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twistedmentat posted:I legit was surprised when I saw that VCD was just a format, and not just what you called porn from Japan, because that was literally the only thing I ever saw on it. He mentions that the main competitor to this thing, the Super Chair, never came to market. That's not entirely true. When I worked at a video store in the 90s, we had a Super Chair available for rental. It was the same kind of thing -- control the D-pad by tipping your body, and the buttons were on the handgrips. Conceptually, it really only worked with games where your character/ship/whatever was pointing vertically "up" on the screen -- think Rad Racer or Top Gun, not Mario or Zelda.  It didn't get checked out very much, so we mostly left it set up over by the video games section as a playable demo, complete with its own little TV and NES. This of course meant it got beat to poo poo in fairly short order, but it was definitely eye-catching. Everyone who saw the thing wanted to try it, and it got rented out to be the centerpiece at quite a few sleepover birthday parties.
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Apr 24, 2019 01:31
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Powered Descent posted:He mentions that the main competitor to this thing, the Super Chair, never came to market. That's not entirely true. When I worked at a video store in the 90s, we had a Super Chair available for rental. It was the same kind of thing -- control the D-pad by tipping your body, and the buttons were on the handgrips. Conceptually, it really only worked with games where your character/ship/whatever was pointing vertically "up" on the screen -- think Rad Racer or Top Gun, not Mario or Zelda. That's neat, I wonder if the Super Chair just made it out to consumers, was just available to rent? That reminds me, demo stations, you never see them anymore outside of maybe indie game stores, even the MS store in the Eaton center replaced the Kinect that used to be outside into just a screen showing game demos. Platystemon posted:Porn from Japan already has its own TLA. Yea, JAV, but all the ones i found in the early era were labeled VCD.
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Apr 24, 2019 01:50
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twistedmentat posted:That reminds me, demo stations, you never see them anymore outside of maybe indie game stores, even the MS store in the Eaton center replaced the Kinect that used to be outside into just a screen showing game demos. Pretty much every GameStop, target, Walmart, Best Buy, etc all have systems you can play demo games on in the store.
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Apr 24, 2019 02:31
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GutBomb posted:Pretty much every GameStop, target, Walmart, Best Buy, etc all have systems you can play demo games on in the store. Really? I haven't seen one here in Canada for ages. Even at Xmas when there are reps for the companies, they don't have any demo stuff setup.
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Apr 24, 2019 02:57
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The only time I ever saw a real, live Virtual Boy in the flesh was a demo unit at Target. Speaking of demos, I remember an area Christian bookstore had an NES unit set up to sell copies of Bible Adventures, one of the unlicensed cartridges from Wisdom Tree.
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Apr 24, 2019 04:10
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Speaking of demos, I remember an area Christian bookstore had an NES unit set up to sell copies of Bible Adventures, one of the unlicensed cartridges from Wisdom Tree. I never actually played that game, but your mentioning it just flashed me back to Seanbaby's review of it. Or maybe I'm thinking of Sunday Funday, I always get them confused. ...oh my god, both of those pages have got to be 20 years old. 
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Apr 24, 2019 05:13
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Mr.Radar posted:According to Wikipedia, VHS had a resolution of approximately 333x480 for NTSC and 335x576 for PAL (though, being an analog format, digital resolution equivalents depend a lot on the quality of the equipment and recording). VCD was 352x240 for NTSC and 352x288 for PAL. In practice, on period-appropriate displays, they do appear to be pretty close despite VCDs having half the vertical resolution. VHS is ~240 lines, S-VHS is ~400 but that wasn't very common. Professionally authored VHSs could look pretty good but anything made with a home video recorder isn't going to match that level of quality. VCD was, at the very least, consistent.
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Apr 24, 2019 09:34
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SCheeseman posted:VHS is ~240 lines, S-VHS is ~400 but that wasn't very common. Professionally authored VHSs could look pretty good but anything made with a home video recorder isn't going to match that level of quality. VCD was, at the very least, consistent. SVCD, SXVCD and whatever other scene formats beg to differ but still worked on physical players
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Apr 24, 2019 11:21
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My dad was SUPER into LaserDisc. He had his reasons: higher resolution and better sound (we had a 5.1 surround system ages before it was popular). But the main reason he got into LDs was aspect ratio. He adamantly refused to watch movies that were pan-and-scan. Letterbox all the way. And he was right, back in the VHS days, most movies were cropped, or pan-and-scan. So I was the weird kid, growing up watching letterboxed Star Wars and seeing the whole frame, while everyone else saw the cropped version. He even gave me a little lecture about aspect ratios, and I ended up writing a paper about it in grade school. 2.35:1 for the win. Also LDs weren't hard to come by in my town. Sona video had a huge selection of LDs (any Bolingbrook goons?). Also, any movie we owned on LD I still subconsciously remember exactly when it was time to flip the disc over. Yeah, that was my job on movie night.
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Apr 24, 2019 15:54
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Humphreys posted:SVCD, SXVCD and whatever other scene formats beg to differ but still worked on physical players Not all of them since they break spec, I had a DVD player that couldn't handle high bitrate VCDs and certain SVCDs. It's more that VCDs were consistent in that all the analogue nonsense like tracking and tape quality wasn't an issue.
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Apr 24, 2019 15:58
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I was going to bring up SVCD. For those who didn't know, SVCD was MPEG2 based (verses VCD's MPEG1). The resolution was 480x480 on NTCS, but it's standard profile only allowed for about 35 minutes of video. The quality was pretty close to DVD... if you were watching on an SD tube TV. But there were many out of spec and semi-compatible formats like CVD (China Video Disc) and a several community formats that many DVD players would still play. Many of them would let you get over 1 hour on a disk, allowing a complete movie to fit on one or two disc but at better quality than VCD. Back in the early to mid 2000's, APEX was the cheap player of choice since it didn't seem to give a poo poo what format a disc was in. As long as it was Mpeg1 or 2, it would tend to just play it, regardless of resolution, bit rate, or CD mode.
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Apr 24, 2019 16:37
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Lowen SoDium posted:Back in the early to mid 2000's, APEX was the cheap player of choice since it didn't seem to give a poo poo what format a disc was in. As long as it was Mpeg1 or 2, it would tend to just play it, regardless of resolution, bit rate, or CD mode. There where quite a few DVD players out there with seemingly random brand names, all based on the same basic chipsets that would play anything. My parents bought a "Norcent" branded DVD player during that era. It would quite literally play anything. Didn't care about region, NTSC/PAL, disc format, burned, mp3s, AAC files, photos, etc.. It would even play mpeg2 transport stream files burned to a CD or DVD. I took it apart once and discovered it used a bog standard PC IDE DVD drive that had its front face plate removed.
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Apr 24, 2019 17:02
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Pan and scan was so bad. I can see indulging in an expensive hobby just to avoid it. On some films it was particularly bad. I always got nauseous watching Last Action Hero and League of Their Own versions formatted for 4:3.
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Apr 24, 2019 17:03
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Krispy Wafer posted:Pan and scan was so bad. I can see indulging in an expensive hobby just to avoid it. On some films it was particularly bad. I always got nauseous watching Last Action Hero and League of Their Own versions formatted for 4:3. Pan and Scan was just fine in the 80's when people rarely had a TV over 18" and the reduced size and fidelity would paper over all the horrid flaws of it. In fact I feel like a lot of the movies that were shot in wide screen but with an intention on home video sales used that to an advantage. Of course in the 90's and the 2000's the cracks weren't so easy to hide, especially when DVD showed up.
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Apr 24, 2019 17:08
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One Nut Wonder posted:2.35:1 for the win. How do you pick the "correct" aspect ratio? Is it related to what most films to date have needed? Is it related to human vision?
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Apr 25, 2019 02:25
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Buttcoin purse posted:How do you pick the "correct" aspect ratio? Is it related to what most films to date have needed? Is it related to human vision? The correct aspect ratio is the one that the film was originally intended to be shown in.
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Apr 25, 2019 02:56
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Krispy Wafer posted:Pan and scan was so bad. I can see indulging in an expensive hobby just to avoid it. On some films it was particularly bad. I always got nauseous watching Last Action Hero and League of Their Own versions formatted for 4:3.  
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Apr 25, 2019 03:14
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Buttcoin purse posted:How do you pick the "correct" aspect ratio? Is it related to what most films to date have needed? Is it related to human vision? landscape, never portrait
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Apr 25, 2019 03:25
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Iron Crowned posted:Pan and Scan was just fine in the 80's when people rarely had a TV over 18" and the reduced size and fidelity would paper over all the horrid flaws of it. In fact I feel like a lot of the movies that were shot in wide screen but with an intention on home video sales used that to an advantage. “Pan and scan” was a specific technique for displaying portions of the full frame though, not really shorthand for 4:3. It’s a technique where they actually scan across the widescreen image in a really unnatural way, sometimes even while the camera in the shot is moving. Lots of movies in the 80s were filmed with an aspect ratio closer to 4:3 and then cropped for their theatrical release. Then for the home video release they would remove the cropping. Of course they were never meant to be seen in 4:3 so you get stuff in the frame that was never meant to be there like John Cleese wearing pants when he’s clearly supposed to be naked.  Then the ones that did the best with the bad situation they had were the ones that just did what they could with the source material and wouldn’t pan or scan but just give the best view they could for that particular shot and then pick a new area to highlight on the next cut.
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Apr 25, 2019 04:11
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How did the various industries settle on 16:9 as a compromise since it's still not film ratio?
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Apr 25, 2019 04:19
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It's not fully accurate to say that they were filmed in 4:3 then cropped as 35mm film is natively 3:2. Some degree of cropping is always done no matter what the format, as leaving dead space at the sides is pretty useful to fix framing issues in post.ryonguy posted:How did the various industries settle on 16:9 as a compromise since it's still not film ratio? Happy medium between 1.66:1 and 1.85:1. With overscan on TVs of the time the borders are invisible with either on a 16:9 set. SCheeseman has a new favorite as of 04:23 on Apr 25, 2019 |
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Apr 25, 2019 04:20
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I am so glad they stopped making different Wide and Fullscreen dvds. Even up to 2007 or 8 we were still selling them at HMV. I think it was when Blurays came out they stopped, or the companies just got sick of people bitching about their copy of Con Air looking weird. We'd see them show up in cheap dump bins around xmas.
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Apr 25, 2019 06:44
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One Nut Wonder posted:My dad was SUPER into LaserDisc. He had his reasons: higher resolution and better sound (we had a 5.1 surround system ages before it was popular). But the main reason he got into LDs was aspect ratio. He adamantly refused to watch movies that were pan-and-scan. Letterbox all the way. I have pre-special edition original trilogy on LD that is pan and scan!
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Apr 25, 2019 10:40
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twistedmentat posted:I am so glad they stopped making different Wide and Fullscreen dvds. Even up to 2007 or 8 we were still selling them at HMV. I think it was when Blurays came out they stopped, or the companies just got sick of people bitching about their copy of Con Air looking weird. the only DVD I still own is the first DVD I bought, Das Boot, it's a double-sided disc with widescreen on one side and 4:3 on the other in twenty years the 4:3 side has never been played I was also blown tf away by being able to switch between subs and dubs on the fly, and bless my old Mintek DVD player, the first gen of ~$100 players that would also play .avi files burned to a CD
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Apr 25, 2019 11:05
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SCheeseman posted:VHS is ~240 lines, Luminance. Chroma, it was only about 40 lines. PAL was even worse for color data.
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Apr 25, 2019 12:19
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I've got a double-sided Memphis Belle DVD, it's the only double-sided disc I've ever owned, and the only time the 4:3 side was played it was entirely by mistake.
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Apr 25, 2019 12:52
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twistedmentat posted:Really? I haven't seen one here in Canada for ages. Even at Xmas when there are reps for the companies, they don't have any demo stuff setup. Last time I saw one was in EB Games on Queen West and I cant remember if I went there last year or three years ago. I'm thinking the latter. I know my local best buy doesn't have a demo station set up.
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Apr 25, 2019 12:55
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Bargearse posted:I've got a double-sided Memphis Belle DVD, it's the only double-sided disc I've ever owned, and the only time the 4:3 side was played it was entirely by mistake. It’s been so long since I’ve used a double‐sided disc that I can’t recall if the label refers to the data that’s actually on that side, the data that will be played when the label is up, or if studios are inconsistent.
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Apr 25, 2019 13:11
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It's hella funny when TV shows that were supposed to be 4:3 are now shown in widescreen: 
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Apr 25, 2019 13:15
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Suddenly remembering when Bioshock came out and people noticed immediately that playing it in a wide aspect ratio just gave you a cropped 4:3 picture and wow how did that happen
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Apr 25, 2019 14:02
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Negrostrike posted:It's hella funny when TV shows that were supposed to be 4:3 are now shown in widescreen: I get the second one, but what the hell happened to Dewey's face in the first? Is that even the same actor?
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Apr 25, 2019 14:50
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Weatherman posted:I get the second one, but what the hell happened to Dewey's face in the first? Is that even the same actor?
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Apr 25, 2019 15:12
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There's probably a little bit of distortion from being near the edge of the lens too
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Apr 25, 2019 16:18
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Stand in?
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Apr 25, 2019 17:17
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Malcolm in the Middle is kind of funny to watch in 16:9 and in HD. The show was shot on film, so the HD transfer is pretty good, but the earlier seasons where not shot with HD in mind. To can see a lot of times (especially in the earliest episodes) where things are out of focus or actors make up looks really bad. It wasn't very noticeable on SD, but HD it stands out a lot.
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Apr 25, 2019 17:18
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Last Chance posted:Stand in? Sit in, in this case 
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Apr 25, 2019 17:22
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The Big Word posted:Suddenly remembering when Bioshock came out and people noticed immediately that playing it in a wide aspect ratio just gave you a cropped 4:3 picture and wow how did that happen eeeeehhhh it was actually sort of more like the Fish Called Wanda example Bioshock was visually designed with HDTVs and 16:9 in mind, but it was also released when 4:3 monitors were still common-ish for PC and a decent number of people still had 4:3 TVs. so rather than give potentially a large chunk of PC players a hosed up image, they decided to expand the image at the top and bottom for 4:3 rather than crop off the sides
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Apr 25, 2019 17:40
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God bless every TV show that shot film long after tape became the preferred format. A huge bulk of 80’s and 90’s shows will forever look like rear end because everyone rushed to the cheapest and most convenient format that scales horribly.
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Apr 25, 2019 18:33
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Platystemon posted:It’s been so long since I’ve used a double‐sided disc that I can’t recall if the label refers to the data that’s actually on that side, the data that will be played when the label is up, or if studios are inconsistent. Label side up indicated which side was being played. For example if it you put it in the tray and it said "Widescreeen" it would be the widescreen version that would play
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Apr 25, 2019 18:37
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Krispy Wafer posted:God bless every TV show that shot film long after tape became the preferred format. A huge bulk of 80’s and 90’s shows will forever look like rear end because everyone rushed to the cheapest and most convenient format that scales horribly. Yeah all the interlacing looks like poo poo on a modern TV.
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Apr 25, 2019 18:58
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