I hear there is this new idea for home video that uses little discs. It’s like if you crammed a laserdisc down to the size of a CD. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t see it taking off.
What he considered to be "no effort" was leaving in the grammatical mistakes (assumingly) made in the script and editing in graphics later to correct them...which admittedly takes some effort...
Having had MANY of my favorite VHS tapes ruined as a kid when the VHS player "ate" the tape, seeing the Betamax yank the tape out and 360 it around a loop actually made me cringe.
Learning also that the VCR partially unloads the tape when you hit stop...beta doesn't do that. Imagine rewinding that tape pressed against all of those components...ugh
Yeah, my first thought was basically, "Holy crap that's way too much tape." VHS had enough trouble with wrecking tapes. Actually, now that I think about it, I do remember that one of my childhood friends was unfortunate enough to have a father that picked Betamax. I don't recall all the details - given that I would've been fairly young at the time - but I do remember the number of wrecked tapes being a factor in his parents buying a VHS VCR. Well, that and the fact that the format war was basically won by that point.
Strange, I watched my fair share of VHS when I was a kid, but I don't recall that our VHS player ever mangled a tape (maybe the players got better in the 90s). Audio cassettes on the other hand…
@@teldrah As far as I was concerned back then, even one tape was too many. 😆 It really wasn't that bad, but the fact that it was a possibility at all is still kind of annoying.
In my area, Sony VHS are probably the most common VCR brand found in thrift shops. I had to buy two of them to get one that works. But Sony did make good VHS. Maybe the best short of Panasonic's AG series, which is still the gold standard decades later.
@Zcooger Second Channel Ahh the NV-FS200. Mine broke a few months ago. Mechanical failure. And I won't waste any time trying to repair a VCR that uses that over-engineered G mechanism.
And even more ironic that this late Sony VHS VCR is a rebadged Samsung... Not Sony at all. Samsung mechanism with Samsung electronics. Even the menu looks the same as on Samsung VCRs.
But what was on those two? What priceless content is now lost forever? His graduation video? A bootleg copy of Song of the South? A lost episode of Doctor Who?
And the fact he doesn't point out a put by overstating it or saying that he made a pun is nice. But if the pun was in an odd place he just gives a slight pause for the viewer to catch up.
Back in the 80's when tape players were new, I was a 2-way radio repair tech. A friend with an out of warranty VHS player had a problem with his unit and volunteered me to fix it since apparently 2-way radios are practically identical to VHS players, and I knew how to solder wires together, that made me an expert on video tape players. When a tape was inserted, it would pull it in, act like it was going to feed the tape in but would immediately stop, then promptly eject it. When I removed the cover, looked at all the internal adjustment controls, and knowing at that point I didn't even know how to set the clock on the player, much less fix it, I said I can't do anything without a repair manual, hoping to persuade my friend to take it to a real tape player repair shop. We put it back together, and he left with it and I felt like I had dodged a bullet. The next week, he shows back up at my shop, with the same broken tape player and a smile on his face, and hands me a repair manual that he said cost a hundred dollars and said I could I fix it now that we have the manual for it. So, we went though the troubleshooting process from end to end, and from what we could determine it was something to do with that "light on the stick" you mentioned, and the side sensors. According to the manual, the player would check to make sure the tape was taut before loading, using that light and edge sensors and if not would attempt to wind up the tape to make sure it was tight. Watching it, we could see the tape was just fine, no slack, but the player kept ejecting the tape. After exhausting all possible obvious problems, we finally measured the voltage on the edge sensors, finding one of them wasn't detecting the light. Upon closer inspection of the sensor we found a bug had crawled into that sensor, got stuck and died. Removing the bug fixed it but not before we had gone through every step, alignment, adjustment in that machine and somehow we managed to compromise the MACRO copy protection detection (there were dozens of controls, I haven't a clue which one it was) and it worked wonderfully well making copies of other tapes.
LOL That's funny that he brought it back with the manual and payed that much for it. I used to do some repairs on VCRs. Eject mechanisms were often the cause of failures. Your story is similar to how we got the term "bug" in a machine or program. Where a moth caused a relay to fail in an early electro-mechanical computer.
@@my3dviews Yeah, those were the days. I also repaired CCTV systems, so I had some very basic video tools, like the kind made by Heathkit, and at the time a nice Sencore scope that was better suited for home TV than CCTV stuff. I was still a kid, and had just gotten my commercial FCC license and fortunately the study material covered broadcast radio and TV, but at the time I still had practically no real life experience, so I was loaded with all sorts of theory and Q & A knowledge I was ready to put to the real test, attempting to repair a very complicated device I had no clue about. Since we lacked the real test equipment called for in repair manual, we had to build a few gimmick tools along the way, like inverting sync to inject using a transistor inverter, and stuff like that, and after the first pass through the alignment, the VCR absolutely was screwed up beyond all hope. So much for raw inexperienced knowledge. Anyhow, energized by my friends urging, and willingness to supply beer and Dorito's as payment for services, by the time we finished the second case of beer (we opted for the pay as you go plan), and repeated the alignment procedure probably a dozen more times, we managed to get a little bit of a picture back, and were able to tweak here and there until the picture looked fairly decent, at least to two drunk wanna be VCR repair tech's. The picture wasn't perfect, but after my buddy discovered it would now record tapes, even those with copy protection, he wouldn't ever let me take another crack at fixing it properly. Over the years, I gained a lot of electronic experience repairing all sorts of electronic stuff, but VCR's were something I never felt I properly conquered, and stayed clear of them, and after watching the video of the Betamax from this post, I think I made right decision. Lol! :)
@@TurpInTexas Ya, I don't miss doing repairs. Didn't mind the ones were you instantly knew what was wrong based on what the customer said. Keeping a few old VCRs around as parts was a great way to fix things. I recall one Sony beta, that had audio problems. Had a different model that just happened to have the same circuit board. Did a quick swap and it worked. Sure beat having to find the component on the board that was at fault. VCRs also had lots of mechanical failures, which often were obvious just by looking at it. Such as a broken cog on a plastic gear. I got out of it when everything was turning digital. Now everything is so cheap that I don't even know if they even fix them anymore. Don't think that it's worth fixing a $75 Blu-ray player. Maybe just a complete circuit board swap, but no point in trying to find the faulty component.
I'm also not sure if it was intentional but it's funny that he then says he'll go use a DVD players since that's also really an obsolete format at this point now that streaming has largely completely taken over.
I hedged my bets and bought an HD-DVD / Blu-ray combo drive for my media PC back in 2007, along with some movies in each format. I found HD-DVD to be much faster loading and easier to navigate, and I'm still annoyed that it lost out to Sony. Not that any of this matters now.
@@JosephDavies Well, something appears for me, so I guess it's the card? I have an i in a circle that shows up for the entire video EXCEPT for a second or two when he says "right about now". And then when he says "there it is" a rectangular box with the words "Suggested: ..." shows up. In either case, I have to click on it to show the video titles and thumbnails. (Which tbh is what *I* would call a card, but who knows)
I'm glad you mentioned the difference between Betamax and Betacam! I worked at a TV station in northern Michigan for several years around 2015 and we were still using Betacam (SP, specifically) occasionally even up until around 2018, when we finally got rid of our Betacam player. The reason we still had it for so long was for ingesting ad spots into our system; some clients insisted on sending us their commercials on Betacam tapes, despite us being capable of ingesting just about any possible format or media.
Telling it like someone who wants to repeat history you mean. All the failures of Beta are gonna show you which formats today and in the future are doomed to failure. So generally speaking, yes all of it matters to someone looking to avoid choosing dead end formats.
@@natsume-hime2473 Not at all. The simplest solution is not to be an early adopter during a format war. If you can wait a year or two then the eventual winner is usually pretty obvious. Plus you save a lot of money as the prices drop rather quickly. Honestly my parents bought into CED boy was that a failure. But at the time it seemed like a better format if you just wanted to watch movies. Rewinding was such a foreign concept to me when we finally did switch to VHS. And we really only did that because our CED player died and VCRs were dirt cheap by then.
I picked Zune over iPod, HDDVD over Blu-Ray and Windows Phone over Android/Apple. So, when the next format war starts, do the opposite of me! At least I picked DVD over DIVX. :)
DVD's work on my computer and mean I don't need to get a special player for them, bluerays don't so why should I spend money on seperate equipment just for bluerays when DVD's at just fine.
@@nienke7713 ...because blurays have between double to 4x the resolution of DVDs and if you want to watch something in HD that's the format of choice? Also Blurays have been a thing since like... 2009...ish? You've had loads of time to switch. It's not even a backwards compatibility thing, Bluray players still play DVDs.
I worked in a video rental store for years in the 80's ... One thing I learned for sure... Beta customers were the assholes... Like Prius owners and Vegans, you knew when a Beta customer came in because they announced it to everyone... First with the attitude of superiority and then after a few minutes with the bitching that the selection for Beta wasn't as good. When one of them asked "which format do you think is better?" , The only correct answer is .. "I don't care, I just work here and I have shit to do... NEXT!"
Yep, another perfect explanation of that whole saga. I used to work in a mom and pop electronics and video rental store (late 70s-early 80s) long before Blockbuster existed and we certainly did rent both Beta and VHS porn and of course, regular Hollywood movies. Back then, nobody ever complained that VHS had any inferior picture quality. Tape all pretty much looked the same at least on consumer TVs of the time. We were all just amazed that we could record broadcast TV and rent/buy movies to watch at home. From what I remember, as to why VHS came out on top, is that it came down to price. The VHS VCRs were sold by many more different manufactures and therefore, almost always quite a bit cheaper. As a salesman, trying to explain to a customer that Beta was better was difficult because they couldn't see any difference and frankly, neither could I. And then there was the initially shorter recording time of Beta which certainly wasn't a selling point so it was hard to extol any virtue of Beta over VHS. Even though Beta Hi-Fi came out before VHS Hi-Fi, that didn't sway anyone from buying VHS over Beta either. Beta did initially have a steadier Freeze-Frame quality but that wasn't a reason a customer would choose one over the other. By the mid-80s when Sony VCRs began having wide-spread quality control issues (the machine wouldn't rewind) it was all over for Beta.
I think part of it was Sony wanted higher lic fees for both the players AND the media. Maybe fried brain cells, but I recall JVC was the main lic holder for VHS and their lic costs (particularly on media) were way lower. Not that I can cite that and at this point wtf cares.
Major driver was cost of licence. Sony had a per machine royalty, while JVC was a lot less worried, with both much lower costs and a lot less actual chasing up, so that manufacturers would look up the cost of making a machine design, and choose the cheaper option and make VHS. As well the actual mechanics were easier to make, quite a few clone manufacturers could do the entire machine easily enough, but only found the head drum assembly too difficult, so resorted to buying them as spare parts for larger brands. Did drive Matsushita crazy for a while IIRC, with the number of head drums they were selling to the repair market, till they finally found out why, and probably started offering them as a ready to use part instead, getting in an extra profit for essentially already paid for production capacity. Then the cloners got to the point they could actually make the whole machine in house. Sony however wanted tight control, which both costs money, and also stifles innovation and changes to the mechanism, while VHS found a solution to big drums in the VHS-C with the smaller drum, faster rotation and extra heads with switching, but which left a standard azimuth track on the tape, which also was used in a few full size smaller units as well. Assorted mechanism types were to get it either smaller, lighter, cheaper, or more compact for some application. Last VHS decks I saw consumer side were essentially one single plastic injection mould of all the parts, integrated with a single sheet metal stamping, to make the deck, complete with all of the tape mounts and eject mechanisms.
@@xiradio Really good format, and quite reliable. Just that Sony wanted all of that pie, and that is what killed it, competing formats that were cheaper, more manufacturers and most importantly good enough for the job.
And he uses a non-Sony Betamax machine. Which is funny because one of the big reasons that Betamax struggled is that with only one manufacturer making it (Sony) for the most part, its prices were substantially greater. JVC sold licences to many more electronics manufacturers to allow them to make the VHS format of a VCR, which allowed those manufacturers to reduce prices, and make VHS far more popular.
@@BritishMetric144yeah I think that’s the main reason VHS ultimately won the format war. Had Sony outsourced their production more like JVC, and thus made Beta more affordable, I think Beta and VHS would have coexisted like iPhone and Android, or Coke and Pepsi. It would’ve all just come down to personal preference. Of course there’s also the fact that a single Beta tape could only record as much as five hours, while a VHS tape could record as much as ten hours, but most people aren’t going to record that much in one go in my experience anyway.
Regarding tape cartridges, my all-time favorite is Video8. The Betamax tape feed path looks like a nightmare to untangle if anything ever goes wrong with the machine.
I remember the Sony rep proudly bringing a demo Video8 machine into our workshop to show us. We quickly wired it up to a nice Sony TV and off we went. There was no doubt about it, the pictures were significantly better than VHS/Beta and we all stood around nodding and making the right noises. Then there was quite a long delay before the system actually launched onto the market, and something seemed to have happened in the meantime - the pictures were definitely NOT as good as the demo. in fact, although they were still better than VHS/Beta, the difference was small. Never found out what went on during that long delay...
The light detection of the end of the tape reminded me of something I nearly forgot: back in the 90's at some point, when I was 12ish, I acquired an old VCR that didn't have a cover. (I got a LOT of electronics by grabbing other people's trash and they frequently had damaged or missing cases, but working internal electronics!) I used it to record TV shows on at night ("Becker" was one that was on past bedtime that I'd like to sneak) and had no problem. But then I put a lamp on the same table and found it kept spitting the tape back out any time I tried to play or record... took me a little while to figure out that there was a light sensor in there! Putting a random piece of sheet metal over the top of it solved this problem. I used that VCR for a couple years.
@@Reydriel In America people throw a lot of things away just because of cosmetic matters. All grocery stores combined in america throw away an average of 43 billion pounds of food every year because of cosmetic/blemish reasons.
@@Reydriel oh yeah, tons of stuff with minor damage - often cosmetic, but sometimes easy to fix electronic stuff like a failed capacitor - can be found in the trash or on the cheap in the second hand market. I got a Super Nintendo as a kid basically this same way too - the case was ripped right off (my guess is someone got VERY angry at the game) but the board inside was fine. I actually still have that one... and it is still just a board with the wires popping out of a shoe box lol. And the best part about free junk is if it doesn't work? Oh well, no big deal. Worst case is you waste time, but even in these you often learn something new about how electronics go bad.
@@Reydriel Heh. I had neighbors in the 90's across the street that threw all sorts of good stuff away. I got a stack of HP laser printers. Most of them seemed to work fine. I got a lawn mower. The only thing wrong with it was a bolt missing in the handle. I cut my grass with that thing for years. They once threw out a couple of gas powered weed-whackers. I saw them as I came home one day, but came back out too late... someone else had already grabbed them.
At least there were a few BluRay HD-DVD combo players. I'm not sure how many VHS+BETAMAX combo machines there were. And because it's still semi recent, finding a BluRay\HDDVD combo drive for a PC or a Samsung BluRay\HDDVD combo player isn't difficult. The problem really comes in when you look at format quality. Everyone claimed HDDVD was better, which wasn't true. BluRay offered substantially more capacity. 20GB more on a dual layer disc than HD-DVD's 30GB dual layer cap. The ONLY advantage HD-DVD had was simply it could be made compatible with a DVD player through another layer or simply pressing the DVD layer on the opposite side of the HD-DVD side (which, granted, could theoretically have been done to a BluRay if Sony cared to maintain legacy compatibility.
@@emotionz3 Thw biggest advantage was HD-DVD had more functionality at launch. Bluray was in flux so compatibility of features between players varies wildly. HD-DVD was also cheaper to manufacture.
Our family originally purchased a Beta machine in the early 80s and I can recall going to video rental stores and needing to stick to a specific side of the store. As VHS started to win the format wars, those rental stores would shrink the size of of their Beta collection, to the point where I remember it was down to 3 shelves out of a store that had dozens. Eventually my parents gave in and purchased a VSH and the Beta machine was relegated to the basement where the children would watch the Disney collection that still remained on Beta.
Similar story here; my parents had been big fans of Sony equipment, ever since their first Trinitron TV in the mid-'70s. By about 1988-'89,* all our local chain video stores** had dropped Betamax altogether. The only store that still carried Beta at all was a small independent video store -- and around 1990 they announced _they_ were dropping it too. ...Which was when Dad broke down and got a (Sony) VHS VCR. We also had a Betamovie camcorder pretty much identical to the one in Alec's video. It, along with the Betamax VCR, eventually ended up with Mom when my parents divorced. I think Mom sent both to the electronics recycler at least a decade ago now. (Though the Beta VCR's _box_ survives ... as a convenient box for our old Atari 2600 and its cartridges, joysticks, cables, etc. 🙂) * when I can first remember going out to rent videos with Dad ** Panorama Video, Mr Movies, Video Update, etc. We didn't have a Blockbuster nearby until a little later.
I grew up from the age of five watching VHS and I've learned a lot of things about this format. At the age of 15 I learned to perform "tape reel donation" from one VHS cassette to another by opening the cases and swapping the reels. Not exactly that easy - you'd have to remember to lower the tape between the pins on the back of the cassette - but once you learn the position, it is surprisingly simple to learn and master. If your cassette has a broken case, I can happily switch the tape reels. At this point in time I am possibly the only qualified VHS tape surgeon in South Western Sydney Australia...
I'm a little disappointed just because I like the chunky retrofuturist look of Betamax more than the cheap oreo look of VHS, but that's the only reason.
There's a great place in Milwaukee where you can pick one up for cheap. It's called Lightning Fast VCR Repair. Expect to wait at least six months for shipping.
But beta was first to market, so they would have had more patents. Why was their design wackier than VHS which you would think would have to do more evasion?
I love how Sony's own digital audio tape format uses a mechanism reminiscent of the vhs cassette, so they basically admitted that the beta mech was inferior
When you have the image so the capstan is on the bottom it makes a beta, but you have to include the cassette! The spools make up the round bits of the "B" shape. (Yes I'm aware I'm about 3 years late to this party lol)
Yes, Sony did indeed use an M-load (albeit a very wonky M) on some of their later Betamax systems. The ones I am aware of were the C20, C30 and C40 models. Remarkably slimline, and the C40 boasted linear stereo tracks, so clearly from the later end of Beta. The mechanism they used was much more compact than the standard Beta, and it loaded a lot quicker too. Worth checking out if you can find one as they are a real oddball.
I might have one of those models somewhere, but I can't even remember, and if I do, I don't think I ever took the lid off it. Thanks for prompting me to check!
Do you know if those systems had any protections against recording on the very earliest part of the tape, which u load systems wouldn't be able to read?
@@CattoRayTube No, it didn't. It could record and play back many seconds of material that was invisible to a U-load Beta machine. It also put the tape back on the left spool when unthreading the tape rather than the right spool as a U-load Beta machine does, meaning that a fully-rewound tape placed in a U-load beta machine caused the loading ring to struggle somewhat, as the tape had to come from the left spool, and was dragged across the head. Not a major issue I am sure, but owning both a U-load and an M-load Beta machine was quite interesting as to what they could and couldn't do.
Remarkably, there is a youtube vid of someone having loading issues with one of these Beta machines. ua-cam.com/video/lmYzVLSgnGk/v-deo.html He doesn't actually get to load a tape, but you can kinda see where the loading system is and where the tape goes.
I worked on VHS and Beta machines for years and although the recordings on Beta were *slightly* better than VHS, that was about the only improvement. The tape path on Beta was very long and depended on many tape guides to keep the tape in line. Beta also kept the tape 'wrapped' around the head drum while fast-winding, which led to accelerated wear of the drum. I had quite a few cases with Beta machines where the tape would stick to the highly-polished drum.
@@felkmane Yeah, it irritates me to this day that there are people who insist that the guy who CREATED it in the first place is the one who's saying it wrong, just because they've been saying it incorrectly and don't want to admit it.
@@BlissfullWulf The guy who created it didn't create the english language. Its graphics interchange format, gif is just the shortened version to say it. You take the g- sound from graphics.
I actually prefer DVD over BD, but I could very well be using a dying format. I'm not ready to adopt a digital library yet, I need this for another decade at least.
@@theshamanite Keep them, At least for the BD, they have and will alwave have the better image quality, thanks to a better encoding. Streaming is just not the same. Plus if the service closes, then all the monney you paid for the movies is gone.
HD DVD versus Bluray was barely a war. The HD DVD manufacturers gave-up after just 2 years. The Betamax vs VHS war lasted 12 years. (Sony made its first VHS unit in 1987.)
"Do notte buye Betamacks" Your closing statements made me lol. Tho you didnt mention how failure prone that insanely complex tape transport system was. We had a Betamax when I was a kid and it messed up so regularly that 5yo me thought said Betamax player existed for the sole purpose of destroying Betamax tapes
Interesting. although I upgraded my Betamax machine to take advantage of the new features, the original continued to operate until a few years ago. In the meantime I have gone through five VHS machines; each one cheaper in construction (and lesser in time to survive) than the last. At least DVD is better built, or was, if my latest drive is anything to go by.
Video 2000 was really nice, you didn't ever get noise lines with them, not even when fast-forwarding. Too bad Philips and Grundig couldn't make it win the war
Tube radios and TVs, Transistor radios, 8 track cassettes, audio cassettes... Then things began to really heat up. Now, I've seen representatives of 70 years of technology in my life, and kinda feel, "If it worked, don't knock it". I still prefer XP over windows 10. Works better for the things I ask it to do.
@Fart LOL!! Said I prefer it for what I ask it to do. I have a windows 11 system, of course. Or how would I know that XP performs better at certain tasks?? Read recently that 40% of the systems are still using XP. Don't know if that's true, but it suggests that an awful lot of people have had the same experience.
@@MonkeyDefenceForce i know about floppy disks and have experience with them, even if I born in 2009. I have 31 floppy disks, 3 computers running XP and a keyboard with PS/2 connector. Heck, even old calculator, old camera which uses tape (for photos) and an old fan. Oh, and a pirated version of NES: classic edition, old CRT TV and a VHS VCR. Also, my Tower PC runs XP SP 3 and I code on.... Just BASIC. Holy cow, I'm too young but also too old. I don't even know, do I exist....
This is also relevant! However, I didn't put in the video because A) there are exceptions in the realm of Beta (notably Sanyo-built machines) and B) later VHS machines (including the one in this video) would also leave it threaded. Since there are exceptions to be found for both cases, I don't necessarily find it to be _too_ much of a net gain or loss in either's favor
That was also the benefit of early Beta vs VHS. Beta laced up upon loading the tape, and had almost instant play. Early VHS would stuff around for a few seconds lacing up the tape before a picture would appear. Beta was pretty limp around the heads in FF and REW so not a lot of wear in those modes. It wasnt until maybe the 90s that VHS machines laced up from the start instead of just loading the tape into place. Another disadvantage of Beta was replacing the heads in the machine involved complicated alignment. VHS video heads were a couple of screws, a few wires to un-solder, or terminals in the later ones, and a pulling tool, and the whole upper drum could be changed in a couple of minutes.
"I have a pair of almost-randomly-selected video cassette recorders in front of me." PuhLEEZE tell me that was an homage to season 1 of Citation Needed!
“A pokey thing inside the VCR pushes the wedgey thing...” So hilarious when you use terms like that! 🤣 I’m so happy I found your channel, your content is second to none!!!
Jose Martinez And when we listen to vinyl records, the wibbly wobbly wibble-wobbles on the record make the stylus go all wibbly-wobbly too, and those wibbly-wobbly wibble-wobbles turn into electrical signals 😁
@@TheJacklikesvideos Unsure why you slapped yourself. Beta cassettes were, indeed, played in Video Cassette Recorders. Are you under the impression that VCRs were exclusive to VHS cassettes?
An excellent description of the two VCRs was published in IEEE Spectrum a few decades ago. As the story went, Sony's CEO walked into the meeting to launch their VCR (they already had vuematic) and put the company handbook on the table. He said that the cassette could not be any bigger than the handbook. With VHS, JVC researched all the existing technologies and patents to arrive at their design.
Haha yeah, that was pretty funny, it made me rewind (ha!) to make sure he said Captain Stan. But to answer the question from the other poster, no, it's called a "capstan", which looks like Cap. Stan.
While I owned dozens upon dozens of VHS tapes that watched over and over as a kid, I was so happy to switch over to DVD. It happened by accident really. I bought a PS2 and happened to find out it could play DVDs. Nowadays I use my PS3 or my computer if I feel like it. Being able to watch DVDs on pretty much anything is was makes it that much better.
@@wrightmf Sure there was. The Latin alphabet vs the Greek alphabet. Then later you had the Roman numeral system vs the Arabic numeral system. Just like the Beta format, the only times the Greek alphabet and Roman numeral system appear are when some pretentious twat feels the need to put on airs and pretend their format is superior despite the fact that market forces clearly demonstrated that it wasn't and that this has been settled for a long fucking time.
Great video, and thanks. I was a Beta user until I saw the writing on the wall and switched to VHS for my first hi-fi VCR in 1986. I'm surprised you didn't mention that VHS unloads the tape when it's not playing, so there is less strain on the tape during FF and REW, and VHS FF and REW times (at least in earlier machines) were much faster than Beta. Having owned both in the mid-80s, the difference was immediately noticeable to me. You're right though that none of this matters now, although I still do have a few VHS tapes because the content has never been re-released on DVD or Blu-Ray and it's copyrighted so conversion companies can't touch it.
I know this comment is old, but that is not true, at least in the US. You are 100% allowed to so that and it's called format shifting. It's the same way you are allowed to put your cd on a mp3 player. Yes, they cannot do that commercially but they can do it for you personally. If they say they can't, they don't understand the copyright law or choose not to. Same for DVDs that allow a digital copy. You can say thank you to Apple for helping get that passed.
@@StoutShako there are many lesser known titles that were never converted that may not have been worth it due to not being mainstream enough. There were TONS of bargain basement titles for example you could buy that would never get converted. It should be no surprise as the same will happen to DVD titles . There are many dvd titles that will never get converted to blu ray or available streaming. I encounter that all the time
Not true of more modern machines but correct for older ones. SONY Betamax enabled you to search the picture during FFWD and REW as what they Called Peep search. Quite useful really. Linear tape speed of Betamax was slower than VHS which produced inferior audio before Hi-Fi audio came along. Betamax tapes generally had higher quality tape inside compared to VHS unless you purchased PREMIUM High Grade tapes. Faster Head rotation and larger Diameter head drum of Betamax, coupled with better tape oxide did produce better pictures for off air TV recordings. Most TV Rental companies in the UK opted for VHS since THORN EMI (who partnered with JVC) owned a large proportion of the TV rental chains which promoted the format's success. Plus, the machines were cheaper than SONY's brand Betamax machines and they had longer playing time too.
"You'll find that the tape makes the shape of the letter U." [Crazy freaking line drawing, followed by wacky rotation of the video in order to make the point clear]
Where have you been? Have you completely missed the Omega format? I mean, that's been obsolete for years as well, but there's just something about trying to unfold a hexagon into a dodecahedron to shove it into the player somehow that just never gets old... XD
I know, right? Came as a huge surprise when I got my first look inside a VCR. Also answered some questions about how a VCR could eat tapes as often as they did.
By accident. When you could still rent Betas, sometimes they had amateur porn at the end - obviously bootleg tapes. Video stores weren't too choosy then. Oh and, thanks for mentioning the "tab" so you couldn't record over something! Oh God, the memories are just flooding back.
I so appreciate how you present a fun, fact-filled knockdown of past consumer electronics without approaching the subject as if it's all laughable because this is 2019 and this tech is all oh-so-ancient. Thank you for the time you put into all of your content! I'm so glad I finally found your channel! :)
I demand a demonstration of what happens when you play a Betacam tape in a Betamax player. Oki, demand is a strong word, request or beg is perhaps more suitable.
@@MariaEngstrom Well, the audio track of Betamax is also the analog time code track in BetaCam. So playing in Betacam will get slow audio if you listened to the time code track and a betacam in the home deck will get slowed down data. Putting Betamax in a digibeta will get you a blank screen.
I think this is your best video that I've seen so far! I was almost crying of laughter at the end. Also, my parents backed Beta and my childhood was cartoons in beta... but after that I straight-up ended going entirely digital. I skipped the DVD era and the Blueray/HD-DVD wars by getting one of the earliest Portable DVR devices (an Archos AV500) that had a 4" screen, TV out capabilities, composite recording and about 10 hours of movie playback. No regrets at all!
I absolutely LOVED the rant near the end. "you backed the wrong horse!", as I'm thinking, 'Hell, I was CONVINCED HD-DVD was going to be the frontrunner...', just before he says, "Now where is my HD-DVD player!?" Well, I thought HD-DVD would come out on top until of course the PS3 came out, that was the moment I knew it was toast, but had I done some research I'd have known Sony was the primary 'backer' of Blu-ray...
Finally, after 40 years, I can now make a wise choice when going to buy my first VCR!
Robert Toews you are a wise man for taking your time, but don’t wait to long.
I hear there is this new idea for home video that uses little discs. It’s like if you crammed a laserdisc down to the size of a CD. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t see it taking off.
Best comment =D
Yes, and go down to your local best buy store and buy the latest blueray player :P
Going rewatch my beta home videos and knight Rider on laser disk....
OK, I can sorta see a lowercase "b" but I mean... that ain't β
I'm just imagining the Gammamax.
Bunch of engineers get off their ass drunk and attempt to design a looping tape transport in the shape of γ
perhaps Omega would've been better, as less tape is used for the transport
ß
Yeah but I mean, "B" is a much less marketable name than "Beta". They probably just looked for a cool substitute to "B", and chose the Greek one.
If you're German it's the Eszett machine
"no effort November"
- it's 17 minutes long
- super informative
- and still full of jokes as usual
- hmmm
It was probably recorded in October!
One could consider it better; I would review it as a quick'spouting' of the ideas that matter, with a few jokes interspersed
If this was no effort November, every month should be November
What he considered to be "no effort" was leaving in the grammatical mistakes (assumingly) made in the script and editing in graphics later to correct them...which admittedly takes some effort...
muke001 which, ironically, is better, in my opinion because we get more self-deprecating humor
Having had MANY of my favorite VHS tapes ruined as a kid when the VHS player "ate" the tape, seeing the Betamax yank the tape out and 360 it around a loop actually made me cringe.
Learning also that the VCR partially unloads the tape when you hit stop...beta doesn't do that. Imagine rewinding that tape pressed against all of those components...ugh
Yeah, my first thought was basically, "Holy crap that's way too much tape." VHS had enough trouble with wrecking tapes.
Actually, now that I think about it, I do remember that one of my childhood friends was unfortunate enough to have a father that picked Betamax. I don't recall all the details - given that I would've been fairly young at the time - but I do remember the number of wrecked tapes being a factor in his parents buying a VHS VCR. Well, that and the fact that the format war was basically won by that point.
Strange, I watched my fair share of VHS when I was a kid, but I don't recall that our VHS player ever mangled a tape (maybe the players got better in the 90s). Audio cassettes on the other hand…
@@teldrah As far as I was concerned back then, even one tape was too many. 😆
It really wasn't that bad, but the fact that it was a possibility at all is still kind of annoying.
@@teldrah Your parents probably cleaned it more often than mine did lol. I remember a fair few eaten tapes over the years.
I appreciate the fact that you used a Sony VHS player for this demonstration. If that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.
In my area, Sony VHS are probably the most common VCR brand found in thrift shops. I had to buy two of them to get one that works. But Sony did make good VHS. Maybe the best short of Panasonic's AG series, which is still the gold standard decades later.
@Zcooger Second Channel Ahh the NV-FS200. Mine broke a few months ago. Mechanical failure. And I won't waste any time trying to repair a VCR that uses that over-engineered G mechanism.
I really like the philosophy JVC had of just licensing out to other companies instead of trying to keep everything in house
Should've used an JVC betamax player
And even more ironic that this late Sony VHS VCR is a rebadged Samsung... Not Sony at all. Samsung mechanism with Samsung electronics. Even the menu looks the same as on Samsung VCRs.
"two videocassettes were harmed in the making of this film" You have no idea how much I love you right now...
first
But what was on those two? What priceless content is now lost forever? His graduation video? A bootleg copy of Song of the South? A lost episode of Doctor Who?
@@sireuchre you can tape them back together.
@@Jehty_ tape the tape
@@sireuchre The complete run of The Phoenix.
This video was falsely advertised as being "No Effort". There was a good deal of effort on display in this video. :)
So true.
I feel so deceived.
Perhaps the no effort idea was on our part.
This man's deadpan, straight face humor is unmatched. That damn card joke at the beginning was top notch.
And the fact he doesn't point out a put by overstating it or saying that he made a pun is nice. But if the pun was in an odd place he just gives a slight pause for the viewer to catch up.
Oh, come on. He’s no Pat Paulson, after all.
It is one of my biggest joys watching his videos
Your comment is kinda funny.
Back in the 80's when tape players were new, I was a 2-way radio repair tech. A friend with an out of warranty VHS player had a problem with his unit and volunteered me to fix it since apparently 2-way radios are practically identical to VHS players, and I knew how to solder wires together, that made me an expert on video tape players. When a tape was inserted, it would pull it in, act like it was going to feed the tape in but would immediately stop, then promptly eject it. When I removed the cover, looked at all the internal adjustment controls, and knowing at that point I didn't even know how to set the clock on the player, much less fix it, I said I can't do anything without a repair manual, hoping to persuade my friend to take it to a real tape player repair shop. We put it back together, and he left with it and I felt like I had dodged a bullet. The next week, he shows back up at my shop, with the same broken tape player and a smile on his face, and hands me a repair manual that he said cost a hundred dollars and said I could I fix it now that we have the manual for it. So, we went though the troubleshooting process from end to end, and from what we could determine it was something to do with that "light on the stick" you mentioned, and the side sensors. According to the manual, the player would check to make sure the tape was taut before loading, using that light and edge sensors and if not would attempt to wind up the tape to make sure it was tight. Watching it, we could see the tape was just fine, no slack, but the player kept ejecting the tape. After exhausting all possible obvious problems, we finally measured the voltage on the edge sensors, finding one of them wasn't detecting the light. Upon closer inspection of the sensor we found a bug had crawled into that sensor, got stuck and died. Removing the bug fixed it but not before we had gone through every step, alignment, adjustment in that machine and somehow we managed to compromise the MACRO copy protection detection (there were dozens of controls, I haven't a clue which one it was) and it worked wonderfully well making copies of other tapes.
LOL That's funny that he brought it back with the manual and payed that much for it. I used to do some repairs on VCRs. Eject mechanisms were often the cause of failures.
Your story is similar to how we got the term "bug" in a machine or program. Where a moth caused a relay to fail in an early electro-mechanical computer.
@@my3dviews Yeah, those were the days. I also repaired CCTV systems, so I had some very basic video tools, like the kind made by Heathkit, and at the time a nice Sencore scope that was better suited for home TV than CCTV stuff. I was still a kid, and had just gotten my commercial FCC license and fortunately the study material covered broadcast radio and TV, but at the time I still had practically no real life experience, so I was loaded with all sorts of theory and Q & A knowledge I was ready to put to the real test, attempting to repair a very complicated device I had no clue about. Since we lacked the real test equipment called for in repair manual, we had to build a few gimmick tools along the way, like inverting sync to inject using a transistor inverter, and stuff like that, and after the first pass through the alignment, the VCR absolutely was screwed up beyond all hope. So much for raw inexperienced knowledge. Anyhow, energized by my friends urging, and willingness to supply beer and Dorito's as payment for services, by the time we finished the second case of beer (we opted for the pay as you go plan), and repeated the alignment procedure probably a dozen more times, we managed to get a little bit of a picture back, and were able to tweak here and there until the picture looked fairly decent, at least to two drunk wanna be VCR repair tech's. The picture wasn't perfect, but after my buddy discovered it would now record tapes, even those with copy protection, he wouldn't ever let me take another crack at fixing it properly. Over the years, I gained a lot of electronic experience repairing all sorts of electronic stuff, but VCR's were something I never felt I properly conquered, and stayed clear of them, and after watching the video of the Betamax from this post, I think I made right decision. Lol! :)
@@TurpInTexas Ya, I don't miss doing repairs. Didn't mind the ones were you instantly knew what was wrong based on what the customer said. Keeping a few old VCRs around as parts was a great way to fix things. I recall one Sony beta, that had audio problems. Had a different model that just happened to have the same circuit board. Did a quick swap and it worked. Sure beat having to find the component on the board that was at fault.
VCRs also had lots of mechanical failures, which often were obvious just by looking at it. Such as a broken cog on a plastic gear.
I got out of it when everything was turning digital. Now everything is so cheap that I don't even know if they even fix them anymore. Don't think that it's worth fixing a $75 Blu-ray player. Maybe just a complete circuit board swap, but no point in trying to find the faulty component.
My3dviews Just FWIW, the term "bug" was in use for computer errors before the real moth got caught in a relay.
You literally debugged the VCR.
I laughed way too hard at the rant about none of this mattering.
I'm also not sure if it was intentional but it's funny that he then says he'll go use a DVD players since that's also really an obsolete format at this point now that streaming has largely completely taken over.
@@hedgehog3180 yeah the joke was surely the HD DVD player 😂😂. Microsoft made one for the XB360. What a thriving media format, amirite?
LOL i came down here to comment exactly about that! 😂
I swear I did the same.
I hedged my bets and bought an HD-DVD / Blu-ray combo drive for my media PC back in 2007, along with some movies in each format. I found HD-DVD to be much faster loading and easier to navigate, and I'm still annoyed that it lost out to Sony. Not that any of this matters now.
That info card joke was really nice
Thankfully it worked for me. Needed a good laugh today.
It did appear for me. But I have an issue where annotations keep turning on every video, even though I keep setting it to off. :(
No card appeared for me.
@@JosephDavies Well, something appears for me, so I guess it's the card? I have an i in a circle that shows up for the entire video EXCEPT for a second or two when he says "right about now". And then when he says "there it is" a rectangular box with the words "Suggested: ..." shows up. In either case, I have to click on it to show the video titles and thumbnails. (Which tbh is what *I* would call a card, but who knows)
@@Tahgtahv I believe that's it.
I'm glad you mentioned the difference between Betamax and Betacam! I worked at a TV station in northern Michigan for several years around 2015 and we were still using Betacam (SP, specifically) occasionally even up until around 2018, when we finally got rid of our Betacam player. The reason we still had it for so long was for ingesting ad spots into our system; some clients insisted on sending us their commercials on Betacam tapes, despite us being capable of ingesting just about any possible format or media.
I still keep one for dubbing from tapes people give me .
Editing, clever writing and the implementation of visual and written gags are getting better and better. Great work!
Ironic considering it's supposed to be "no effort November"
@@Kalvinjj It means December is going to be lit! Lit like the light inside a VHS player.
Yeah I'm consistently impressed with how much this channel is improving.
No
@@itchykami destroy your diodes december 😂
I love it...
"Does any of this matter?"
"NO, of COURSE NOT, this is 2019, these are 2 DEAD FORMATS!"
Telling it like it is!
Don't forget the HD DVD player lol
* Laughs in laser disc *
True true, us true media connoisseurs go 8mm anyway. Let the plebs fight out the tape wars.
Telling it like someone who wants to repeat history you mean. All the failures of Beta are gonna show you which formats today and in the future are doomed to failure. So generally speaking, yes all of it matters to someone looking to avoid choosing dead end formats.
@@natsume-hime2473 Not at all. The simplest solution is not to be an early adopter during a format war. If you can wait a year or two then the eventual winner is usually pretty obvious. Plus you save a lot of money as the prices drop rather quickly.
Honestly my parents bought into CED boy was that a failure. But at the time it seemed like a better format if you just wanted to watch movies. Rewinding was such a foreign concept to me when we finally did switch to VHS. And we really only did that because our CED player died and VCRs were dirt cheap by then.
Why is there no comment on the ”Cap ’Stans quarters” joke? Brilliant as always.
UA-cam claims tubeie07's is an hour older than yours, so heck.
I just want to know where the Cap 'stans daughter is.
It's all fun and games until you hear a "Cap 'Stans Crunch."
Absolutely love your videos. The post-recorded "TWELVE" and "THIRTY" were so jarring and unexpected I just couldn't stop laughing after hearing them!
What are you talking about? The audio is seamless with no discernable variance in output.
@@everythingknife8763 This comment made by the VHS-quality gang.
Lolololol
@@everythingknife8763 14:28
@@dylanharding5720 He was just kidding.
The irony of using a Sony VHS player for this video.
only the best irony from Technology Connections
Sony made pretty good VHS machines.
@@TexasCat99 Sony invented VHS and sold it to JVC!
@@EberKlaushartinger Mind.... Blown. I'm apparently too young.
Irony? No, fitting.
Hmm, on that ending note... any chances on the differences between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?
Y'know. When you're willing to put in the effort anyway.
I picked Zune over iPod, HDDVD over Blu-Ray and Windows Phone over Android/Apple. So, when the next format war starts, do the opposite of me! At least I picked DVD over DIVX. :)
@@davindameron9092 okay, which streaming services are you subscribed to?
Trick question, everyone loses.
DVD's work on my computer and mean I don't need to get a special player for them, bluerays don't so why should I spend money on seperate equipment just for bluerays when DVD's at just fine.
@@nienke7713 ...because blurays have between double to 4x the resolution of DVDs and if you want to watch something in HD that's the format of choice?
Also Blurays have been a thing since like... 2009...ish? You've had loads of time to switch. It's not even a backwards compatibility thing, Bluray players still play DVDs.
I worked in a video rental store for years in the 80's ... One thing I learned for sure... Beta customers were the assholes... Like Prius owners and Vegans, you knew when a Beta customer came in because they announced it to everyone... First with the attitude of superiority and then after a few minutes with the bitching that the selection for Beta wasn't as good.
When one of them asked "which format do you think is better?" , The only correct answer is .. "I don't care, I just work here and I have shit to do... NEXT!"
Yep, another perfect explanation of that whole saga. I used to work in a mom and pop electronics and video rental store (late 70s-early 80s) long before Blockbuster existed and we certainly did rent both Beta and VHS porn and of course, regular Hollywood movies. Back then, nobody ever complained that VHS had any inferior picture quality. Tape all pretty much looked the same at least on consumer TVs of the time. We were all just amazed that we could record broadcast TV and rent/buy movies to watch at home. From what I remember, as to why VHS came out on top, is that it came down to price. The VHS VCRs were sold by many more different manufactures and therefore, almost always quite a bit cheaper. As a salesman, trying to explain to a customer that Beta was better was difficult because they couldn't see any difference and frankly, neither could I. And then there was the initially shorter recording time of Beta which certainly wasn't a selling point so it was hard to extol any virtue of Beta over VHS. Even though Beta Hi-Fi came out before VHS Hi-Fi, that didn't sway anyone from buying VHS over Beta either. Beta did initially have a steadier Freeze-Frame quality but that wasn't a reason a customer would choose one over the other. By the mid-80s when Sony VCRs began having wide-spread quality control issues (the machine wouldn't rewind) it was all over for Beta.
I think part of it was Sony wanted higher lic fees for both the players AND the media. Maybe fried brain cells, but I recall JVC was the main lic holder for VHS and their lic costs (particularly on media) were way lower. Not that I can cite that and at this point wtf cares.
Major driver was cost of licence. Sony had a per machine royalty, while JVC was a lot less worried, with both much lower costs and a lot less actual chasing up, so that manufacturers would look up the cost of making a machine design, and choose the cheaper option and make VHS. As well the actual mechanics were easier to make, quite a few clone manufacturers could do the entire machine easily enough, but only found the head drum assembly too difficult, so resorted to buying them as spare parts for larger brands. Did drive Matsushita crazy for a while IIRC, with the number of head drums they were selling to the repair market, till they finally found out why, and probably started offering them as a ready to use part instead, getting in an extra profit for essentially already paid for production capacity. Then the cloners got to the point they could actually make the whole machine in house.
Sony however wanted tight control, which both costs money, and also stifles innovation and changes to the mechanism, while VHS found a solution to big drums in the VHS-C with the smaller drum, faster rotation and extra heads with switching, but which left a standard azimuth track on the tape, which also was used in a few full size smaller units as well. Assorted mechanism types were to get it either smaller, lighter, cheaper, or more compact for some application. Last VHS decks I saw consumer side were essentially one single plastic injection mould of all the parts, integrated with a single sheet metal stamping, to make the deck, complete with all of the tape mounts and eject mechanisms.
Techmoans had an interesting video where he said that machine rental cost was where Beta really died and Video 2000 never stood a chance
Sony did the same thing with MiniDisc. Could have taken off, but for years it was only Sony machines and they weren't cheap.
@@xiradio Really good format, and quite reliable. Just that Sony wanted all of that pie, and that is what killed it, competing formats that were cheaper, more manufacturers and most importantly good enough for the job.
I like the fact you use a SONY vhs machine to proof what was wrong with SONY'S beta system..
Oscar Hartman Talk about irony 😂
It's only fair! 😇
And he uses a non-Sony Betamax machine. Which is funny because one of the big reasons that Betamax struggled is that with only one manufacturer making it (Sony) for the most part, its prices were substantially greater. JVC sold licences to many more electronics manufacturers to allow them to make the VHS format of a VCR, which allowed those manufacturers to reduce prices, and make VHS far more popular.
The fact that Sony made VHS VCRs during Betamax’s lifetime reminds me of how RCA made VCRs while trying to shill CED. Corporations be crazy, yo.
@@BritishMetric144yeah I think that’s the main reason VHS ultimately won the format war. Had Sony outsourced their production more like JVC, and thus made Beta more affordable, I think Beta and VHS would have coexisted like iPhone and Android, or Coke and Pepsi. It would’ve all just come down to personal preference. Of course there’s also the fact that a single Beta tape could only record as much as five hours, while a VHS tape could record as much as ten hours, but most people aren’t going to record that much in one go in my experience anyway.
Also, this is the cursive form of the lowercase letter beta: ϐ
You're welcome
He should've seen this and hearted it.
I love it and hate it at the same time.
blyat
In an unpinned comment, hiding in this section, he has stated that he can see the lowercase b
I was thinking that if you look at it upside down, or equivalently, reflected the curve, it does look like an uppercase beta.
“Now let’s see where the captstan’s quarters are” Thank you for that joke.
The small quips like that from him give me life
Captain Stan
"two videocassettes where harmed in the making of this video"
you monster...
Tntiscool54 how unscrupulous of him!!!
At least he didn't destroy any pron tapes 😜
@@ezg8448 How do you know what was on them?
@@alexatkin
You're not that careless with pron, lol.
Did no one else just use cello tape to put their VHS tapes back together, or was that just me?
Regarding tape cartridges, my all-time favorite is Video8.
The Betamax tape feed path looks like a nightmare to untangle if anything ever goes wrong with the machine.
I remember the Sony rep proudly bringing a demo Video8 machine into our workshop to show us. We quickly wired it up to a nice Sony TV and off we went. There was no doubt about it, the pictures were significantly better than VHS/Beta and we all stood around nodding and making the right noises. Then there was quite a long delay before the system actually launched onto the market, and something seemed to have happened in the meantime - the pictures were definitely NOT as good as the demo. in fact, although they were still better than VHS/Beta, the difference was small. Never found out what went on during that long delay...
@@andyhowlett2231cost cuts. I don't remember if video8 was tape but they probably increased recording time in exchange for worse quality
"Now, where's my HD-DVD player?" That was really funny.
14:29 "The Beta machine needs *TWELVE* more inches of tape. That's about *THIRTY* centimeters."
Haha that's easily my favorite part of the video
Yeah, that caught me off guard haha
Reminds me of both the Simpsons episode where they went to Krusty Summercamp, and Invader Zim episode where they had to sell candy to win prizes.
Reminds me of the call center menus, haha.
Yeah when three hour rape was something like 258 meters.
But which machine would a pirate use? The VC Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
I'll be here all week folks.
You forgot to say 'Don't forget to tip your waitress and try the veal.'
i would like this comment but at this time its got 42 and i don't want to be the one to ruin that.
@@JoelRiggs Don't worry, it's 69 now.
They're both played on VCRs.
Good, I won’t be.
"Betamax was way better!"
-a guy born after DVD was introduced
I've never even heard about Betamax except for the jokes made about it
Sæm.
LOL!
No need to rub it in
Had both. And yes, material wise, beta was slightly better... But VHS was less expensive, had a longer length and a better marketing strategy
TC's "no effort" is most other channels' 3 weeks of research, filming, and editing...
Emblem Parade This guy is amazing and I love him. He’s got so much talent
Maybe he was only referring to the title.
The light detection of the end of the tape reminded me of something I nearly forgot: back in the 90's at some point, when I was 12ish, I acquired an old VCR that didn't have a cover. (I got a LOT of electronics by grabbing other people's trash and they frequently had damaged or missing cases, but working internal electronics!)
I used it to record TV shows on at night ("Becker" was one that was on past bedtime that I'd like to sneak) and had no problem. But then I put a lamp on the same table and found it kept spitting the tape back out any time I tried to play or record... took me a little while to figure out that there was a light sensor in there!
Putting a random piece of sheet metal over the top of it solved this problem. I used that VCR for a couple years.
Damn, people threw away electronics when only the case was broken? That sounds like such a boomer thing to do lmao
@@Reydriel In America people throw a lot of things away just because of cosmetic matters. All grocery stores combined in america throw away an average of 43 billion pounds of food every year because of cosmetic/blemish reasons.
@@autonomous2010 not just in America.
That's something every developed country does.
@@Reydriel oh yeah, tons of stuff with minor damage - often cosmetic, but sometimes easy to fix electronic stuff like a failed capacitor - can be found in the trash or on the cheap in the second hand market. I got a Super Nintendo as a kid basically this same way too - the case was ripped right off (my guess is someone got VERY angry at the game) but the board inside was fine.
I actually still have that one... and it is still just a board with the wires popping out of a shoe box lol.
And the best part about free junk is if it doesn't work? Oh well, no big deal. Worst case is you waste time, but even in these you often learn something new about how electronics go bad.
@@Reydriel Heh. I had neighbors in the 90's across the street that threw all sorts of good stuff away. I got a stack of HP laser printers. Most of them seemed to work fine. I got a lawn mower. The only thing wrong with it was a bolt missing in the handle. I cut my grass with that thing for years. They once threw out a couple of gas powered weed-whackers. I saw them as I came home one day, but came back out too late... someone else had already grabbed them.
“Where is my HD-DVD player?”
I’m still laughing 😂
At least there were a few BluRay HD-DVD combo players. I'm not sure how many VHS+BETAMAX combo machines there were.
And because it's still semi recent, finding a BluRay\HDDVD combo drive for a PC or a Samsung BluRay\HDDVD combo player isn't difficult.
The problem really comes in when you look at format quality. Everyone claimed HDDVD was better, which wasn't true. BluRay offered substantially more capacity. 20GB more on a dual layer disc than HD-DVD's 30GB dual layer cap.
The ONLY advantage HD-DVD had was simply it could be made compatible with a DVD player through another layer or simply pressing the DVD layer on the opposite side of the HD-DVD side (which, granted, could theoretically have been done to a BluRay if Sony cared to maintain legacy compatibility.
@@emotionz3 Thw biggest advantage was HD-DVD had more functionality at launch. Bluray was in flux so compatibility of features between players varies wildly. HD-DVD was also cheaper to manufacture.
I liked HD-DVD because it was region free. None of the other stuff mattered.
Remember when the Xbox 360 had a HD-DVD external player?
*09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0*
Our family originally purchased a Beta machine in the early 80s and I can recall going to video rental stores and needing to stick to a specific side of the store. As VHS started to win the format wars, those rental stores would shrink the size of of their Beta collection, to the point where I remember it was down to 3 shelves out of a store that had dozens. Eventually my parents gave in and purchased a VSH and the Beta machine was relegated to the basement where the children would watch the Disney collection that still remained on Beta.
Oh God, now there's going to be a war about the VSH format.
Similar story here; my parents had been big fans of Sony equipment, ever since their first Trinitron TV in the mid-'70s. By about 1988-'89,* all our local chain video stores** had dropped Betamax altogether. The only store that still carried Beta at all was a small independent video store -- and around 1990 they announced _they_ were dropping it too. ...Which was when Dad broke down and got a (Sony) VHS VCR.
We also had a Betamovie camcorder pretty much identical to the one in Alec's video. It, along with the Betamax VCR, eventually ended up with Mom when my parents divorced. I think Mom sent both to the electronics recycler at least a decade ago now. (Though the Beta VCR's _box_ survives ... as a convenient box for our old Atari 2600 and its cartridges, joysticks, cables, etc. 🙂)
* when I can first remember going out to rent videos with Dad
** Panorama Video, Mr Movies, Video Update, etc. We didn't have a Blockbuster nearby until a little later.
Fun fact: The source tape from which mass distributed Beta tapes are made is called the ...
Master Beta.
Even if it's on 1" or something? No respectable duplication facility would use a Beta (or VHS) master to make duplicate Betamax or VHS copies.
Ha
Took a second, but I got it. 😂
@@RaymondHng He's joking. Non-US pronunciation makes it "master beetah"
@@DanDeebster I've never heard a Brit pronounce it that way.
Two videocassettes were harmed in the making of this film.
Show me on the cassette where he touched you...
He should have better done a proper funeral on those two tapes.
They were also terrorized
F
@@danek_hren FFFFFFF!
Beta owners: “Oh, no, we backed the wrong horse.”
CED owners: “First time?”
I backed Beta but having been burnt waited for the whole HD DVD/Blu-ray thing to play out.
HD DVD owners: Got room for one more?
I have a Blu-ray movie that in spite of it being in the Blu-ray format has an advertising spiel about the great new HD-DVD format.
Beta came before CED tho, at least in the consumer market. I think.
@@CODMarioWarfare (which makes his joke even more on point)
I grew up from the age of five watching VHS and I've learned a lot of things about this format. At the age of 15 I learned to perform "tape reel donation" from one VHS cassette to another by opening the cases and swapping the reels. Not exactly that easy - you'd have to remember to lower the tape between the pins on the back of the cassette - but once you learn the position, it is surprisingly simple to learn and master. If your cassette has a broken case, I can happily switch the tape reels.
At this point in time I am possibly the only qualified VHS tape surgeon in South Western Sydney Australia...
Ok
I don't know if that's worse than being able to overdub tapes
I’M MAD BETA DIDN’T WIN THE FORMAT WAR AND I’M LETTING YOU KNOW IN THE SPACE BELOW THIS VIDEO
beta'd
I had Willy Wonka on Beta, you can't beat that!
Yeah.. heh..
Your hilarious.. 🤦🏾♂️
I'm a little disappointed just because I like the chunky retrofuturist look of Betamax more than the cheap oreo look of VHS, but that's the only reason.
You can still use them, you know?
I had a Beta machine for years!
The problem is I can't find any place who rent those movies anymore.
I guess it's time to buy a VHS machine...
There's a great place in Milwaukee where you can pick one up for cheap. It's called Lightning Fast VCR Repair. Expect to wait at least six months for shipping.
You should probably just skip directly to UMD.
"patent evasion" would be my first guess at some of those wacky designs.
Yes, that could be the reason...
But beta was first to market, so they would have had more patents. Why was their design wackier than VHS which you would think would have to do more evasion?
@@greggh First to market doesn't mean first to patent. A lot of these tape mechanisms predate VHS and Betamax I'd imagine.
@@greggh I think he's referring to 15:20.
I love how Sony's own digital audio tape format uses a mechanism reminiscent of the vhs cassette, so they basically admitted that the beta mech was inferior
I thought I was the only person who fidgeted with VHS tapes like that.
Whatever you do, with 7 billion people on this planet, you are most certainly no the only one.
@@zdanee is that a challenge?
"worthy of note, or noteworthy" ... this is why I love you.
"While I do love pushing buttons, let's move on!" I'm dead.
When you have the image so the capstan is on the bottom it makes a beta, but you have to include the cassette! The spools make up the round bits of the "B" shape. (Yes I'm aware I'm about 3 years late to this party lol)
I thought that you need to invert the image (the cassette must be on the left) and you'll get ẞ
CARDS! Roku-UA-cam don't need no stinkin' cards.
PS I looked under my TV, and there is no links or description there either.
"One of them is VHS machine, and the other is beta machine"
ouch, that burn.
Yes, Sony did indeed use an M-load (albeit a very wonky M) on some of their later Betamax systems. The ones I am aware of were the C20, C30 and C40 models. Remarkably slimline, and the C40 boasted linear stereo tracks, so clearly from the later end of Beta. The mechanism they used was much more compact than the standard Beta, and it loaded a lot quicker too. Worth checking out if you can find one as they are a real oddball.
I might have one of those models somewhere, but I can't even remember, and if I do, I don't think I ever took the lid off it. Thanks for prompting me to check!
Do you know if those systems had any protections against recording on the very earliest part of the tape, which u load systems wouldn't be able to read?
@@CattoRayTube No, it didn't. It could record and play back many seconds of material that was invisible to a U-load Beta machine. It also put the tape back on the left spool when unthreading the tape rather than the right spool as a U-load Beta machine does, meaning that a fully-rewound tape placed in a U-load beta machine caused the loading ring to struggle somewhat, as the tape had to come from the left spool, and was dragged across the head. Not a major issue I am sure, but owning both a U-load and an M-load Beta machine was quite interesting as to what they could and couldn't do.
Remarkably, there is a youtube vid of someone having loading issues with one of these Beta machines. ua-cam.com/video/lmYzVLSgnGk/v-deo.html He doesn't actually get to load a tape, but you can kinda see where the loading system is and where the tape goes.
It was just a more compact U-loader. I've owned an SL-C20.
I worked on VHS and Beta machines for years and although the recordings on Beta were *slightly* better than VHS, that was about the only improvement. The tape path on Beta was very long and depended on many tape guides to keep the tape in line. Beta also kept the tape 'wrapped' around the head drum while fast-winding, which led to accelerated wear of the drum. I had quite a few cases with Beta machines where the tape would stick to the highly-polished drum.
I love the irony that of your two VCRs, the VHS one is a Sony...
"I have to remember to put it there" sounds like a line straight out of Bill & Ted's excellent adventure... ;-)
Oh, no! He's blaspheming against Betamax, offending the *Gods of Hipster Retro Tech!*
Real hipsters use V2000 ;-)
Heresy!!!!!
During a service call we found a crate of beta tapes in the crawl space all that was in it was pornography and the homeowner told us to get rid of it
*Later that day at the pawn shop looking for a beta player
AHAHAHAA
Good to know that the beta/beta pronunciation bollocks goes both ways.
Just like gif/gif.
@@josephharold808 one of those is universally objectively incorrect though
@@felkmane yeah. Anyone who pronounce gif like "gif" is wrong. It's gif.
@@felkmane Yeah, it irritates me to this day that there are people who insist that the guy who CREATED it in the first place is the one who's saying it wrong, just because they've been saying it incorrectly and don't want to admit it.
@@BlissfullWulf The guy who created it didn't create the english language. Its graphics interchange format, gif is just the shortened version to say it. You take the g- sound from graphics.
"Wedgie thing" and Pokey thing" Stop! You're getting way too technical! lol
Yet refreshingly descriptive of their function!
I really love how snarky this episode is.
There's even more snark in the subtitles!
5 years ago is horrifying to see on such a modern-looking Technology Connections video, even though I unfortunately wasn’t here when it released
2020 better have a Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD format series!
I actually prefer DVD over BD, but I could very well be using a dying format. I'm not ready to adopt a digital library yet, I need this for another decade at least.
@@IcyTorment I think The Shamanite meant non-computer-based or non-streaming but wanted a more elegant way to say it.
The Shamanite I love my DVD’s too and the good news is DVD’s still out sell Blue Rays 3 to 1
@@theshamanite Keep them, At least for the BD, they have and will alwave have the better image quality, thanks to a better encoding. Streaming is just not the same. Plus if the service closes, then all the monney you paid for the movies is gone.
HD DVD versus Bluray was barely a war. The HD DVD manufacturers gave-up after just 2 years. The Betamax vs VHS war lasted 12 years. (Sony made its first VHS unit in 1987.)
"You've backed the wrong horse, life sucks."
Later:
"Where's my HD-DVD player?"
SirJeff I don’t know what your exact point is but I believe that is the whole point of the joke.
Dylan Dreisbach yea I was just repeating the joke lol
it lost for the same reason blu ray had higher capacity
Blue
@@ThunderClawShocktrix no it lost because blu ray players were standard on the ps3. That put many millions of blu ray players in peoples home.
"The beta machine needs... *_TWELVE!!_* ...more inches of tape!"
That's about *THIRTY* centimeters
@@TroyVan6654 almost*
That's what SHE said!
@@AstrosElectronicsLab he definitely needs to include a few michael scott clips in his videos
The same as two sixes and that's terrible.
Alec's rant toward the end of the video brought me incredible joy and I'm going to need more.
3:25 “… but on the whole…” *nod for effect
Taking the beat there was perfect
I love how you've only gotten sassier over the years.
It happens when you get older and wiser lol
I’ve only recently discovered this channel and the sass is one of my favorite things about it
AND he's a "Weird Al" fan to boot.
I mean, could he GET any better?!?
💪🏻
🇺🇸
"Do notte buye Betamacks"
Your closing statements made me lol. Tho you didnt mention how failure prone that insanely complex tape transport system was. We had a Betamax when I was a kid and it messed up so regularly that 5yo me thought said Betamax player existed for the sole purpose of destroying Betamax tapes
Interesting. although I upgraded my Betamax machine to take advantage of the new features, the original continued to operate until a few years ago. In the meantime I have gone through five VHS machines; each one cheaper in construction (and lesser in time to survive) than the last. At least DVD is better built, or was, if my latest drive is anything to go by.
Agnes Nutter was always right :)
The pacing and subtle jokes are just unreal. Amazing job as always.
"so, there are 2 things that are worthy of note, or, noteworthy."
i want you to be a spokesperson for me when i establish a business.
Or, the person who does the speaking instead of you.
In Europe, we had a standard that I think was way superior called Video 2000 for a while. Might be cool to dive into that
Video 2000 was really nice, you didn't ever get noise lines with them, not even when fast-forwarding. Too bad Philips and Grundig couldn't make it win the war
Techmoan did ua-cam.com/video/SeSz6MoX00Q/v-deo.html
Maybe re-using parts from V2000 explains why some of the Phillips machines did that weird thing he mentions right at the end?
It's a good thing that V2000 died out years ago, else what do you do with the format after Y2K? Maybe that's WHY it died?
It lost due to not allowing porn on the V2000 system. Sad isn't it.
"No effort"
Proceeds to write a script, film B roll, time a card popping up, etc for a 17-minute video on his own.
You know you're getting old when you have lived long enough to see the rise and fall of an entire technology.
Remember floppy disks? god, they sucked so much.
Tube radios and TVs, Transistor radios, 8 track cassettes, audio cassettes... Then things began to really heat up. Now, I've seen representatives of 70 years of technology in my life, and kinda feel, "If it worked, don't knock it". I still prefer XP over windows 10. Works better for the things I ask it to do.
To be fair that can be within a year for some tech nowadays
@Fart LOL!! Said I prefer it for what I ask it to do. I have a windows 11 system, of course. Or how would I know that XP performs better at certain tasks??
Read recently that 40% of the systems are still using XP. Don't know if that's true, but it suggests that an awful lot of people have had the same experience.
@@MonkeyDefenceForce i know about floppy disks and have experience with them, even if I born in 2009. I have 31 floppy disks, 3 computers running XP and a keyboard with PS/2 connector. Heck, even old calculator, old camera which uses tape (for photos) and an old fan. Oh, and a pirated version of NES: classic edition, old CRT TV and a VHS VCR. Also, my Tower PC runs XP SP 3 and I code on.... Just BASIC. Holy cow, I'm too young but also too old. I don't even know, do I exist....
Betamax didn't unlace the tape from the heads when fast-forward/rewind, meaning extra wear on the tape.
This is also relevant! However, I didn't put in the video because A) there are exceptions in the realm of Beta (notably Sanyo-built machines) and B) later VHS machines (including the one in this video) would also leave it threaded. Since there are exceptions to be found for both cases, I don't necessarily find it to be _too_ much of a net gain or loss in either's favor
@@TechnologyConnections Does it not unthread if you stop then ff/rw? Had a few that did that, visual search being slower.
That was also the benefit of early Beta vs VHS. Beta laced up upon loading the tape, and had almost instant play. Early VHS would stuff around for a few seconds lacing up the tape before a picture would appear. Beta was pretty limp around the heads in FF and REW so not a lot of wear in those modes. It wasnt until maybe the 90s that VHS machines laced up from the start instead of just loading the tape into place. Another disadvantage of Beta was replacing the heads in the machine involved complicated alignment. VHS video heads were a couple of screws, a few wires to un-solder, or terminals in the later ones, and a pulling tool, and the whole upper drum could be changed in a couple of minutes.
Best. Ending. Ever. "NONE OF THIS MATTERS ITS OVER!" :-)
I actually FINANCED my first Hi-Fi stereo VCR. And it's just random junk today.
"YOU BACKED THE WRONG HORSE!"
Spoilers!!!
The end about sums up most of my subscribed channels on vintage tech. haha
"I have a pair of almost-randomly-selected video cassette recorders in front of me." PuhLEEZE tell me that was an homage to season 1 of Citation Needed!
exactly what I thought!
*_MYSTERY BISCUITS_*
Peak nerdyness reached. Proceed with caution.
@@HellJustFroze oh yeah
ya got me with the card gag.
UA-cam sucks
UA-cam doesn't suck it's super
@@stephensnell1379 yeahno. Its horribly broken and awful
@@Verlisify UA-cam is superb
@@stephensnell1379
superbad
@@stephensnell1379 Superbly terrible
“A pokey thing inside the VCR pushes the wedgey thing...”
So hilarious when you use terms like that! 🤣
I’m so happy I found your channel, your content is second to none!!!
Jose Martinez And when we listen to vinyl records, the wibbly wobbly wibble-wobbles on the record make the stylus go all wibbly-wobbly too, and those wibbly-wobbly wibble-wobbles turn into electrical signals 😁
... While discussing the betamax cassette. *Facepalm*
@@TheJacklikesvideos Unsure why you slapped yourself. Beta cassettes were, indeed, played in Video Cassette Recorders. Are you under the impression that VCRs were exclusive to VHS cassettes?
Yup, none's videos are the best.
love the technical jargon
This is one of the funniest videos you've made. I really enjoyed it.
Yes I loved using my VHS Cassettes as fidgeting devices back in the day while I waited for another cassette to rewind
An excellent description of the two VCRs was published in IEEE Spectrum a few decades ago. As the story went, Sony's CEO walked into the meeting to launch their VCR (they already had vuematic) and put the company handbook on the table. He said that the cassette could not be any bigger than the handbook. With VHS, JVC researched all the existing technologies and patents to arrive at their design.
Things I invested in: Betamax, MiniDisc, HD-DVD, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Blackberry Playbook.
F
I still have my BlackBerry PlayBook.
How about LS120? 🤣
I had a minidisc player! It brought me very much joy!
I hear now is a good time to invest in Google Glass for your next purchase
I completely lost it when you said it "YANKS OUT about a mile of tape", hardest I've laughed all week
_"Captain Stan"_ ha, love it!
Wait, that is not the actual name?
Haha yeah, that was pretty funny, it made me rewind (ha!) to make sure he said Captain Stan.
But to answer the question from the other poster, no, it's called a "capstan", which looks like Cap. Stan.
While I owned dozens upon dozens of VHS tapes that watched over and over as a kid, I was so happy to switch over to DVD. It happened by accident really. I bought a PS2 and happened to find out it could play DVDs. Nowadays I use my PS3 or my computer if I feel like it. Being able to watch DVDs on pretty much anything is was makes it that much better.
Stacks of clay tablets should have won the format war.
The truly superior format.
Anthony Harris No love for cave paintings?
Was there ever tablet format wars? Different types of stone or carved characters that better stood the test of time?
@@wrightmf Sure there was. The Latin alphabet vs the Greek alphabet. Then later you had the Roman numeral system vs the Arabic numeral system.
Just like the Beta format, the only times the Greek alphabet and Roman numeral system appear are when some pretentious twat feels the need to put on airs and pretend their format is superior despite the fact that market forces clearly demonstrated that it wasn't and that this has been settled for a long fucking time.
Nuk umi nuku neferet.
I pay my respects.
"oh there it is" - that card joke was so well executed. Love your vids.
"but on the hole"
i laughed too hard at this..
"(pause with an obnoxious smirk)"
Same here, I was laughing at those comments through the hole video
16:51 "two videocassettes were harmed in the making of this film"
PRESS F
F
F
F
F
F
Great video, and thanks. I was a Beta user until I saw the writing on the wall and switched to VHS for my first hi-fi VCR in 1986. I'm surprised you didn't mention that VHS unloads the tape when it's not playing, so there is less strain on the tape during FF and REW, and VHS FF and REW times (at least in earlier machines) were much faster than Beta. Having owned both in the mid-80s, the difference was immediately noticeable to me. You're right though that none of this matters now, although I still do have a few VHS tapes because the content has never been re-released on DVD or Blu-Ray and it's copyrighted so conversion companies can't touch it.
I know this comment is old, but that is not true, at least in the US. You are 100% allowed to so that and it's called format shifting. It's the same way you are allowed to put your cd on a mp3 player. Yes, they cannot do that commercially but they can do it for you personally. If they say they can't, they don't understand the copyright law or choose not to. Same for DVDs that allow a digital copy. You can say thank you to Apple for helping get that passed.
What recordings are on VHS that isn't on DVD? Genuinely curious.
@@StoutShako there are many lesser known titles that were never converted that may not have been worth it due to not being mainstream enough. There were TONS of bargain basement titles for example you could buy that would never get converted. It should be no surprise as the same will happen to DVD titles . There are many dvd titles that will never get converted to blu ray or available streaming. I encounter that all the time
Not true of more modern machines but correct for older ones. SONY Betamax enabled you to search the picture during FFWD and REW as what they Called Peep search. Quite useful really. Linear tape speed of Betamax was slower than VHS which produced inferior audio before Hi-Fi audio came along. Betamax tapes generally had higher quality tape inside compared to VHS unless you purchased PREMIUM High Grade tapes. Faster Head rotation and larger Diameter head drum of Betamax, coupled with better tape oxide did produce better pictures for off air TV recordings. Most TV Rental companies in the UK opted for VHS since THORN EMI (who partnered with JVC) owned a large proportion of the TV rental chains which promoted the format's success. Plus, the machines were cheaper than SONY's brand Betamax machines and they had longer playing time too.
"You'll find that the tape makes the shape of the letter U." [Crazy freaking line drawing, followed by wacky rotation of the video in order to make the point clear]
yo dude gradient horizon is a dope album
@@raptorinator Heyy, you forgot the "t" in the word "horizont."
I'm still waiting for the "Gamma" tapes and their war with "Delta" tapes.
Where have you been? Have you completely missed the Omega format?
I mean, that's been obsolete for years as well, but there's just something about trying to unfold a hexagon into a dodecahedron to shove it into the player somehow that just never gets old... XD
The final rant reminded me very much of the “You lose, sir! Good day!” rant from Willy wonka
I never knew videocassette players pulled out the tape. I'd always assumed they read similarly to audio cassettes
I know, right? Came as a huge surprise when I got my first look inside a VCR. Also answered some questions about how a VCR could eat tapes as often as they did.
14:00 "You could get porn on Beta"
can confirm
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
By accident. When you could still rent Betas, sometimes they had amateur porn at the end - obviously bootleg tapes. Video stores weren't too choosy then. Oh and, thanks for mentioning the "tab" so you couldn't record over something! Oh God, the memories are just flooding back.
"Captain stan" had me absolutely dead
I liked "Capstan's Quarters" even more
I randomly found your videos and fall in love with them. So many memories back to the 90's. Big thanks.
Try Techmoan and LGR later
I so appreciate how you present a fun, fact-filled knockdown of past consumer electronics without approaching the subject as if it's all laughable because this is 2019 and this tech is all oh-so-ancient. Thank you for the time you put into all of your content! I'm so glad I finally found your channel! :)
Suggested title "Angry Man Angrily Discusses Two Obsolete Video Tape Formats" :)
I demand a demonstration of what happens when you play a Betacam tape in a Betamax player.
Oki, demand is a strong word, request or beg is perhaps more suitable.
I believe the word you're looking for is "grovel."
Nothing. The tape speed is about 10x faster.
@@OldProVidios #WeWantProof
@@MariaEngstrom Well, the audio track of Betamax is also the analog time code track in BetaCam. So playing in Betacam will get slow audio if you listened to the time code track and a betacam in the home deck will get slowed down data. Putting Betamax in a digibeta will get you a blank screen.
@@OldProVidios Much thanks for putting up with my childish questions and investing time in answering me. :)
I think this is your best video that I've seen so far! I was almost crying of laughter at the end.
Also, my parents backed Beta and my childhood was cartoons in beta... but after that I straight-up ended going entirely digital. I skipped the DVD era and the Blueray/HD-DVD wars by getting one of the earliest Portable DVR devices (an Archos AV500) that had a 4" screen, TV out capabilities, composite recording and about 10 hours of movie playback. No regrets at all!
"A device that will make your heads spin"
> Unsubscribe
@Trey Stephens He's joking.
HDDVD > Beta. Change my mind.
Bluray > HDDVD > Super VHS > Super Beta > BetaMax > Video 2000 > VHS
:D
MacXpert74 don’t forget the D-VHS 😉
MP4 file > all the above.
It can be put on anything, played any ware, and it will never die.
@@pseudonymity0000 One thing I've learned over the years: NEVER say 'never'...
HDDVD won because the porn industry backed it.
Well if this is the quality of your "no effort" series.. I am looking forward to your next "full effort" series.
I absolutely LOVED the rant near the end. "you backed the wrong horse!", as I'm thinking, 'Hell, I was CONVINCED HD-DVD was going to be the frontrunner...', just before he says, "Now where is my HD-DVD player!?"
Well, I thought HD-DVD would come out on top until of course the PS3 came out, that was the moment I knew it was toast, but had I done some research I'd have known Sony was the primary 'backer' of Blu-ray...