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hackbunny posted:How old are you? We had a VCR and no it wasn't fine at all. The quality was poo poo, noticeably lower than even noise-heavy analog TV. Fast forward and rewind were slow and full of noise and still image was unusable garbage. It was "fine" in that it was intelligible but nobody considered it "good". Quality was just something that wasn't available at the consumer level Looks like I hit a nerve. I'm old enough to remember seeing Betamaxes being sold for $2200. My first VCR was about $300. Top load. Wired remote. Watching movies on a 19" TV. How old are YOU? Mentally, I mean.
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Oct 16, 2016 15:19
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Mister Kingdom posted:Looks like I hit a nerve. I'm old enough to remember seeing Betamaxes being sold for $2200. My first VCR was about $300. Top load. Wired remote. Watching movies on a 19" TV. nice meltdown
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Oct 16, 2016 15:22
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I'm struggling to think of things more asinine than an argument about video tapes.
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Oct 16, 2016 15:22
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Kelp Me! posted:nice meltdown Thanks. Thought you'd like it.
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Oct 16, 2016 15:24
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carry on then posted:I'm struggling to think of things more asinine than an argument about video tapes. The same argument, only now it's devolved into an "I was watching VHS back when it was cool" dickwaving contest
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Oct 16, 2016 15:24
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carry on then posted:I'm struggling to think of things more asinine than an argument about video tapes. Wait a few minutes, I'm sure something will come along.
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Oct 16, 2016 15:25
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Mister Kingdom posted:Wait a few minutes, I'm sure something will come along. I too am eagerly awaiting your next overreaction and subsequent multiple posts trying to shrug off how you overreacted
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Oct 16, 2016 15:27
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Kelp Me! posted:I too am eagerly awaiting your next overreaction and subsequent multiple posts trying to shrug off how you overreacted Have a nice day.
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Oct 16, 2016 15:29
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Girls, you're both the prettiest. /derail over
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Oct 16, 2016 15:31
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This thread:
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Oct 16, 2016 15:32
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Mister Kingdom posted:Have a nice day. 
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Oct 16, 2016 15:32
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Platystemon posted:This thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw1NctezBPc
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Oct 16, 2016 15:33
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Platystemon posted:This thread: Luckily, I have one of these (not really): 
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Oct 16, 2016 15:34
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I just watched Citizen Kane on our school's 30 ft projector, which somehow has a DVD/VHS player/burner attached to it. The quality was actually really good, and when pausing the image was clear save for a little tape distortion at the bottom. Am I retro hipstery enough yet?
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Oct 16, 2016 16:28
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Platystemon posted:This thread: Dangit who let a toddler play with the thread we're lucky the little bugger didn't strangle itself
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Oct 16, 2016 16:42
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Yeah well VHS isn't great, especially considering what came to replace it, but I can't really get mad at it. At the time being able to bring home a move, or record one off the TV, was pretty awesome. I also never head a tape get messed up. Don't think it happened in any brand name audio player either, only a cheap chinese knockoffs tended to chew the tapes.
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Oct 16, 2016 16:53
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mobby_6kl posted:Yeah well VHS isn't great, especially considering what came to replace it, but I can't really get mad at it. At the time being able to bring home a move, or record one off the TV, was pretty awesome. I also never head a tape get messed up. Don't think it happened in any brand name audio player either, only a cheap chinese knockoffs tended to chew the tapes. Cheap blank tapes would gently caress up your VCR, too, and they'd flake apart after one or two plays.
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Oct 16, 2016 16:58
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FilthyImp posted:I just watched Citizen Kane on our school's 30 ft projector, which somehow has a DVD/VHS player/burner attached to it. The quality was actually really good, and when pausing the image was clear save for a little tape distortion at the bottom. I still use VHS at school from time to time. In my area, YouTube videos come in two forms: contractors filming with a flip phone from 2005, smoking, cursing and other stuff I'd get written up for if admin came in for an evaluation or decently filmed Indian videos that my racist students can't handle. There's not much in between. So luckily, the guy that was there before me had a great collection of ~100 pirated videos on VHS and when I can't find something reasonable on YouTube for whatever we're covering at the time I'll dig out a tape and project it in glorious 480i.
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Oct 16, 2016 17:09
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mobby_6kl posted:Yeah well VHS isn't great, especially considering what came to replace it, but I can't really get mad at it. At the time being able to bring home a move, or record one off the TV, was pretty awesome. I also never head a tape get messed up. Don't think it happened in any brand name audio player either, only a cheap chinese knockoffs tended to chew the tapes. Don't forget that at the time, we thought SD was good quality video
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Oct 16, 2016 17:53
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My parents got our first top loader in about 82 or so and was responsible for many Friday night pizza and movie nights. It was great at the time, but I remember seeing Laser disc at Incredible Universe and was blown away. Too bad it never really caught on. It would have been a nice way to fill the gap between VHS and DVD.
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Oct 16, 2016 18:04
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I personally still love VHS........I mean the quality is crap compared to modern video formats but I'll be dammed if VHS didn't have a certain charm to it. Yes I still have a VHS player (2 actually) and a shitload of tapes although I've reduced my collection to Big Box horror releases and old punk/metal tapes/bootlegs.
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Oct 16, 2016 18:15
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VHS is mostly bad because it's composite video. If it had used S-Video (separate luma and chroma) or RGB, it would have been comparable to DVD, at least for new tapes. Of course, the fuzziness of most CRT TVs covered up the badness pretty well. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 18:30 on Oct 16, 2016 |
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Oct 16, 2016 18:26
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KozmoNaut posted:VHS is mostly bad because it's composite video. If it had used S-Video (separate luma and chroma) or RGB, it would have been comparable to DVD, at least for new tapes. I remember my parents 2nd and 3rd VCRs (after the top loader died) were 4-head, S-video, JVC (late 80s) and Panasonic (early 90s) units that looked much better than the top loader. Especially the Panasonic unit with the Panasonic 32" that had the blackest of blacks. Those two kept going and were donated to Goodwill in the later 90s when they pit DVD players on the family room and living room TVs.
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Oct 16, 2016 18:52
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I bricked our VCR with a dusty TV-recorded copy of The Sound of Music. It started to play, then got snowier and snowier, and then it just stopped and wouldn't play any more tapes. That's my VHS story. Oh, I used to have the first Harry Potter movie on video, and it had a commercial for DVD, showing off the interactive menu. It blew my little mind!
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Oct 16, 2016 21:44
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Mister Kingdom posted:Looks like I hit a nerve. I'm old enough to remember seeing Betamaxes being sold for $2200. My first VCR was about $300. Top load. Wired remote. Watching movies on a 19" TV. This post owns
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Oct 16, 2016 21:52
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I remember getting some anime movie from a dollar store on VHS when I was a kid, looking at the tape, and thinking it must have been like ten minutes long because there was barely anything on the spool. Somehow they managed to cram a two-plus hour movie into that tiny thing. Never knew that the SLP setting could be pushed that far before then.
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Oct 16, 2016 21:54
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mobby_6kl posted:Yeah well VHS isn't great, especially considering what came to replace it, but I can't really get mad at it. At the time being able to bring home a move, or record one off the TV, was pretty awesome. I also never head a tape get messed up. Don't think it happened in any brand name audio player either, only a cheap chinese knockoffs tended to chew the tapes. The day care vcr ate a barney tape I loaned them when I was like four. That is my VHS story.
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Oct 17, 2016 00:47
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah, not being able to encode a letter to itself is a huge flaw in cryptography, and that and a few mechanical flaws in the way the wheels worked were the only reason we were able to break the Enigma with the technology of the time in a usable fashion. Don't get me wrong, the boffins at Bletchley Park were brilliant and Alan Turing was definitely a man ahead of his time, This always bugs me. The original Enigma breakthrough had nothing to do with Alan Turing and Bletchley Park. It was by Marian Rejewski and his Polish colleagues, who cracked the Enigma and built a perfectly functional duplicate of it purely through cryptanalysis without ever seeing or laying their hands on an actual Enigma machine, in 1932. Another *big* cryptographic flaw in operational practice was that the operator would first send the random daily rotor setting twice as part of the encrypted message. So if he picked BRL as the rotor setting, the first six characters of the plaintext would be BRLBRL. Coupled with the fact that the Enigma won't encipher a character as itself, was the initial crack that allowed Rejewski to slip a wedge into it and hammer it open. This occurred long before the Brits were involved, and the name of the machines at Bletchley Park, bombs, came directly from the Polish term for the automated decrypt machine they built, which was called the bomba kryptologiczna. Turing didn't even start working on Enigma decrypts until 1938. Kwyndig posted:The Enigma was a deeply flawed machine in operation, the number of possible code combinations on it was actually around half or less of what it was mathematically capable of, not even considering the actual flaws in the design, simply due to the instructions operators had to work with. It was merely around 16x1019 possible combinations, and considering a modern desktop computer can manage multiple TFLOPS on its GPU alone, brute forcing any short Enigma message without any decrypted data wouldn't take more than a few days (and Enigma messages were always short). The keyspace of the naval Enigma machine is roughly equivalent to an 86-bit key. I think all intercepted Enigma messages have now been broken, but a few of them were still unbroken as of 10 years ago. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 01:10 on Oct 17, 2016 |
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Oct 17, 2016 01:04
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I think it has been mentioned in this thread before, but the documentary REWIND THIS is really interesting. It covers vhs history, the limits of the format and its impact on movies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewind_This!
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Oct 17, 2016 01:27
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Aristophanes posted:Oh, I used to have the first Harry Potter movie on video, and it had a commercial for DVD, showing off the interactive menu. It blew my little mind! Got to love the attempt to advertise improved sound and picture quality on the existing medium though. "The picture is sharper!" train hits car "The sound is clearer!" banging piano Wow! That looks and sounds awe- oh.
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Oct 17, 2016 04:29
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The End posted:8-Bit Guy went and did a bunch of testing and confirmed that yes, VHS really was dogshit. I had this same piece of poo poo VCR in this video and it ate a rental copy of "Maverick" starring Mel Gibson and would chew up tapes no matter what from then on. Had to trash it.
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Oct 17, 2016 04:31
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VHS was actually incredibly good, which is why the format was wildly successful for many years. To claim otherwise is pretty loving stupid lol
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Oct 17, 2016 05:59
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Slanderer posted:VHS was actually incredibly good, which is why the format was wildly successful for many years. To claim otherwise is pretty loving stupid lol Popularity is always a great indicator of superior quality.
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Oct 17, 2016 07:32
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VHS was an incredibly useful and consumer friendly format. That didn't make it a good format, considering that in the history of consumer electronics only recently we have reached film-level quality in homes (Not an authority, and I welcome any corrections on this point).
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Oct 17, 2016 07:40
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Is there any truth to the claim that it was the porn industry that tipped the scales in VHS' favor over Betamax, or is it just urban legend?
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Oct 17, 2016 07:51
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Collateral Damage posted:Is there any truth to the claim that it was the porn industry that tipped the scales in VHS' favor over Betamax, or is it just urban legend? I assume it was that the early beta movies were on two tapes (60 minutes per?) and VHS were on a single tape, although that might also be folklore.
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Oct 17, 2016 07:54
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SomeJazzyRat posted:VHS was an incredibly useful and consumer friendly format. That didn't make it a good format, considering that in the history of consumer electronics only recently we have reached film-level quality in homes (Not an authority, and I welcome any corrections on this point). HDR OLED 4K screens are better than film, it'd be difficult to argue otherwise.
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Oct 17, 2016 08:49
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Collateral Damage posted:Is there any truth to the claim that it was the porn industry that tipped the scales in VHS' favor over Betamax, or is it just urban legend? Sort of an urban myth (as in: I believe that it did have an effect) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYZITaxlTQ
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Oct 17, 2016 08:52
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Sort of like how people comment on retro gaming looking better on some CRTs than newer HDTV, is/was VHS a format that similarly was primed to take advantage of certain features of a normal tube TV of the time that more modern TVs would not? As the guy said, when it was hooked up to an old CRT TV, the picture looked 'good'.
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Oct 17, 2016 08:54
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SwissCM posted:HDR OLED 4K screens are better than film, it'd be difficult to argue otherwise. 4k has about the same amount of detail as 35mm but doesn't have grain (although grain is sometimes added back in in post depending on the desired look) and 4k televisions haven't been around for very long so I'm still going to agree with the original statement that "in the history of consumer electronics only recently we have reached film-level quality in homes" because we've only just recently caught up in the past few years*. *I'd put 1080p easily above films shot with 16mm. Yes, I'm aware this is sometimes done for artistic reasons and not just because the filmmaker was poor.
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