY and push IN to set the start point), and the video feed for the channel was five S-VHS decks with a programmed console that ran them. The input deck on the editing station was an interesting one. It was playback only, could only understand SP (EP tapes ran super fast), and it was dual-size: there was a selector button that would mechanically mess with the door, allowing a VHS-C or S-VHS-C tape to be inserted without an adapter.
Regarding Hi-Fi on both Beta and VHS, this was an entirely separate audio track. The regular "normal" linear track could have other material on it if you wanted it to- the Fantasia VHS has a mono-compatible mix on the linear track and most TV recordings I made were set to record the SAP track if one was there from broadcasts on that track. Our first VCR was a Hi-Fi VHS in 1985 and it drove me NUTS that it could only play the linear tracks in mono- and that is true of about 99% of all VHS Hi-Fi machines out there. Those earlier stereo tapes shown here will only play in mono on most recent machines. I've taken great pains to track down equipment to play linear stereo properly. I can even play the linear tracks on Beta tapes in stereo which is extremely rare, but most movie tapes only had that track in mono. Despite reports I've seen to the contrary, both tracks on VHS tapes were stereo all the way up to the end of that format. (The Hi-Fi track on some tapes is unusable due to tracking errors as demonstrated here- I've gotten some where the track won't even play at all. You then need the linear track as a backup and playing that in mono won't cut it for me.)
@@louiseogden1296 Second Audio Program- this was part of the analog stereo TV standards, it was a separate mono audio track you could switch to. It wasn't used much but was intended mainly for Spanish dubs of English shows, not many shows actually had that though. It was later used for audio description tracks which are more common now, some stations ran separate audio material on it such as simulcasting radio stations owned by the same company. Digital TV of course allows for more multiple audio tracks.
There was also Beta ED (Extended Definition), which matched or exceeded Super VHS quality, but it arrived around the same time Sony caved in and started selling VHS VCRs, so it got almost no attention except from some Beta-diehard videophiles. And most later VHS VCRs do have the ability to play S-VHS tapes with a watchable image, albeit reduced to standard VHS quality -- this was called Quasi S-VHS or Super Quasi Playback (SQPB). And to nit-pick: those early two-piece portable setups with a separate camera and recorder are not camcorders, because the term "camcorder" comes from the combination of both devices (camera + recorder) into one unit.
SQPB/S-VHS ET is on deck for Volume 3. Per your nitpick, I couldn't think of a better term for the early portapak-styled rigs that would be understandable to casual viewers.
The components of such a setup were a video camera and a portable VCR. CVC (Compact Video Cassette) was a competing videotape format in these two-piece systems, but it was unreliable and didn't last long enough to make it into camcorders. And good old Super8 film was still a viable competing format in the early '80s, since its cameras were much smaller and lighter and often produced superior image quality, but once VHS-C and 8mm camcorders were introduced it quickly died out.
Part II at last! Well done. I stand firmly by my vote for this as Best of Breed among VHS history videos. Somewhere, a small liberal arts college is crying out for you to join them as a professor of practice in... I dunno what. Talking about this stuff to the most- and least- hip undergrads around.
Been waiting for this. Looking forward to learning more about this once-ubiquitous format. BTW, my dad has the LaserDisc release of “Elephant Parts.” The sound quality on that disc, especially for an early 80’s disc, is incredible! Also my aunt worked for Video Monitoring Services, and I went to work with her a few times. I remember they favored S-VHS.
Wow! I just published my review of a JVC SVHS-C camcorder today! Some videotape psychic synergy seems to be going on this week! Great video with excellent examples of footage. Great job! You have just published the BEST documentary about the video tape format wars of the 1980s.
The SL-7200 had Beta I speed only. I bought one in 1976 for $1300! (nearly $6000 in 2020 dollars) The Beta II speed was introduced in the SL-8200 (Zenith JR-9000W), which came along about 1978. In one of many of Sony's odd decisions the next machine was the SL-8600, which abandoned Beta I, and would play/record in Beta II only. If you wanted to upgrade, then you couldn't play any of your tapes recorded in Beta I. Sony added Beta I playback in the SL-5400, but you had to use a switch on the back of the unit to change between Beta I and Beta II or III mode.
21:18 I actually have this camera, the picture quality is actually pretty good. I took video with it as recently as late 2008 of my old apartment.
4 роки тому+5
Hi, Ben! A great in-depth look at VHS. There are still a couple of things I would like to get cleared up if possible. One is, on nearly all of the footage of the VHS tape footage, on the bottom of the screen there is like a quarter inch of "corrupted" information (if you can call it that,) and I was wondering what that is and if you can clear it as I do not remember that being an issue with VHS here in the U.K. Also, regarding tape speeds. I do not remember having long play Beta at all here in the U.K. and VHS EP was also never a thing here as far as I remember. I used to repair video recorders for a living and even back then in the mid 90's LP was quite rare and EP was not heard of. I am wondering if they did not bother with those so much over here because we were such a small market share. We did own a Sony Beta, but it was definitely only one speed. It never even occurred to us about dual speed. It was just a video recorder. And, as I said I have never seen a 3 speed VHS in my life. Also, I had a JVC S-VHS deck without an S-VHS socket which I thought at the time was weird. It had a scart, but was composite through that, only. Seemed a very pointless video recorder looking back. Thanks for the memories.
Good observations! What you are talking about is head switching noise. It's a consequence of the rotating video head drum, and the VCR having to switch from taking information from one head to taking information from another head. As far as I know, there are a couple professional-grade S-VHS decks that have an option to change the head switching point. Unfortunately, they are SP-only machines. The head switching noise often doesn't show up on a TV screen because of the ever-present slight overscan that cuts off the edges of the picture. PAL never got VHS EP because LP was good enough. Your garden variety E-180, equivalent to our standard T-120, records 3 hours in SP and 6 hours in LP. A T-120 in NTSC records 2 SP/4 LP/6 EP. 6 hours in LP is enough to not have to develop an additional third mode to sacrifice more quality. It's probably something to do with PAL having fewer fields per second. I don't know how much this would actually matter, but 525 lines x 30 frames = 17,750 lines/minute, and PAL would have 15,625 lines per minute. Fewer lines per minute = more video information stored on the same length of tape. LP eventually faded into obscurity in NTSC-land. Few VHS decks will actually play it back well, and decks that record in LP are few and far between. By 2000, it seems that only Panasonic was offering it. Most people just used EP because they wanted to save a buck. Which means that most home TV recordings have terrible quality.
I had one VCR that had a pot on one of its boards inside to adjust where the head-switching noise appeared, and I moved it off the screen even with zero overscan. That machine sadly died recently. Other VCRs may have such an adjustment but good luck finding them- with this machine I just randomly tweaked everything and got lucky.
I was in graduate school between 2002-2004 for film and we used mini dv. I still have the tapes from there and will dispose of them because from looking online they are obsolete.
This is fascinating and so informative. I’ve really enjoyed it. I still have my JVC HR-S3900U VCR that I purchased in 2001 and it’s working fine. I have many things on VHS tapes that aren’t on dvd, or anywhere else for that matter.
In addition to a couple of early Sanyo, Technicolor gadgets, we had the rca VCT-400 model.... BEST mono audio ever, loved the 7-day timer (and how easily it popped-out of the VCR ;) . We were lucky enough to have a Sony VO-1600 which LOVED to snap tape if you didnt let it settle between rewind/playback modes...
I have been looking for a while to figure out when EP was introduced. Not even a newspaper archive was of any help. I did this because I was trying to figure out what VCR model a batch of tapes (1980-1988) was recorded on, it seems to be a Panasonic-manufactured deck that does not care about Macrovision, as the recordings closely line up with my 1986 Panasonic-manufactured Sylvania.
The Sony BMC-110 BetaMovie was available in mid-1983. It should be noted that it was record only with no electronic viewfinder, and the early models had manual focus and manual white balance!
Great trip down memory lane. JVC is just so 1985 its not true and then fell off. Reminds me of Phil Collins mid 80s over synthesised music. Remember VHS was supreme in NZ from 1983 onwards, Beta never got a foothold and in 83 wanting to get a video movie out and my Dad would never let me (I was 7) I thought it was munch bunch as it showed cartoon fruit - it was infact a porno in which the fruit was being inserted in certain places!!!
Alright volume 2! Gerat video bro. Love VHS tapes! I think thier better then dvd. I have alot a reasons why. Like how you can skip the ads the voice that announces the the stuff that's coming soon and stuff like that. Nowadays you can't skip ads and thiers no announcer. They just say this is rated by the blah blah blah association of Hollywood! DVDs are no fun! God bless you man. Keep up the good work.
To a VHS collector like myself, EP mode is a bit of a mixed blessing. On one hand, in EP mode, you have more stuff on that tape. On the other, it's a bit more prone to degradation than the other modes.
The format war was based mainly on the number of VHS manufacturers, the interference of entities such as RCA, the availability of duration of recording times. If Sony had left other manufacturers to make players in Betamax, it would have been something different.Not for nothing the Betacam, a format derived from the Betamax aimed at the broadcasting sector had more significance.
The main reason VHS was available in so many brands was that JVC licensed it out to Panasonic, Funai, and Mitsubishi, who manufactured hardware for many other companies, While Sony only licensed Betamax to a couple of manufacturers.
I'm becoming intimately familiar with VHS-C. Currently in the process of digitizing a bunch of old home movies on VHS-C from the late 90s and early 2000s. Then I'll be throwing it in Final Cut, to make the ultimate home movie.
We were robbed in 1993 and my insurance had a "full replacement" clause in it. My 1989 Super Beta deck was taken and I won't forget how the insurance company whined about having to buy a new Super Beta Deck that year (special order) for around $650.
I think the no porn on Beta urban legend is perpetuated by internet millennials. Who are used to strict content control from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft on their consoles.
Question: when you recorded one programme onto a tape and then recorded another, the tape would switch between the two recordings with a few seconds of static acting as a kind of 'wipe' between programmes. It looked a bit like the fuzz at the bottom of the footage at 12:43-45 and again around the 19:08 mark (at the beginning of Eighteen Carat Virgin). What was that called and why did it happen? And tbh trying to sell camcorders by showing a perv at a beach must have been cooked up by some guy who had been watching too many adult VHSs and not getting enough of the real thing...
All'inizio del video si vedono immagini con forti disturbi video,secondo me quei disturbi sono fatti apposta,io sono pieno di videocassette e non c'è ne una,dico una!,che ha il segnale video disturbato in quel modo,ma ci prendiamo in giro?
It was all about one thing...content. We weren't interested in quality of picture, or tape length. It was all about movies being available on VHS. In 1982 I saw bootleg versions of E.T., Star Trek 2 and Rocky 3, just to name a few, while they were still at the cinema. That is why VHS won. All my mates also got VHS machines and we started double taping movies lol!
That song is an absolute banger and I’m going to have it stuck in my head for the rest of the week...
It's up there with "Beware of Pretty fine girls, they'll mess ur head up"
You can probably find a copy of that original 33 1/3 on eBay or elsewhere online...YT doesn't appear to have the full song, alas.
@@Moneytane1976 mind
More history videos please. I find these fascinating.
This is the best channel ever. FInally content that appeals to my super nerd senses.
UA-cam is good for this kind of video lecture -- nerd appeal, no need to appeal directly to advertisers or public service commitments, and flexible on time.
If you're having trouble memorising the table at 6:39, remember these things (note: that all times are in format of mins:hrs):
1. L-x refers to length of tape in feet, x0.3 for meters.
2a. BII(I) or B2(3) has twice(thrice) as much recording time as BI (B1) speed, which provides 0.12x as much recording time as the tape length in feet*, eg. 0:15 for L-125 B1.
b. Whatever recording times you get for the same tape length at different speeds, each next length down(up) provides those times doubled(halved) from the previous. To provide a base set of values, the possible recording times for L-125 tape are 0:15, 0:30 and 0:45 at B1, 2, 3 respectively.
3. L-830 doesn't support B1, on the other hand the tape must be used inside machines with B3 capabilities, even for B2 speed. Recording times for those combos are 5:00 and 3:20 respectively. The numbers below, therefore, are slightly higher for this type of Betamax.
*B2 speed provides 0.24x as much recording time as the tape length in feet, for B3 the factor changes to 0.36.
The whole myth of Sony not "allowing" porn on Betamax is B.S. I have plenty of "adult" Beta tapes..... STRICTLY for historical purposes...😛
Please archive the content at the Hub. So we fans of adult filmography pornography can reference it for science purposes and such.
I've gotten tons of cheap Beta porn from Ebay sellers- a whole box of tapes for a pittance. Last time though it was left outside my door while I was at work, and it was GONE by the time I got home! Whoever swiped it probably had no way to play them!
Of coarse for historical purposes. It's all just bush anyway. I also have a large archive of beta tapes including movies for mom and dad.
Neither Beta nor VHS were content controllers. The myth is due to RCA's CED, but that was also because there was not a high player sales volume for a third party to be interested in producing CEDs.
19:09 yeah, but what would the producers pick, cheaper or more expensive format?
so if you end up with more pr0n on vhs, then it indeed affected the war outcome, and not by small margin....
also, you probably never had the situation that same movie was released on both formats, right?
Great episode, as always...one indirect drawback of playing standard VHS cassettes in a S-VHS unit was that it made onscreen artifacts more prevalent, as I found out firsthand. Also, had no idea that prerecorded movies were ever released in Video 8 format, or that Amstrad manufactured all sorts of electronics (only ever knew them as a computer company!).
15:40 I know of one S-VHS usage. When I was in high school (99-02) I did filming for the school PEG channel on the local cable system, which was a joint venture of the cable company and the high school A/V department. The whole system was S-VHS: the auditorium was multi-camera with a director's console, pumped into an S-VHS deck, sports games were filmed on portable cameras that took full-size S-VHS tapes, the editing system was an Amiga running VideoToaster with two S-VHS decks and an editing console (the kind where you old ENTRY and push IN to set the start point), and the video feed for the channel was five S-VHS decks with a programmed console that ran them. The input deck on the editing station was an interesting one. It was playback only, could only understand SP (EP tapes ran super fast), and it was dual-size: there was a selector button that would mechanically mess with the door, allowing a VHS-C or S-VHS-C tape to be inserted without an adapter.
Regarding Hi-Fi on both Beta and VHS, this was an entirely separate audio track. The regular "normal" linear track could have other material on it if you wanted it to- the Fantasia VHS has a mono-compatible mix on the linear track and most TV recordings I made were set to record the SAP track if one was there from broadcasts on that track.
Our first VCR was a Hi-Fi VHS in 1985 and it drove me NUTS that it could only play the linear tracks in mono- and that is true of about 99% of all VHS Hi-Fi machines out there. Those earlier stereo tapes shown here will only play in mono on most recent machines. I've taken great pains to track down equipment to play linear stereo properly. I can even play the linear tracks on Beta tapes in stereo which is extremely rare, but most movie tapes only had that track in mono. Despite reports I've seen to the contrary, both tracks on VHS tapes were stereo all the way up to the end of that format. (The Hi-Fi track on some tapes is unusable due to tracking errors as demonstrated here- I've gotten some where the track won't even play at all. You then need the linear track as a backup and playing that in mono won't cut it for me.)
What is/was SAP?
@@louiseogden1296 Second Audio Program- this was part of the analog stereo TV standards, it was a separate mono audio track you could switch to. It wasn't used much but was intended mainly for Spanish dubs of English shows, not many shows actually had that though. It was later used for audio description tracks which are more common now, some stations ran separate audio material on it such as simulcasting radio stations owned by the same company. Digital TV of course allows for more multiple audio tracks.
There was also Beta ED (Extended Definition), which matched or exceeded Super VHS quality, but it arrived around the same time Sony caved in and started selling VHS VCRs, so it got almost no attention except from some Beta-diehard videophiles. And most later VHS VCRs do have the ability to play S-VHS tapes with a watchable image, albeit reduced to standard VHS quality -- this was called Quasi S-VHS or Super Quasi Playback (SQPB).
And to nit-pick: those early two-piece portable setups with a separate camera and recorder are not camcorders, because the term "camcorder" comes from the combination of both devices (camera + recorder) into one unit.
SQPB/S-VHS ET is on deck for Volume 3.
Per your nitpick, I couldn't think of a better term for the early portapak-styled rigs that would be understandable to casual viewers.
The components of such a setup were a video camera and a portable VCR. CVC (Compact Video Cassette) was a competing videotape format in these two-piece systems, but it was unreliable and didn't last long enough to make it into camcorders. And good old Super8 film was still a viable competing format in the early '80s, since its cameras were much smaller and lighter and often produced superior image quality, but once VHS-C and 8mm camcorders were introduced it quickly died out.
You know...I went back and watched the Betamax episode. It puts everything now into context.
A new Oddity Archive video? It must be my birthday! Oh wait! It is.
Happy birthday!
Happy B-Day my dude!
Thanks guys! :)
(*≧∀≦)ﾊ┏━iiiiii━┓ﾊ(≧∇≦*)
That's Japanese for "Happy Birthday".
@@numbstation Sorry. I don't speak Anime my friend.
Part II at last! Well done. I stand firmly by my vote for this as Best of Breed among VHS history videos. Somewhere, a small liberal arts college is crying out for you to join them as a professor of practice in... I dunno what. Talking about this stuff to the most- and least- hip undergrads around.
Been waiting for this. Looking forward to learning more about this once-ubiquitous format. BTW, my dad has the LaserDisc release of “Elephant Parts.” The sound quality on that disc, especially for an early 80’s disc, is incredible! Also my aunt worked for Video Monitoring Services, and I went to work with her a few times. I remember they favored S-VHS.
Still own the 1st VHS VCR I ever bought. My 1986 Panasonic 4 head HQ machine. Bought it band new in 1986 and I still use it from time to time.
Wow! I just published my review of a JVC SVHS-C camcorder today! Some videotape psychic synergy seems to be going on this week! Great video with excellent examples of footage. Great job! You have just published the BEST documentary about the video tape format wars of the 1980s.
Now this is what I call a great show!
The SL-7200 had Beta I speed only. I bought one in 1976 for $1300! (nearly $6000 in 2020 dollars) The Beta II speed was introduced in the SL-8200 (Zenith JR-9000W), which came along about 1978. In one of many of Sony's odd decisions the next machine was the SL-8600, which abandoned Beta I, and would play/record in Beta II only. If you wanted to upgrade, then you couldn't play any of your tapes recorded in Beta I. Sony added Beta I playback in the SL-5400, but you had to use a switch on the back of the unit to change between Beta I and Beta II or III mode.
Another great episode. I can’t wait for the next part!
21:18 I actually have this camera, the picture quality is actually pretty good. I took video with it as recently as late 2008 of my old apartment.
Hi, Ben! A great in-depth look at VHS. There are still a couple of things I would like to get cleared up if possible. One is, on nearly all of the footage of the VHS tape footage, on the bottom of the screen there is like a quarter inch of "corrupted" information (if you can call it that,) and I was wondering what that is and if you can clear it as I do not remember that being an issue with VHS here in the U.K. Also, regarding tape speeds. I do not remember having long play Beta at all here in the U.K. and VHS EP was also never a thing here as far as I remember. I used to repair video recorders for a living and even back then in the mid 90's LP was quite rare and EP was not heard of. I am wondering if they did not bother with those so much over here because we were such a small market share. We did own a Sony Beta, but it was definitely only one speed. It never even occurred to us about dual speed. It was just a video recorder. And, as I said I have never seen a 3 speed VHS in my life. Also, I had a JVC S-VHS deck without an S-VHS socket which I thought at the time was weird. It had a scart, but was composite through that, only. Seemed a very pointless video recorder looking back. Thanks for the memories.
Good observations! What you are talking about is head switching noise. It's a consequence of the rotating video head drum, and the VCR having to switch from taking information from one head to taking information from another head. As far as I know, there are a couple professional-grade S-VHS decks that have an option to change the head switching point. Unfortunately, they are SP-only machines. The head switching noise often doesn't show up on a TV screen because of the ever-present slight overscan that cuts off the edges of the picture.
PAL never got VHS EP because LP was good enough. Your garden variety E-180, equivalent to our standard T-120, records 3 hours in SP and 6 hours in LP. A T-120 in NTSC records 2 SP/4 LP/6 EP. 6 hours in LP is enough to not have to develop an additional third mode to sacrifice more quality. It's probably something to do with PAL having fewer fields per second. I don't know how much this would actually matter, but 525 lines x 30 frames = 17,750 lines/minute, and PAL would have 15,625 lines per minute. Fewer lines per minute = more video information stored on the same length of tape.
LP eventually faded into obscurity in NTSC-land. Few VHS decks will actually play it back well, and decks that record in LP are few and far between. By 2000, it seems that only Panasonic was offering it. Most people just used EP because they wanted to save a buck. Which means that most home TV recordings have terrible quality.
I had one VCR that had a pot on one of its boards inside to adjust where the head-switching noise appeared, and I moved it off the screen even with zero overscan. That machine sadly died recently. Other VCRs may have such an adjustment but good luck finding them- with this machine I just randomly tweaked everything and got lucky.
The footage at 5:48 was recorded the day after I was born. Cool!
22:04 Mine is so cheap, it doesn't have an electronic viewfinder. Adorable, reminds me of my PXL2000.
14:13 That’s not cheese, it’s Sweetness!
so hyped for this! cant wait to dive in
20:24 lmao I love that kid slapping open the VCR that's hilarious
lol
I was in graduate school between 2002-2004 for film and we used mini dv. I still have the tapes from there and will dispose of them because from looking online they are obsolete.
if anything Sony helped the porn industry of the 80s, alot of stuff was shot on a BetaCam and mastered on Beta Tapes
This is fascinating and so informative. I’ve really enjoyed it. I still have my JVC HR-S3900U VCR that I purchased in 2001 and it’s working fine. I have many things on VHS tapes that aren’t on dvd, or anywhere else for that matter.
In addition to a couple of early Sanyo, Technicolor gadgets, we had the rca VCT-400 model.... BEST mono audio ever, loved the 7-day timer (and how easily it popped-out of the VCR ;) . We were lucky enough to have a Sony VO-1600 which LOVED to snap tape if you didnt let it settle between rewind/playback modes...
I have been looking for a while to figure out when EP was introduced. Not even a newspaper archive was of any help.
I did this because I was trying to figure out what VCR model a batch of tapes (1980-1988) was recorded on, it seems to be a Panasonic-manufactured deck that does not care about Macrovision, as the recordings closely line up with my 1986 Panasonic-manufactured Sylvania.
The Sony BMC-110 BetaMovie was available in mid-1983. It should be noted that it was record only with no electronic viewfinder, and the early models had manual focus and manual white balance!
Great trip down memory lane. JVC is just so 1985 its not true and then fell off. Reminds me of Phil Collins mid 80s over synthesised music. Remember VHS was supreme in NZ from 1983 onwards, Beta never got a foothold and in 83 wanting to get a video movie out and my Dad would never let me (I was 7) I thought it was munch bunch as it showed cartoon fruit - it was infact a porno in which the fruit was being inserted in certain places!!!
I think this is a good time to mention the new video game "Moving Out". Start a new game and choose to play the Training level...
OK who else is suddenly interested in acquiring Walter Payton's KFC record?
Ahh the intro in VHS quality.
Alright volume 2! Gerat video bro. Love VHS tapes! I think thier better then dvd. I have alot a reasons why. Like how you can skip the ads the voice that announces the the stuff that's coming soon and stuff like that. Nowadays you can't skip ads and thiers no announcer. They just say this is rated by the blah blah blah association of Hollywood! DVDs are no fun! God bless you man. Keep up the good work.
You forgot to mention SQPB (super quasi playback) where certain VHS machines could playback SVHS recorded tapes but only at regular VHS resolution.
As I said during the episode, the S-VHS story is for volume 3-the cutoff here was 1988.
OH, NO!
BETA
Also thanks for the stupid chicken song I can't get out of my head now
To a VHS collector like myself, EP mode is a bit of a mixed blessing. On one hand, in EP mode, you have more stuff on that tape. On the other, it's a bit more prone to degradation than the other modes.
I've noticed that your talking speed is much slower than many years ago, I wonder what made this change.
Practice, I guess.
The format war was based mainly on the number of VHS manufacturers, the interference of entities such as RCA, the availability of duration of recording times. If Sony had left other manufacturers to make players in Betamax, it would have been something different.Not for nothing the Betacam, a format derived from the Betamax aimed at the broadcasting sector had more significance.
The main reason VHS was available in so many brands was that JVC licensed it out to Panasonic, Funai, and Mitsubishi, who manufactured hardware for many other companies, While Sony only licensed Betamax to a couple of manufacturers.
@@dougbrowning82 Sony learnt from that mistake and won the next format war: Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD.
I'm becoming intimately familiar with VHS-C. Currently in the process of digitizing a bunch of old home movies on VHS-C from the late 90s and early 2000s. Then I'll be throwing it in Final Cut, to make the ultimate home movie.
We were robbed in 1993 and my insurance had a "full replacement" clause in it. My 1989 Super Beta deck was taken and I won't forget how the insurance company whined about having to buy a new Super Beta Deck that year (special order) for around $650.
11:51 - It's KSI!
I think the no porn on Beta urban legend is perpetuated by internet millennials. Who are used to strict content control from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft on their consoles.
Question: when you recorded one programme onto a tape and then recorded another, the tape would switch between the two recordings with a few seconds of static acting as a kind of 'wipe' between programmes. It looked a bit like the fuzz at the bottom of the footage at 12:43-45 and again around the 19:08 mark (at the beginning of Eighteen Carat Virgin). What was that called and why did it happen?
And tbh trying to sell camcorders by showing a perv at a beach must have been cooked up by some guy who had been watching too many adult VHSs and not getting enough of the real thing...
There’s really no “horizontal resolution” with an analog signal. There are only discreet vertical lines of resolution.
Why do you recommend a Manual VHS-C Adapter over a Mechanical one?
I personally like the VHS intro
All'inizio del video si vedono immagini con forti disturbi video,secondo me quei disturbi sono fatti apposta,io sono pieno di videocassette e non c'è ne una,dico una!,che ha il segnale video disturbato in quel modo,ma ci prendiamo in giro?
In all seriousness, who Would record 6 hours of video on a tape for home video?
Me trying to fit all of Jarvis Cocker's appearances on mid-1990s TV onto one tape...
Ha! You're obviously young! I have a bunch of VHS tapes (from the 80's) taped at SLP speed.
@@michaeltnewyorknights8413 Correct! Teenage me was delighted to cram three movies onto one tape into the 90s.
Don't forget D-VHS !!
And W-VHS too!!
Hopefully he'll cover both in part 3. Both were among the earliest prosumer HD formats (along with MUSE Hi-Vision LD).
That was way after 1988, his cutoff point.
Too bad that there weren't any pre-recorded titles released for SuperBeta & ED-Beta. (11:24)
Is this guy trying to emulate Wilson on Home Improvement?
Does anyone know the song at 13:00? Been trying to find it to no success so far
The Perry Players - I Can Be Anything ua-cam.com/video/HhheV7fgNWE/v-deo.html
Information ABOUT the group has never been forthcoming.
@@OddityArchive Fantastic! Thanks
I traveled from the first video just to figure this out. THANK YOU. It's so good.@@OddityArchive
Perché stai sempre dietro a un cartone?
VHS won this round. 😀👍📼
If you're interested in a deep dive on this topic (and many others on video, audio, and others) check out the Technology Connections channel
It was all about one thing...content. We weren't interested in quality of picture, or tape length.
It was all about movies being available on VHS. In 1982 I saw bootleg versions of E.T., Star Trek 2 and Rocky 3, just to name a few, while they were still at the cinema. That is why VHS won. All my mates also got VHS machines and we started double taping movies lol!
And with the big hair craze of the late 70's thru the 80's came Global Warming.
OK, either I'm weird,or maybe it's just generational, But I dig that look. 😊
You do videos weakly, but I feel that you do that shit for several months!