The History of 240p
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- čas přidán 19. 02. 2018
- An examination of how we reached 240p as an output resolution for computers and game consoles. Focuses on the relevance of refresh rate (Hertz), interlacing, resolution, CRT technology, and how we ultimately reached 240p.
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#240p #CRT #Gaming - Věda a technologie
1:17
FUN FACT:
The flicker that you see in older projectors are the reason why movies are sometimes referred to as "Flicks".
So without those old projectors, Netflix would have had a different name.
@@leatherhidegaming Netjector
The term during the silent movie era was "Flicker Show"
@@customsongmaker A Flikker means gay in Dutch.
@@CLOYO Dutch mostly sounds like funny german
2:15 Have you ever tried to stick a fork in a power outlet? It hertz a lot, like 60 times per seconds !
lol. nice
Eh... More like 120Hz. The shock from the negative going part of the waveform hurts as bad as the positive.
Dunn.. literally.
@@pinkliongaming8769 you're cute
@@pinkliongaming8769 should i say it? r/wooosh
Short Answer: 240p is a resolution my Wifi defaults to when watching CZcams videos.
You have traveled from the distant past friend. You must be weary.
its 144p with me
Vincent C 0p with me
I learned that when your internet connection sucks ( free motel wifi), CZcams can go as low as 140p!
For me it's -1080p 😂😂😂😂😂
In all my years of researching technical film history, I have never heard of that reasoning for how we got to 24 fps. It does sound like things got muddled a bit and then a misunderstanding got it backwards.
Early silents varied wildly in framerates as hand cranking was up to the feel of the cinematographer and the projection was equally variable until things got standardized. Usually silents were at 16-18 fps. Some were really extravagant and went up to the 24 fps we know today.
As far as I have understood it, the 16-18fps range was considered good enough and we wouldn't have seen a change if it wasn't for sound. When sound entered the movie world there were some experimentations where you had a separate playback device that was manually synched in the theatre. But it was deemed much, much more feasable to add the sound to the film itself. So the quality of the sound now was determined by the speed of the film it was recorded to. 24 fps was simply the lowest possible speed that made an acceptable and intelligible sound.
the only real reason they never went faster than 24 fps was money. 24 was good enough and it became the accepted standard.
The multiflashing was purely to reduce apparent flickering for viewers. In a movie theatre with film projection. Half the time spent watching the image, the audience is actually staring at a black screen. Cheap projectors both back then and even later on did a single flash. The earliest projectors were multitool devices that could be used both as the camera and the projector and used the same mechanics and single flash shutter. The Butterfly shutter (as is shown in this video) provides a double flash of each image and there are/were even triple flash shutters available for extra flicker-reduced image. You could technically add more holes, but you need enough black at one point during the revolution of the shutter so that the film can move when we don't see it. And if you jerk the film too fast during too short a timeframe you are in danger of ripping the film apart. So 2-3 flashes per frame were, again, deemed good enough for general consumption.
What a great video. I was surprised about the source of scan lines. I just thought they were present on all CRT tv images, but I am dumb. Also it now makes sense why game consoles use the non interlaced video format, they saved money using low resolution and not needing to process and output interlaced video and they got 60 Hz as a bonus. Thanks for clearing up the mystery of 240p.
Thanks for commenting, Alexander! I am glad you enjoyed it!
The “P” stands for Progressive Scan.
@alan bane
That would be 'D'.
@@klobiforpresident2254 🇩enis
@@klobiforpresident2254 Denis the penis
I for interlaced?
@@domino6490 Yes, excactly
1:39 Originally, silent films were shot at approximately 16 frames per second (it varied somewhat), and each image was flashed three times for a 48hz refresh rate. Though theaters would often project it faster to squeeze in one extra showing for the day. When sound came to film, it was recorded as a linear track besides the picture. To get decent sound quality, the framerate was increased and standardized to 24fps.
"what is 240p?" For me it's probably the resolution I'm gonna have to watch this video at, because I'm redownloading Black Mesa for the public Xen beta while I watch this.
lol. Nice.
@@DisplacedGamers only downside is I had to entirely redo Surface Tension since my old save was incompatible with the new version.
Enjoy, fellow Half-Life fan!
For the best experience play black mesa at 240please
@@blahuhm6782 "No! I don't want to die!"
Wow! You are an extremely underrated channel! You deserve so many more subscribers. By the way, very helpful video, thank you.
Thank you, PeterG! I admit that it would be nice to have a few more subs!
I LIVE for this knowledge!!! Your videos are perfect! I cannot get enough!
Literally just came over here from Bob at RetroRGB's recommendation before watching the recent 480i deep dive he did. This short 240p video is simply phenomenal. It clarified and taught me so much in just 7mins!!! An absolute must for all us beginner geeks. Thank you 🙏
This is such a great channel! Thank you for all the very good explanations :)
One thing that bothers me is when I see an arcade emulator that applies the scanline effect going left to right across a portrait orientation picture. The scan lines are always across the long way regardless how the CRT is oriented.
In those cases I just disable D3D or use a non-native resolution to make the pixels look softer and easier on the eyes. I mean, 256x192 on a 19" display without any softening can be quite jarring.
When you said 'this footage was shot at 1000 frames per second' I still thought you were referring to the original footage and for a moment I was left wondering why such an advanced camera would produce such a terrible image haha.
Same
Man, thats a lot of good information here. Thanks for this. I Will recommend your Channel for my friends. Keep the good work
On the PC side of things, the monitors to go with CGA and EGA were designed to show 200-line modes with 200 lines. When IBM made VGA, they upped the horizontal refresh rate to allow higher resolutions and made the graphics system output each line of pixels twice in the 200-line modes, so 320*200 and 640*400 are indistinguishable to a VGA monitor.
Awesome, been trying to wrap my head around this what with the Super NT coming out recently. Thanks!
240p is what I’m watching on
I was watching in 1080p but decided to switch to 240p just for this video
Download this video and play it on Nintendo 3DS native 240p screen.
That is the best 240p console ever.
240p youtube looks shit. Worse than than video CD which run same resolution
You must have Verizon DSL. Paid for 6Mbps and was lucky to get 1Mbps. CZcams defaulted to 360p on a good day.
same
Can I just say I love your ability to keep these history of videos nice and brief very few have the ability to do that well. although it does make me wish every time I see the end of a video and you put all the other terms that you would do a series kind of explaining them all in one go and how they relate to each other.
I know technology connections does something similar to that but I think you do a really good job of explaining this stuff and they make for great videos to send to my friends who ask me about this stuff.
Couple of mistakes in this video. Each field in an interlaced video is a separate image captured at a separate points in time. Two fields never combine into a single image. The phosphor afterglow lasts far too short for that and has no impact in reducing flicker, that's up to your eyes and brains persistence of vision (flicker fusion). So TV run at we would call today 60fps all the time, just with each other line missing, alternating which one each field. The reason why video games go for 240p instead of 480i is not to gain 60fps, which they could already do, but to reduce line flicker. If a digital image is shown at 480i the pixels keep jumping up and down with each new field, that creates noticeable flicker artifacts. By going 240p they get a more stable image and since the devices aren't capable of rendering higher resolution, nothing is lost. The reason why line flicker isn't an issue for normal TV shows is that the cameras scan the lines in overlapping pattern, so line 1 contains information from line 2 as well, early computer weren't able of this kind of blending.
Very informative. Well done.
you forgot to add that the first video ever on youtube was 240p
144p*
@@everythingpony It wasn't even an option, originally
@ADEBISI ADEBISI ok boomer
@@Godsecution No he's right.
@@theultimatechad626 And the joke isn't fucking funny
What a great video, very informative and a fascinating subject. Thanks!
Very informative!! Great video!
You give the important information in an uncomplicated manner and very quickly. Very well done
Loved this! Subscribed!
Fascinating! After watching your video about dithering on the Genesis, your other about SNES aspect ratio, before this, I knew this was a channel to subscribe to! Now, I have a lot of missed content to go over as well!
I'm going to call it double strike from now on. Great video btw!
Me too.
@@snesfan8935 Emulators won't.
Double copyright strike. /s
This video was so great-it was well researched and really informative! In your update video, you said to mention if there may be videos that you’d like to see more of, and I’d love to see more videos along these lines.
Thank you, Ashley. Your comment means a lot. I am hoping to build quite a library of videos like this one.
Freaking fantastic & informative video man, thanks!
this background music was dang good! Thank you!
Great vid as always
Very informative and easy to grasp you rock
Great video - thank you!
Amazing video!!!!
Great video. Especially about the scanlines
Pretty good little channel you l’ve got here.
Deserves 10x more subscribers, easily.
This was very helpful in explaining the differences. Thanks!
I wish YT had suggested you sooner. What a lot of great content. Thank you.
Great video I learned something new today
Excellent video!
Amazing video, thanks!
Thank you so much for the informative video.
This channel is so underrated! You explain things very well.
@@HedgehogY2K Nobody cares about your shameless plug. GTFO.
Thanks, DG. It's really good to know the history behind all this! xDD
2:49 >high definition
*240*
480 scanlines were chosen for computers and video game consoles that came later as a de-facto resolution simply because it was the largest number divisible by 8 that could fit in a 483-line display. a width of 640 'dots' or pixels ensures that the aspect ratio is a constant 4:3 and can properly fit the display.
This channel really turned to be my fref this days. Love it !
1:06 I like how the animation you made to explain how films use the Phi phenomenom is also an example of the Phi phenomenon.
It's actually called "persistence of vision". Not sure where this "phi" thing came from.
Just discovered your channel and it is awesome!
Thanks, Daniel!
While watching this, video has changed its resolution from 1080p to 240p. Creepy.
Well explained!!
This video should have been twice as long. There is so much more to detail!
Only you can take a boring subject and make it actually interesting. Loving this channel a lot.
I watched this video in 144p
Some people didnt understand my comment lol
144p should never die, cause I use this to to listen videos and no use much data
Maverick
@@Fernandoext use newpipe. If you are an android user.
Absolute madman
144p Master Race
Amazing video.
Adding on, digital displays tend to handle such a signal in one of two ways:
1.) Completely ignore the timing change and interlace it anyway
2.) Apply a line-doubler to make a more literal 240p picture
Sadly option 1 is almost always taken.
@@HedgehogY2K You really do not want to deinterlace native 240p content like you would do with native 480i content (with, say, Yadif). All you need to do with 240p wrapped in a 480i capture is separate the fields. And you will end up with 240p at 60 fps. In AviSynth just use SeparateFields().
In VirtualDub select the filter "Bob doubler", then choose the correct field order for your capture (it's Top field first for most capture cards), and select "None - alternate fields". Then, optionally, you might want to point-resize the height back to 480.
@@HedgehogY2K Usually you want pixel doubled (not interpolated/deinterlaced) 480p from 240p to keep the pixelated look, but if you don't want it just don't do anything after separating the fields and you're left with 240p. And here's what I'm talking about:
i.ibb.co/8gxym9X/separate-fields.png
(Note the filter is called "Bob doubler", not the usual "deinterlace" one).
@@HedgehogY2K Nope, it doesn't cause flickering. All it does is it changes the way your fields (actually frames in 240p) are STORED. It doesn't do anything more than that, because that's all that's needed. It removes the incorrect pairing of two fields in one frame and puts each field one after another, making them half height (=240 lines) independent frames at 60 fps.
@@HedgehogY2K No, it's not. In 480i two fields belong together to make up a frame of higher vertical resolution than a single field by itself. Otherwise there would be no point at all in doing that whole interlace thing.
In 240p each "field" is one independent frame (so technically there are no fields in 240p but neither your capture card nor TV care).
This channel is incredible
incredible research!
Interesting video, thank you.
I thought this channel has at least 500K subs or higher. Good content, hope your channel grow more soon
Thanks!
Huh, pretty interesting. I actually learned a lot today. Thanks!
I love scanlines on old games. It just looks cool!
Me: *watches video in 480p*
My phone: *drops video quality to 240p*
Interesting... I never knew that those old consoles were completely skipping half the scanlines, or that it was even possible to tell the TV to re-use the same field. I had always just assumed the TV automatically switched fields and the consoles were simply drawing their next frame on different fields like normal video. I figured that phosphor fading was masking the combing. I also always thought the scanline effect was always visible regardless of the video source, but then again... I did play a LOT of games as a kid.
Can we have that in English now
Not just game consoles. It was a feature of computer monitors as well.
The phosphorous glow bled into the blank lines, so the image usually looked almost gapless on smaller screens and with increasing distance from the display. It became even more gapless in person when computer monitor resolutions went up significantly in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
This "scanline" look was most prevalent in arcade cabinets, since we were standing very close to a very large screen.
The scanline effect is in fact always there on a CRT (regardless of the video source), it's just that with 480i (and up) it is much less pronounced. Due to the alternating nature of an interlaced signal, to the eye the scanlines (or rather "blank lines") appear to be scrolling up or down the screen (unlike 240p where they are rock solid). But you need to be really close to the screen to see that and the CRT's focus adjustment has to be at the sweet spot.
But how on earth could you tell TV not to alternate fields?!
@@airattoz The frequency modulator in a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) has a key frequency for each field separately, so the frequency that is produced creates the same key twice instead of alternating between fields, such as that of a live TV broadcast.
240p is _pure disappointment_ when you see a hot thumbnail on PH and then it turns out that it is the maximum resolution😩
Yes, i crave full hd
And the videos actually really freaking good but it’s just ruined by the quality. ;(
Screw that when you click a video and it was filmed vertically 🤮
@@bt3743 Yeah, it annoys me when people film with their phones in portrait. How hard is it to rotate a phone 90 degrees?
@@jezz2k its annoying to film horizontal while fuckin
Cool video
I know where that music's from...
*I see you're a man of culture as well.*
I see you a man who likes The *Migos*
This is a very good explanation of the difference between frames and fields, something people get wrong constantly.
Deep inside we all know that now a days 240p is when you have to save data on your phone while vacation.
144p saves you twice the amount of data cost, I do because the screen is so tiny not much different.
God damn, just as it was getting interesting it ends, you got more? Great vid BTW
Also, in film, the motion that occurs in each still image is captured as a blur. Each frame contains captured motion. In a game it does not.
which os why most games give you a motion blur option, though it's usually quite excessive.
@@guguigugu That's an effect on a still image to make it look like film. It's not a frame capturing all motion, because the motion does not exist. That's why 30 fps games with motion blur look gross, but 24 fps video looks fine.
@@TheRealFrankWizza Not true. You have simply grown used to watching film as "24fps" this is why anytime you watch anything that isnt such, looks fake and un-cinematic.
@@lLxJLxJl No, it is literally because no motion is missing from frame to frame. 100 percent of all motion is captured by the camera sensor.
D Johnson yes, but you didn’t get what I just said, The reason film looks “fine” at 24fps isn’t because of the blur, Cartoons to our eyes look normal, yet those don’t have motion blur, ( to top it off they are drawn at lesser frame rates, usually at 12) it all has to do with how humans have grown to perceive things. The hobbit looks weird af at 48fps
The music was awesome!
I do hope your videos are open for community to add subtitles. I must translate it for that kind if info is a must for any retrogamer.
They are. And if I forgot to open one up, please ask.
I'm old. To me it seems sacrilege to refer to an authentic analog signal as 240p or 480i. The 240p or 480i refers to common digital representations of those signals and you didn't really start hearing those terms until this century.
Yes. People searching for 240p will find this video, but the signal itself is covered in a more appropriately titled "What is 525-line Analog Video" video also found here. Hopefully that term agrees with you a bit more!
That's not entirely true. When displaying an interlaced image, the resolution is approximately 480 horizontal lines. If you're using half the scanlines, that would make the horizontal resolution about 240 lines. The image is progressive and that's what the "p" in 240p stands for. Same goes for 480i. And you do realize that a modern television can't even display an interlaced signal, right? The image has to be deinterlaced first. Therefore the 480i terminology had to have originated from the idea of an interlaced display on a CRT. Also, late model CRTs often had a sticker indicating that the resolution was 480i.
@@purplesabbath9057 Digital video can be interlaced, regardless if modern TVs aren't able to display it, and interlaced digital video has been around way before digital TV anyway.
@@trinidad17 Yes, you are right. I should have just kept my big mouth shut about that.
I've always hated scanlines so when I made some emu consoles for my brothers years back I didn't put them on. Years later, my brother gets an SNES mini and tells me that he loves it because of "these things called scanlines". I laughed and told him that he could have used them years ago on what I gave him, but it didn't even occur to me that anybody else would like them either. Crazy how different people can be, even down to these little things.
This video made me subscribe.
This clears up the 60 progressive of the game on a 60 interlaced TV issue I never really understood.
This channel is pure old school engineering !
Watch in 240p for the ultimate experience
Watching this in 240p for the true experience
Great vídeo . Degrats
I'd love to see you cover the other things like dropfame timecode and blanking!
I watch these things to decipher my childhood and i am forever stuck in the past
Wow, I'm actually really surprised they leave the other half of the scanlines black. I would have definitely guessed that they just duplicated the lines instead.
It makes sense when you think about how the monitor works. You sweep the electron beam across the screen a certain number of times per second and down the screen another number of times per second. Easier to set things up so that the lines on one pass fall between the lines on the previous than to store and duplicate lines. This is especially important when the basis of your electronics is valves because transistors haven't been invented yet.
That's not to say analogue TV didn't use storage. It just wasn't used for providing a progressive scan. Where it was used was in the colour-decoding system. Of the three standards, only SECAM actually required storage. NTSC and PAL could be implemented without it, though you could improve PAL's picture quality with a storage-based decoder (and by the time games systems were a thing, you'd be hard-pressed to find a TV that didn't use one).
Of course, if it's a dedicated device, rather than a repurposed TV, you can design both the monitor and the computer's hardware to work entirely in progressive terms, and implement line duplication if desired. Which actually does happen with VGA. VGA sends each line twice in 200-line modes, resulting in a VGA monitor getting the same signal for 320*200 and 640*400. The previous CGA and EGA cards only sent each line once in 200-line modes, and CGA was designed to be able to output NTSC-compatible composite video, which got exploited by game developers and demoscene groups to produce extra colours that normally weren't available (look up 8088MPH by Hornet for a demonstration of what's possible).
watching this in 240p to set the mood
I recall no body talking about 240p before youtube. First one I recall was 720p when people had flats after crt's, it was called HD and Full HD for 1080p (or HD ready)
I used to work as tv repair, peeps were just talking about crt size (which was measured differently than flat ones) but also the refresh rate was more commonly asked wheter it was over 60Hz and tubes that were flat (Sony trinitron tubes). There is more to it but yeh, nobody talked about resolutions much before flats were out.
cool video. Always wanted to know how 240P is actually achieved on most 480i crt sets.
Amazing explanation, I've absorbed 25% of it but still learned heaps
On PAL you have 576 scanlines. Some consoles used the extra ones, others just added black bars. So we also had 256p and such.
That was a positively excellent synopsis in under 7 minutes. Kept it at a good level, add nothing flashy, just pure pertinent information. Subscribed. Please do more of these.
I saw this in my recommenced tab for some reason.
I love scanlines for old 2-d games,i hate when they get smoothed as default as it looks smudged
Back in the 386DX2 66MHZ days, popular video cards such as Cirrus Logic, Trident, S3, ATI, etc were only able to produce CGA 4 color, EGA 16 color, and VGA 256 color up to a maximum of 320x200. There was 3rd party MSDOS programs such as UNIVBE which made it possible to display SVGA screen modes up to 320x240 to 1024x768 but it never performed that fast on anything slower than a Pentium. Warcraft II and Terminal Velocity were two of the first games that made use of SVGA display modes in their games. Graphics cards couldnt catch up. and with the release of 3DFX voodoo and OpenGL and Microsoft creating DirectX, things started getting very competitive.
Upvoted as soon as I saw the Atari 800 :)
fascinating ... not shortly after the beginning I started to lose it and after that I couldn't understand nothing
Wow I didn’t know the refresh rate based off our power. Pretty cool how old game consoles got 60 FPS out of a display that normally produced 30 FPS content.
Keep the vids coming and I’ll watch!
Will do!
Nice
watching this video in 240p
like every Video ;-;