I distinctly remember recording, FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech, live on my family's Quasar VR-1000 machine. So the VCR was obviously invented sometime before 1941. My dad kept this recorder on top of the TV right between his JVC GR-C1, and the "flux capacitor" that he loaded into the trunk of his DeLorean he used for business trips every time there was a thunderstorm in the area.
I actually recorded Jesus' crucifixion on an early Ampex system. It took boxes and boxes of tapes because they only held about 20min of time and the program was rife with Roman commercials. Boyyyy what a different time it was lemme tell you whhattt!
lol. President Roosevelt did appear on television three time actually, though there were only 10,000 television sets in use by the time world war 2 started, so viewership was limited.
@@Kylefassbinderful You recorded historic Roman events too? Man, I remember recording the coronation of Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV on an Ampex setup! I had to deal with many boxes of tapes too, and the broadcast kept pausing for commercials for Crazy Augustus' Cattle Emporium and Ovaltinius. I didn't mind the latter, since I loved seeing the commercials and can still remember the catchy hymn they sang in them. I remember drinking a glass of chocolate Ovaltinius mixed with goat milk while me and my dad would watch gladiator matches on TV on Saturday nights
I miss going to the local mom and pop video rental store in the '80s and getting a couple of VHS tapes. I was a kid at the time, but I vividly remember it. Oddly, the thing I remember most is the smell of the store. If you were around, you probably know what I mean. Tapes and VCRs had a very particular smell. I'd probably get a can of air freshener with that smell if somebody made it. Good times.
I miss the days of walking into an electronics store in the 90s and seeing the wild and wonderful different technology all in your face advertising everything being new and exciting. now its all the same design on everything and its just like "oh here's the next one that comes out in a month its the same."
In Japan, the *only* legitimate user of the Dog & Gramophone "His Master's Voice" trademark is *Toshiba,* the Japanese subsidiary(like Capitol in America, the "infant toddler") of EMI(The Gramophone Co.) Ltd., Hayes Middlesex England.
Very interesting and entertaining. I am in Australia and remember seeing D-VHS on runout sale at a specialist hifi shop circa 2002-3. Didn't realise they were so mechanically bad inside, but it makes sense - any VCR after Panasonic's amazing MKII around 1997 was just wafer-thin tinfoil garbage.
Perhaps you may have hinted at it, the Betamax Blank Tape was way more expensive than VHS blanks. This supposedly is because of royalties other manufacturers had to pay to Sony to make the blanks - including those bought by the Pre-recorded video industry. That alone contributed greatly to the decline of Betamax.
Matsushita: correct pronunciation broken into the separate syllables - *Mat - Su - Shi - Ta!* Four syllables, the 'i' in the third syllable is *NOT* silent!
The Japanese pronunciation is correct. After all, Matsushita's a Japanese business, but nobody in English-speaking countries pronounces Panasonic as Pana-soni-ku.
My dad had several VHS players through the years. He actually had to change a fuse once on one in the 80s. My last VHS player purchase was a cheap $25 Wal-Mart one called "DA 4 HEAD." Yep. That was really the name of it.
Great idea, string the together, despite seeing all of them individually, watching them again in a stream. I remember being impatient waiting for the next episode to drop inbetween the sergies, op shop buys and obscure electronic gadget from 1991 videos!
Really like your video compilation here. I would like to hear the music at the end of this video in CD format extended, maybe extend to an hour. I'm a sucker for the Mellotron, the violin sounds great too with it!
In regards to the US introduction date, the July 5, 1977 episode of _Wheel of Fortune_ exists due to being recorded by one of the contestants on the program. He says that it is on VHS tape and has poor sound quality and color. I can definitely confirm the quality aspects (it's floating around here somewhere on CZcams), but I guess we'll have to take his word for the format.
Man, I've got a lot of VHS tapes that I been dragging around for years. Some recorded material off the TV since the late 80s and most of the 90s and early 2000s. I would love to find me a good VCR to be able to revisit those recordings. The last vcr I bought brand new out of the box, was a vcr I bought from Walmart in 2006 or 2007. It only lasted maybe about a year or so.
I was born in 1991, i didn't know of the existance of SVHS until halfway through the DVD era. I got to see SVHS somewhere around 2006 or 7, and was blown away by the fact that a decades old medium gave equal or better picture than the then-revered DVD format.
@@roxics that is true but S-VHS was still very impressive to get video extremely close to laserdisc quality which was the high end videophile format for decades. while S-VHS and laserdisc was comparable to DVD, not better but close enough to be impressed since S-VHS came out in 1986, an decade before the first DVDs were made and available.
@@memphischeshier2767icture is made up of luma and chroma - the quality of a video image is based on both. In terms of luma (the black and white resolution of the image), 400 lines (which i agree is impressive for it's time) is close to Laserdisc but chroma (colour resolution) of SVHS is about the same as standard VHS - i.e. poor and nowhere near Laserdisc. DVD had quality issues on early discs but once early teething problems were resolved on some DVD releases, DVD is superior to Laserdisc and infinitely superior to SVHS because of SVHS's poor chroma resolution.
I remember going with my Dad on October 2rd 1977 to get a Betamax. The electronic store salesman sold my Dad on the new, just released RCA Select-A-Vision VHS machine because it recorded up to 4 hours on LP vs only one hour on the Betamax. I know it was October 2nd because I taped the Elvis In Concert TV special on October 3rd 1977. I still have that tape and it still plays good. I remember the machine plus several blank tapes cost my Dad $1200. He got 2 T-30 tapes, 2 T-60 tapes and 2 T-120 tapes. The first place in our area I knew of to rent VHS and Beta movies was a mall TV store called Video Concepts (Owned by parent company Radio Shack) which I think started renting movies in 78 or 79. We got a pirate HBO microwave antenna in 1976 and I used our VCR to record a library of movies from HBO.
I remember at Christmas I used to get lots VHS tapes in to tape some of the special programmes and films. In those days we had four channels (!). I remember in the late 80s early 90s there used to be special films series shown at Christmas such as the Japanese monster movies, W.C Fields, Marx Brothers, Jackie Chan etc etc.
Sony’s most successful formats were developed jointly by with other companies. They developed CD together with Philips and DVD was compromise between their MultiMedia videodisc and Toshiba’s SD videodisc. Blu-ray has had a decent run that was being developed long before Toshiba’s HD-DVD and if Toshiba hadn’t had competition Toshiba would have settled on using high compression on dual layer DVD9.
Betacam took most of the professional realm globally for ENG and some productions, as well as playout. They fared well, just not with their own format in the domestic realm.
The sound from that one stereo vhs was one I had. The miscalibrated hi fi head. That happened to me. Took it in for repair and Sears never fixed it while under warrantee. The way the sound played was the same.
Ok, so Mirrors Edge is a game that can't be minimized and therefore changing yt videos to run in the background is not possible. However thankfully , youtube just gave me the VHS history mini series in autoplay, so I had a reliable audio narrative to focus my brain on while playing. Great Series. Very Informative.
Wish to see a future episode on the history of Coded Anti-Piracy used by the film industry to identify the source of pirated movies recorded off a camcorder in theaters. (19:04)
I think when done right VHS hifi sounds amazing. I'm not saying it's audiophile quality but it does sound damn good. It sounds as good as a FM stereo broadcast with no static or interference. And there's almost no tape hiss because the heads move so fast. But yeah it's touchy and very tempermental when it comes to playing hifi tapes on other VCRs.
Thank you for creating this history. I stumbled on this by accident when doing my own research. As a writer of short stories it is often difficult when writing historical fiction to separate fact from fiction (yes, I know historical fiction is an oxymoron). The detail work you've created allows for more accurate development. As someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s I remember many of these devices from renting Star Trek videos and wearing them out. One thing that might be germane to your archive is that many VCRs were destroyed by early microwave humidifiers which would vaporize water impurities, which seem to get attracted to the heads of these machines causing excess wear and early degradation (as I learned on a few occasions). Something I found interesting.
i just remember when my family lived in north carolina for a year that one mom and pop video rental store right by the house we just had built and my dad was always out of town on buisiness so my mom would take her 4 kids me included to the rental stire and the adult section was just a few book cases full of vhs tapes in the back of the store with only a sign on one side of the aisle that said adults only. my momin hushed tone: "JOE! GET OUTTA THERE AND LOOK AT MOVIES!" of course the tiities had electrical tape covering them over the case😭😭😭😭😭but still tho. my mom tellin me to get outta there😂😂😂😂
The VHS era was really amazing and even seeing movies I didn't know were released on VHS like Racing Stripes, Shark Tale, Robots, Madagascar, even The Incredibles, but it kinda does makes sense a little 2005 was the last definitely the last successful VHS era year but early 2006 was when it ended permanently its a funny feeling looking at 2005 movies seeing most 2005 movies were barely apart of the VHS era while most 2006 to present movies missed the VHS era
I've seen a rash of videos touting the virtues of VHS as a higher end than anyone ever gave it credit for analogue audio recording format thanks to VHS Hi-Fi. We may see a resurgence of VHS and VHS-C as hipster bands decide to release albums on those formats because surprisingly good analogue audio, like reel-to-reel but WAY cheaper. Whether or not that brings in a golden age of amateur indie music video producers, I don't know.
Great video! It's nice to see everything wrapped up in a single, accessible documentary like this! Keep up the good work! I'd like to point out a couple of more points, though: - 1:03:54 - you're mentioning ADAT, but it's actually far from the first time VHS was used for digital audio production. Back in the late 1970s, "PCM adaptors" existed that converted digital audio to and from a pseudo-video signal that could then be recorded and played back by any VCR (VHS, Beta, U-matic or whatever else). This pseudo-video format got standardized as EIAJ STC-007 (for NTSC equipment) / STC-008 (for PAL/SECAM equipment) and eventually all-in-one digital audio tape decks utilizing a VHS transport appeared, like the Technics SV-P100 featured by Techmoan some time ago. - I think your take on the S-Video cabling and its role within S-VHS was a little bit confusing, so let me elaborate a bit: A broadcast NTSC signal - or any NTSC source put through an RF modulator - can carry ~330 lines of horizontal resolution. Composite cable technically has no limit, although the digital 720x480 variant of SD is equivalent to ~528 lines in analog units and it's rare to find anything that outputs more - although some computer equipment, e.g. the IBM CGA, output ~560. All those figures are for black&white signals, though - when you add color, you'd end up interfering with the color signal when trying to display "test cards" for anything between ~163 and ~319 lines of resolution (for NTSC - also note that the NTSC chroma carrier itself is equivalent to ~280 lines "test card"; for PAL/SECAM the interference range is roughly 245-448 lines, with broadcast B&W bandwidth topping at ~390, ~430 or ~470 lines, depending on the country). Some TVs and monitors, particularly the older ones, will just ignore most of the luma information that interferes with chroma, resulting in effectively reducing the resolution to maybe 200-ish lines for NTSC and 300-ish for PAL (the band above the chroma signal rarely makes a noticeable difference). Higher-end and newer sets will employ elaborate comb filtering techniques to recover almost all of the luma resolution. It's all a delicate compromise between more luma artifacts (dot crawl) and more chroma artifacts (patterned ties turning into rainbows) though, so the actual resolution is usually still limited. S-Video, of course, uses separate signal paths for luma and chroma, so luma resolution does not interfere with anything, without the need for any comb filtering. On the other hand, almost all major analog videotape formats (excluding some professional formats that use component video) use a "color-under" format, in which the chroma signal is decoupled from the original signal and recorded separately from luma - just like in S-Video. This is a technical requirement, as the tolerances for the color carrier stability within a composite signal are far too strict for a mechanical device like a VCR to maintain. So, even standard VHS records "S-Video", in a way! However, given that it's already limited to ~240 lines, using S-Video I/O has relatively little difference on the resulting quality. With S-VHS' 420-line resolution, there is a much greater improvement in quality when using S-Video I/O - but it does not mean that you _need_ it to benefit from S-VHS capabilities. A nicely comb-filtered broadcast signal will still look much better recorded on S-VHS than on standard VHS, as it is able to record the 320-330 line band above the chroma information, as well as whatever the comb filter recovers from the 160-320 line interfering band. In practice it will retain all the fine detail of the broadcast, just the colors will become more smeary and blobby. Without the need for an S-Video signal path, though!
Cool history! ....One question....did Ben and the "D" company have a specific run-in, or is it simple anti-evil empire (reason for the beep of the name)?
Probably just to do with the fact that they're know for being a very litigious company that will sue you for so much as painting their characters on the wall at an orphanage.
Thank you for the history lesson! I would not agree though with your take on new camcorder formats. They are not secondary, they move the needle forward. DV was a huge leap even compared to Super VHS. Professional formats introduced better chroma sampling, 10-bit or higher bit depth, various gamma profiles, film-like frame rate along with progressive scanning, effective compression schemes, HD and 4K and even higher resolutions, and finally abandonment of magnetic tape in favor of HDDs and solid-state media.
I'm hoping to find some old info from distribution companies of how many VHS copies were manufactured for each film. I understand that most of these records are lost or never kept but I'm hoping to recover as much information as I can. I'm thinking the libraries use to catalog every thinkable periodical, publication, newsletter, industry reports etc. on microfiche Or maybe you have or know where it has already been compiled.
Home video which spawned the movie rental industry, unfortunately brought drive-in theaters to their knees. It was often predicted in the late 1980s, that drive-ins would no longer exist by the 1990s. Of course that never happened and other factors negatively impacted drive-ins such as rising land values. But, the numbers are astounding. In 1980, over 3500 drive-ins existed in the United States. By 1990, there were around 900. Many drive-in operators saw their attendance drop to trickle in the mid and late 1980s. They had no idea that drive-ins would rebound in the early 1990s so they closed up. In 1987 alone, 1000 drive-ins closed...permanently in most cases.
46:25 - Note that the word "primer", when it refers to a review of materials for the purpose of learning, is pronounced with the vowel in "prim", not with the vowel in "prime". Only when the word "primer" refers to an initial coat of paint is it pronounced with the vowel in "prime".
The nominal off-air resolution of analogue(note the spelling there, anaLOGUE) TV is 525 lines NTSC at 24 fps while PAL was 625 lines 25fps. The NTSC system operated on a 60Hz power supply line frequency while PAL was geared to a 50Hz line frequency. (1:01:00)
Yes and no. There are indeed that many lines in a frame, but not all of those are visible. For PAL, only 576 lines are part of the actual visible picture. For NTSC this is 480 lines (and 29.97fps by the way) There is also a horizontal part of the picture that's designed to be invisible. The invisible parts are 'overscan'. This was done because of limitations in how fast the electron beam could started and stopped, causing distortions at the start and stop. Eventually the invisible lines were used for digital signals like Teletext (very popular in Europe), closed captioning and ShowView (a system in which you can select a movie title on your VCR, which will automatically start the recording when it receives the TV guide data transmitted in the invisible lines)
27:57 You think you have rare stuff, Benny-Boy? Try finding ANY footage of George Snider racing (that's from the 1977 Indianapolis 500. AJ Foyt won, btw. Gordon Johncock broke down).
I have come to the conclusion ever person needs a mile long cave full of tables with electric outlets to get the best of all the Tech from the last 80 years , I don't even think having a place like MJ's Neverland would be big enough to enjoy it all , I use 4 VCR's some adaptors , Camcorders , Tripods , cables and switching boxes and this takes up a large bedroom of space , I also have 1000 Computers and 78 Guitars , 7 Amps , Keyboard , Mixers , 24 Stereo Receivers , My place looks like Computer Reset in their Heyday . :\ QC
I actually considered a dvhs vcr back in the day. I was an old school tape trader. It was really to only way to record in HD. If one could simply record OTA HD programming I would have, but as discussed it was complicated. At the time I found a way to capture OTA HD broadcasts in 16:9 but in standard def which I considered good enough. To this day there really isn't a good non computer way to record in HD. I don't consider DVRs because what do you want me to do swap out hard drives for long term storage?
If you said Ed beta to a person in 2022 it would take on an entirely different meaning, I'm actually willing to bet every dollar I will ever make that nobody would assume you were talking about a video standard.
Video Cassette Recorders and VHS is gen X (MTV generation) and gen Y (millennials) technology. Gen Z probably haven't heard of it because they were 3 years old when the last VCR/VHS tape was produced.
The Magnetic Video Corporation-text looks very much like it's generated on the same equipment used for a CBS tape with music videos from 1982 that I own. Perhaps there weren't that many text generators around for decent money.
I am trying to get into preserving VHS tapes that might possibly have some lost media inside of them. So, what would be a decent VCR that I could get used for relatively cheap that I would use for that task? And yes, I do own a USB S-Video capture card that I can plug in to my laptop and get VHS footage back from the VCR easily via OBS Studio. However, I would prefer if it had any of these two features: -SVHS recording and playback -stereo sound Does anybody have suggestions for what VCR I should get?
At 18:30 -- "By 1980 the selection expanded to include [beep] and Warner Brothers titles .." with the beep seemingly intended to mask the word "Time." Am I missing a joke, or was a Freudian slip being corrected? I remember Time Warner Cable, Inc.
@@OddityArchive I am now enlightened. Thank you. The beep is very effective. I listened repeatedly and could not make out the word "Disney" even when knowing to expect it. (The closed captioning also gave no clue.)
15:36 Magnetic Video became 20th Century Fox Video, then CBS-Fox Home Video. What it became after that, I neither know nor care as by the 1990s Rupert Murdoch had got his grubby paws on Fox and took the company down into the *gutter!*
38:20 I can't get over the fact how creepy her makeup looks like. I KNOW the cameras were woefully weak these days and actors/tv-pressenters of both genders had to have makeup, but DAMN this look terryfying.
i'll never understand any of this technology or why ppl needed all that extra expensive stuff. but i'm 36 so i kinda straddle the beta/vhs/dvd/streaming gap but to me a streaming movie is good as long as the quality doesn't go below an old degraded vhs quality. like older and obscure horror movies that some ppl upload to youtube. as long as the audio and video sync up and it's no more blurry than an old vhs then i can handle watching it. idk what all this hd 4k stuff means. i like it. but i don't understabd what hd 4k means. but my standards are that the quality should be viewable and the audio should sync up. other than that i can deal with the shitty visual scratchy lines and stuff. to me it's nostalgic. i wish i could find an old vhs upload of dawn of the dead extended version on yiutube. these hd 4k versions are good but something about the original 2 vhs tape extended version.
Yeah, I've noticed that as more people have gone over to watching on their phones, tablets and laptops (all with the built-in speaker), that it really picks out that bell more than intended. For what it's worth, I've started to back off on it over the last few months.
I'm telling you this because I like your channel: Your scripts have a tendency to use the word "read" (as in 33:46 "read: you could now get 290 lines as opposed to only 240." But since we are listening to your voice, not reading, it would make more sense if you just said "meaning."
I distinctly remember recording, FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech, live on my family's Quasar VR-1000 machine. So the VCR was obviously invented sometime before 1941. My dad kept this recorder on top of the TV right between his JVC GR-C1, and the "flux capacitor" that he loaded into the trunk of his DeLorean he used for business trips every time there was a thunderstorm in the area.
finally, some real educational content on this video
and in the film Back to the future, it was actually Doc showing Marty the JVC camcorder, because it was his as it had been released in the 1950s
I actually recorded Jesus' crucifixion on an early Ampex system. It took boxes and boxes of tapes because they only held about 20min of time and the program was rife with Roman commercials. Boyyyy what a different time it was lemme tell you whhattt!
lol. President Roosevelt did appear on television three time actually, though there were only 10,000 television sets in use by the time world war 2 started, so viewership was limited.
@@Kylefassbinderful You recorded historic Roman events too? Man, I remember recording the coronation of Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV on an Ampex setup! I had to deal with many boxes of tapes too, and the broadcast kept pausing for commercials for Crazy Augustus' Cattle Emporium and Ovaltinius. I didn't mind the latter, since I loved seeing the commercials and can still remember the catchy hymn they sang in them. I remember drinking a glass of chocolate Ovaltinius mixed with goat milk while me and my dad would watch gladiator matches on TV on Saturday nights
Fun Fact (although obvious) this video is long enough to go on an T-120 tape at SP.
Should have been done in 4x3 so I won't have to letter/gutterbox that copy!
Another fun fact : I recorded those episodes to a VHS tape a bunch of weeks ago 😉
@@lutello3012 It's all good, I recorded the series to both W-VHS and D-VHS. All necessary detail has been preserved.
I miss going to the local mom and pop video rental store in the '80s and getting a couple of VHS tapes. I was a kid at the time, but I vividly remember it. Oddly, the thing I remember most is the smell of the store. If you were around, you probably know what I mean. Tapes and VCRs had a very particular smell. I'd probably get a can of air freshener with that smell if somebody made it. Good times.
I miss the days of walking into an electronics store in the 90s and seeing the wild and wonderful different technology all in your face advertising everything being new and exciting. now its all the same design on everything and its just like "oh here's the next one that comes out in a month its the same."
are you hyped for the newest iphone and the paired new ios??????
In Japan, the *only* legitimate user of the Dog & Gramophone "His Master's Voice" trademark is *Toshiba,* the Japanese subsidiary(like Capitol in America, the "infant toddler") of EMI(The Gramophone Co.) Ltd., Hayes Middlesex England.
I plan on recording this series (all 103min) to VHS. Just for my own collection.
UPDATE, I did.
Very interesting and entertaining. I am in Australia and remember seeing D-VHS on runout sale at a specialist hifi shop circa 2002-3. Didn't realise they were so mechanically bad inside, but it makes sense - any VCR after Panasonic's amazing MKII around 1997 was just wafer-thin tinfoil garbage.
Perhaps you may have hinted at it, the Betamax Blank Tape was way more expensive than VHS blanks. This supposedly is because of royalties other manufacturers had to pay to Sony to make the blanks - including those bought by the Pre-recorded video industry. That alone contributed greatly to the decline of Betamax.
Hey wait... Haven't I seen this?... Guess I'll let it play in the background and see if you added any hidden new info!
Great job. I was fully absorbed! I can't imagine the hours you put into this. Thank you!
I like too much this history! I had VHS even when I got DVD player. Very impressive!
Welp, this is going to be a great hour a forty three minutes of my life
Anyone who writes "welp" is a weenie.
@@frankcabanski9409 damn I just realized that was aimed towards me
@@azomama2 Ha HA!
Good review of format. I never would have thought that VHS would come and go in my lifetime!
Popping some popcorn and kicking back for this epic. Thanks Ben!!
Matsushita: correct pronunciation broken into the separate syllables - *Mat - Su - Shi - Ta!* Four syllables, the 'i' in the third syllable is *NOT* silent!
The Japanese pronunciation is correct. After all, Matsushita's a Japanese business, but nobody in English-speaking countries pronounces Panasonic as Pana-soni-ku.
ma TSU shi TA
@@rosemarysandcastleThat's close to how I say it.
My dad had several VHS players through the years. He actually had to change a fuse once on one in the 80s. My last VHS player purchase was a cheap $25 Wal-Mart one called "DA 4 HEAD." Yep. That was really the name of it.
Great idea, string the together, despite seeing all of them individually, watching them again in a stream. I remember being impatient waiting for the next episode to drop inbetween the sergies, op shop buys and obscure electronic gadget from 1991 videos!
I remember in the late 90's going into Radio Shack and noticing they were still selling Beta L750 tapes and thought it was odd.
this channel is gold. thanks man.
Really like your video compilation here. I would like to hear the music at the end of this video in CD format extended, maybe extend to an hour. I'm a sucker for the Mellotron, the violin sounds great too with it!
In regards to the US introduction date, the July 5, 1977 episode of _Wheel of Fortune_ exists due to being recorded by one of the contestants on the program. He says that it is on VHS tape and has poor sound quality and color. I can definitely confirm the quality aspects (it's floating around here somewhere on CZcams), but I guess we'll have to take his word for the format.
I was waiting for these parts to be put together. Now I think I'll call in sick to work and binge watch some Oddity Archive!
17:40. There's still one thing I miss about the 70's....
-one- two things I miss about the 70s. weather looked a bit nippy that day
Man, I've got a lot of VHS tapes that I been dragging around for years. Some recorded material off the TV since the late 80s and most of the 90s and early 2000s. I would love to find me a good VCR to be able to revisit those recordings. The last vcr I bought brand new out of the box, was a vcr I bought from Walmart in 2006 or 2007. It only lasted maybe about a year or so.
Who knows you might have some lost media on those tapes
I bet the very first one he should in the video the Sony prototype still works.
I was born in 1991, i didn't know of the existance of SVHS until halfway through the DVD era.
I got to see SVHS somewhere around 2006 or 7, and was blown away by the fact that a decades old medium gave equal or better picture than the then-revered DVD format.
It wasn't. I was an adult when DVD was introduced. S-VHS is worse quality than DVD.
@@roxics that is true but S-VHS was still very impressive to get video extremely close to laserdisc quality which was the high end videophile format for decades. while S-VHS and laserdisc was comparable to DVD, not better but close enough to be impressed since S-VHS came out in 1986, an decade before the first DVDs were made and available.
@@memphischeshier2767icture is made up of luma and chroma - the quality of a video image is based on both. In terms of luma (the black and white resolution of the image), 400 lines (which i agree is impressive for it's time) is close to Laserdisc but chroma (colour resolution) of SVHS is about the same as standard VHS - i.e. poor and nowhere near Laserdisc. DVD had quality issues on early discs but once early teething problems were resolved on some DVD releases, DVD is superior to Laserdisc and infinitely superior to SVHS because of SVHS's poor chroma resolution.
I remember going with my Dad on October 2rd 1977 to get a Betamax. The electronic store salesman sold my Dad on the new, just released RCA Select-A-Vision VHS machine because it recorded up to 4 hours on LP vs only one hour on the Betamax. I know it was October 2nd because I taped the Elvis In Concert TV special on October 3rd 1977. I still have that tape and it still plays good. I remember the machine plus several blank tapes cost my Dad $1200. He got 2 T-30 tapes, 2 T-60 tapes and 2 T-120 tapes. The first place in our area I knew of to rent VHS and Beta movies was a mall TV store called Video Concepts (Owned by parent company Radio Shack) which I think started renting movies in 78 or 79. We got a pirate HBO microwave antenna in 1976 and I used our VCR to record a library of movies from HBO.
Truly an amazing series!
I remember at Christmas I used to get lots VHS tapes in to tape some of the special programmes and films. In those days we had four channels (!). I remember in the late 80s early 90s there used to be special films series shown at Christmas such as the Japanese monster movies, W.C Fields, Marx Brothers, Jackie Chan etc etc.
The main thing I took away from this: Sony never gives up even when their efforts are rather futile.
Sony’s most successful formats were developed jointly by with other companies. They developed CD together with Philips and DVD was compromise between their MultiMedia videodisc and Toshiba’s SD videodisc. Blu-ray has had a decent run that was being developed long before Toshiba’s HD-DVD and if Toshiba hadn’t had competition Toshiba would have settled on using high compression on dual layer DVD9.
Betacam took most of the professional realm globally for ENG and some productions, as well as playout.
They fared well, just not with their own format in the domestic realm.
Glad you put this together. Enjoying it very much . Keep up the good work .
This is my 6th time watching this. Idk why but I really enjoy watching it over and over.
The sound from that one stereo vhs was one I had. The miscalibrated hi fi head. That happened to me. Took it in for repair and Sears never fixed it while under warrantee. The way the sound played was the same.
Ok, so Mirrors Edge is a game that can't be minimized and therefore changing yt videos to run in the background is not possible. However thankfully , youtube just gave me the VHS history mini series in autoplay, so I had a reliable audio narrative to focus my brain on while playing. Great Series. Very Informative.
Super VHS tape was good for recording NFL football games. The players were so small and blurry on regular VHS tape.
Video Station in Alameda, Calif. was my family's goto rental spot back in the day. They had a Papa Murphy's inside as well.
I coughed up $2000 for a portable VHS with camera in 1982. My cellphone has 5 cameras.
Hey, in 1982 two grand might as well of been twenty grand. Two grand wasn't easy to come by like it is now.
Wish to see a future episode on the history of Coded Anti-Piracy used by the film industry to identify the source of pirated movies recorded off a camcorder in theaters. (19:04)
Great suggestion! I second that, just 'cause I got curious 🤭🤭🤭
Now That Is What I Am Talking About!!! Holy Cow!!! Thank You Ben!!!
Oddity Archive theme song is one of my favorite theme songs of all time.
I think when done right VHS hifi sounds amazing. I'm not saying it's audiophile quality but it does sound damn good. It sounds as good as a FM stereo broadcast with no static or interference. And there's almost no tape hiss because the heads move so fast. But yeah it's touchy and very tempermental when it comes to playing hifi tapes on other VCRs.
Thank you for creating this history. I stumbled on this by accident when doing my own research. As a writer of short stories it is often difficult when writing historical fiction to separate fact from fiction (yes, I know historical fiction is an oxymoron). The detail work you've created allows for more accurate development. As someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s I remember many of these devices from renting Star Trek videos and wearing them out. One thing that might be germane to your archive is that many VCRs were destroyed by early microwave humidifiers which would vaporize water impurities, which seem to get attracted to the heads of these machines causing excess wear and early degradation (as I learned on a few occasions). Something I found interesting.
i just remember when my family lived in north carolina for a year that one mom and pop video rental store right by the house we just had built and my dad was always out of town on buisiness so my mom would take her 4 kids me included to the rental stire and the adult section was just a few book cases full of vhs tapes in the back of the store with only a sign on one side of the aisle that said adults only.
my momin hushed tone: "JOE! GET OUTTA THERE AND LOOK AT MOVIES!"
of course the tiities had electrical tape covering them over the case😭😭😭😭😭but still tho. my mom tellin me to get outta there😂😂😂😂
Ooooo that Saab 900 Conv. we caught but a glimpse of made me feel positively giddy.
There is a bootleg version of "True Lies" , officialy sold on europe amazon.
Allegedly a D-Theater Video rip.
Excellent quality.
Killer video as always, love the channel!
The VHS era was really amazing and even seeing movies I didn't know were released on VHS like Racing Stripes, Shark Tale, Robots, Madagascar, even The Incredibles, but it kinda does makes sense a little 2005 was the last definitely the last successful VHS era year but early 2006 was when it ended permanently its a funny feeling looking at 2005 movies seeing most 2005 movies were barely apart of the VHS era while most 2006 to present movies missed the VHS era
I've seen a rash of videos touting the virtues of VHS as a higher end than anyone ever gave it credit for analogue audio recording format thanks to VHS Hi-Fi.
We may see a resurgence of VHS and VHS-C as hipster bands decide to release albums on those formats because surprisingly good analogue audio, like reel-to-reel but WAY cheaper.
Whether or not that brings in a golden age of amateur indie music video producers, I don't know.
You'd have a better signal with Beta Hi-Fi or U-Matic.
Outstanding job!
I remember VCRs costing $700-$800.00 as a kid.
We could never afford one. I remember renting them in a huge plastic briefcase.
Great video! It's nice to see everything wrapped up in a single, accessible documentary like this! Keep up the good work!
I'd like to point out a couple of more points, though:
- 1:03:54 - you're mentioning ADAT, but it's actually far from the first time VHS was used for digital audio production. Back in the late 1970s, "PCM adaptors" existed that converted digital audio to and from a pseudo-video signal that could then be recorded and played back by any VCR (VHS, Beta, U-matic or whatever else). This pseudo-video format got standardized as EIAJ STC-007 (for NTSC equipment) / STC-008 (for PAL/SECAM equipment) and eventually all-in-one digital audio tape decks utilizing a VHS transport appeared, like the Technics SV-P100 featured by Techmoan some time ago.
- I think your take on the S-Video cabling and its role within S-VHS was a little bit confusing, so let me elaborate a bit:
A broadcast NTSC signal - or any NTSC source put through an RF modulator - can carry ~330 lines of horizontal resolution. Composite cable technically has no limit, although the digital 720x480 variant of SD is equivalent to ~528 lines in analog units and it's rare to find anything that outputs more - although some computer equipment, e.g. the IBM CGA, output ~560. All those figures are for black&white signals, though - when you add color, you'd end up interfering with the color signal when trying to display "test cards" for anything between ~163 and ~319 lines of resolution (for NTSC - also note that the NTSC chroma carrier itself is equivalent to ~280 lines "test card"; for PAL/SECAM the interference range is roughly 245-448 lines, with broadcast B&W bandwidth topping at ~390, ~430 or ~470 lines, depending on the country).
Some TVs and monitors, particularly the older ones, will just ignore most of the luma information that interferes with chroma, resulting in effectively reducing the resolution to maybe 200-ish lines for NTSC and 300-ish for PAL (the band above the chroma signal rarely makes a noticeable difference). Higher-end and newer sets will employ elaborate comb filtering techniques to recover almost all of the luma resolution. It's all a delicate compromise between more luma artifacts (dot crawl) and more chroma artifacts (patterned ties turning into rainbows) though, so the actual resolution is usually still limited.
S-Video, of course, uses separate signal paths for luma and chroma, so luma resolution does not interfere with anything, without the need for any comb filtering.
On the other hand, almost all major analog videotape formats (excluding some professional formats that use component video) use a "color-under" format, in which the chroma signal is decoupled from the original signal and recorded separately from luma - just like in S-Video. This is a technical requirement, as the tolerances for the color carrier stability within a composite signal are far too strict for a mechanical device like a VCR to maintain. So, even standard VHS records "S-Video", in a way! However, given that it's already limited to ~240 lines, using S-Video I/O has relatively little difference on the resulting quality. With S-VHS' 420-line resolution, there is a much greater improvement in quality when using S-Video I/O - but it does not mean that you _need_ it to benefit from S-VHS capabilities. A nicely comb-filtered broadcast signal will still look much better recorded on S-VHS than on standard VHS, as it is able to record the 320-330 line band above the chroma information, as well as whatever the comb filter recovers from the 160-320 line interfering band. In practice it will retain all the fine detail of the broadcast, just the colors will become more smeary and blobby. Without the need for an S-Video signal path, though!
Incredible series, thanks so much for the informative content.
Highly excellent video, good work
Fun, informative,
repeatedly standing behind a box for some reason
Who could ask for more?
Cool history! ....One question....did Ben and the "D" company have a specific run-in, or is it simple anti-evil empire (reason for the beep of the name)?
Probably just to do with the fact that they're know for being a very litigious company that will sue you for so much as painting their characters on the wall at an orphanage.
I'm looking to make a short documentary about the history of VHS for a doc filmmaking class. Thanks for this resource, much appreciated.
Thank you for the history lesson! I would not agree though with your take on new camcorder formats. They are not secondary, they move the needle forward. DV was a huge leap even compared to Super VHS. Professional formats introduced better chroma sampling, 10-bit or higher bit depth, various gamma profiles, film-like frame rate along with progressive scanning, effective compression schemes, HD and 4K and even higher resolutions, and finally abandonment of magnetic tape in favor of HDDs and solid-state media.
I'm hoping to find some old info from distribution companies of how many VHS copies were manufactured for each film.
I understand that most of these records are lost or never kept but I'm hoping to recover as much information as I can.
I'm thinking the libraries use to catalog every thinkable periodical, publication, newsletter, industry reports etc. on microfiche Or maybe you have or know where it has already been compiled.
Great series.i might download this on recorded it on DVD and watch it and it would be great.
Your first movie. Will it be coming on discovision and beta.
Home video which spawned the movie rental industry, unfortunately brought drive-in theaters to their knees. It was often predicted in the late 1980s, that drive-ins would no longer exist by the 1990s. Of course that never happened and other factors negatively impacted drive-ins such as rising land values. But, the numbers are astounding. In 1980, over 3500 drive-ins existed in the United States. By 1990, there were around 900. Many drive-in operators saw their attendance drop to trickle in the mid and late 1980s. They had no idea that drive-ins would rebound in the early 1990s so they closed up. In 1987 alone, 1000 drive-ins closed...permanently in most cases.
46:25 - Note that the word "primer", when it refers to a review of materials for the purpose of learning, is pronounced with the vowel in "prim", not with the vowel in "prime".
Only when the word "primer" refers to an initial coat of paint is it pronounced with the vowel in "prime".
Well, it is intended metaphorically--as in a coat of primer for someone's eventual thorough history of VHS (the "paint").
@@OddityArchive - Well played.
loved this post ! thanks !
The nominal off-air resolution of analogue(note the spelling there, anaLOGUE) TV is 525 lines NTSC at 24 fps while PAL was 625 lines 25fps. The NTSC system operated on a 60Hz power supply line frequency while PAL was geared to a 50Hz line frequency. (1:01:00)
Yes and no. There are indeed that many lines in a frame, but not all of those are visible. For PAL, only 576 lines are part of the actual visible picture. For NTSC this is 480 lines (and 29.97fps by the way)
There is also a horizontal part of the picture that's designed to be invisible.
The invisible parts are 'overscan'. This was done because of limitations in how fast the electron beam could started and stopped, causing distortions at the start and stop.
Eventually the invisible lines were used for digital signals like Teletext (very popular in Europe), closed captioning and ShowView (a system in which you can select a movie title on your VCR, which will automatically start the recording when it receives the TV guide data transmitted in the invisible lines)
Great stuff!
27:57 You think you have rare stuff, Benny-Boy? Try finding ANY footage of George Snider racing (that's from the 1977 Indianapolis 500. AJ Foyt won, btw. Gordon Johncock broke down).
Someone else has a (better and more complete) copy. The whole race was on YT as of my making that part.
41:14 thank you!!!
No VHS collection would be complete without a VHS tape rewinder.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS_tape_rewinder
...and it better be two-way! Having said that, those suckers can break off the leaders on older tapes.
True there was kinescope tapes sricttly for studios,most of these early videotapes have disintegrated
Oh yay, thx!
Fantastic Video !!!
I have come to the conclusion ever person needs a mile long cave full of tables with electric outlets to get the best of all the Tech from the last 80 years , I don't even think having a place like MJ's Neverland would be big enough to enjoy it all , I use 4 VCR's some adaptors , Camcorders , Tripods , cables and switching boxes and this takes up a large bedroom of space , I also have 1000 Computers and 78 Guitars , 7 Amps , Keyboard , Mixers , 24 Stereo Receivers , My place looks like Computer Reset in their Heyday . :\ QC
Doesn't want to humor the theory home video was made for porn.
Years later finds porn on an old film reel.
Benny Boy's a legend.
Pretty sure that incident predates this subseries.
more than a 'theory.' Porn was the main driver of all home video formats in the early days.
34:52 damn that's funky
I actually considered a dvhs vcr back in the day. I was an old school tape trader. It was really to only way to record in HD. If one could simply record OTA HD programming I would have, but as discussed it was complicated. At the time I found a way to capture OTA HD broadcasts in 16:9 but in standard def which I considered good enough. To this day there really isn't a good non computer way to record in HD. I don't consider DVRs because what do you want me to do swap out hard drives for long term storage?
The only place I ever saw a dvhs deck was at Fry’s in Garland, Texas.
Count the number of random shots of small town America.
Telesound 13 sounds like a song from a pinball table produced by Gottlieb or Williams.
If you said Ed beta to a person in 2022 it would take on an entirely different meaning, I'm actually willing to bet every dollar I will ever make that nobody would assume you were talking about a video standard.
Video Cassette Recorders and VHS is gen X (MTV generation) and gen Y (millennials) technology. Gen Z probably haven't heard of it because they were 3 years old when the last VCR/VHS tape was produced.
1:07:23 S-VHS ET? *Phone home!* LOL
The Magnetic Video Corporation-text looks very much like it's generated on the same equipment used for a CBS tape with music videos from 1982 that I own. Perhaps there weren't that many text generators around for decent money.
I want a bowl of Kellogs just Right
...with a side of Tori Amos.
I am trying to get into preserving VHS tapes that might possibly have some lost media inside of them. So, what would be a decent VCR that I could get used for relatively cheap that I would use for that task? And yes, I do own a USB S-Video capture card that I can plug in to my laptop and get VHS footage back from the VCR easily via OBS Studio.
However, I would prefer if it had any of these two features:
-SVHS recording and playback
-stereo sound
Does anybody have suggestions for what VCR I should get?
Look at all that woodgrainLGR is gonna freak !
At 18:30 -- "By 1980 the selection expanded to include [beep] and Warner Brothers titles .." with the beep seemingly intended to mask the word "Time." Am I missing a joke, or was a Freudian slip being corrected? I remember Time Warner Cable, Inc.
“Disney” is the offending word. It’s an old running joke from this show’s early days that no one seems to want me to let go of.
@@OddityArchive I am now enlightened. Thank you. The beep is very effective. I listened repeatedly and could not make out the word "Disney" even when knowing to expect it. (The closed captioning also gave no clue.)
Man.... I should download this, put it on a beta-max tape and watch it..... because.... just because
r/madlads
@Soren Sorensen You rebel you.
I can smell this video.
15:36 Magnetic Video became 20th Century Fox Video, then CBS-Fox Home Video. What it became after that, I neither know nor care as by the 1990s Rupert Murdoch had got his grubby paws on Fox and took the company down into the *gutter!*
38:20 I can't get over the fact how creepy her makeup looks like. I KNOW the cameras were woefully weak these
days and actors/tv-pressenters of both genders had to have makeup, but DAMN this look terryfying.
1:38:50 cOHven? Niiice!
I have that transfer of Ghostbusters. It is dodgy. Its just bad. I bet people who got the criterion laserdisc were happy.
i'll never understand any of this technology or why ppl needed all that extra expensive stuff. but i'm 36 so i kinda straddle the beta/vhs/dvd/streaming gap but to me a streaming movie is good as long as the quality doesn't go below an old degraded vhs quality. like older and obscure horror movies that some ppl upload to youtube. as long as the audio and video sync up and it's no more blurry than an old vhs then i can handle watching it. idk what all this hd 4k stuff means. i like it. but i don't understabd what hd 4k means. but my standards are that the quality should be viewable and the audio should sync up. other than that i can deal with the shitty visual scratchy lines and stuff. to me it's nostalgic. i wish i could find an old vhs upload of dawn of the dead extended version on yiutube. these hd 4k versions are good but something about the original 2 vhs tape extended version.
Is the delivery supposed to be dry on purpose?
benny boy yes
my body is ready
Anyone know the name of the song in 35:00
Great video but it needs more of the bell 😉
Yeah, I've noticed that as more people have gone over to watching on their phones, tablets and laptops (all with the built-in speaker), that it really picks out that bell more than intended. For what it's worth, I've started to back off on it over the last few months.
I'm telling you this because I like your channel: Your scripts have a tendency to use the word "read" (as in 33:46 "read: you could now get 290 lines as opposed to only 240." But since we are listening to your voice, not reading, it would make more sense if you just said "meaning."
10:20 techmoan muppets
Why does "deep throat" have the triforce symbol on the label? 12:43
I figured it out, it was the logo for Arrow films and video
cool video, but I feel like his voice as at 70% speed