I read somewhere this actually happens to memories. every time you remember an event, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered said event.
I wonder what school memories will be like (and home memories and outside ones) when I’m like 50 yrs older… will my memory of getting venti from genshin just be a picture like one I have rn
@@tigerwolfpip Our memory is really like VHS tapes. I read a few months ago that the chrominance ("color") signal can also be lost if a lot of years have passed since the event happened, or if you recalled that memory thousands of times, leaving it in black and white. I have some childhood memories in black and white, and this phenomenon explains it.
That explains why a few specific things I’ve repeatedly thought back to get more and more unrecognizable and broken down the more I remember them as time goes on
Your memories actually do work that exact way; recalling memories is simply bringing up copies of copies and so on, acting as a game of telephone. Over time, said memories degrade more and more until they're just jumbled noise, and eventually, they're gone forever.
The audio actually held up pretty well, despite being reduced in quality you can still make it out even in the 20th generation... that or the song is now just on repeat in my head.
Because the human mind is really good at picking up voices. Edit: It is good at picking up anything human related. This is why (1) We see faces in things and (2)We know when machine generators failed to do humans.
I'm from a developing country and back then in early 1980s pirated video tapes were very common and the picture quality at 1:50 was normal to us because most tapes we rented are like that until the late 1980s which a tape which had been copied from a LaserDisc became available and the picture is comparable to the 1st generation (0:00) which was eye popping to us because we never seen a tape that clear before.
That inspired my own attempt at this experiment. I took a 30-second clip from a movie I taped from TV, and I kept copying and copying and copying it. On the 8th copy, you couldn't tell what ANYTHING was. I actually kept it going for 32 copies, and it was then that the TV finally resorted to a blue screen, which it RARELY ever does does when I'm watching a VHS movie (it's really determined to display the whole thing, good, bad AND ugly).
It's interesting that the audio quality is the biggest difference (to me, at least) between the 1st and 2nd generation, but the audio far outlasts the video in the long run. It's still audible during the 16-17th generation. Even by the 18th, it's only beginning to warble. Edit: clarity
Even after 23 generations, you can still just make out the leads singer burying her face in her hands in despair at the end of each take. As if she and her friend are trapped in void that's slowly withering away, and along with them, fading like a flower. And yet they play, like the fine musicians of the Titanic, to the very end.
Everytime I see you Oh, I try to hide away But when we meet it seems I can't let go Everytime you leave the room I feel I'm fading like a flower Tell me why
I was going to say how perfect the song choice is for testing VHS Generation Loss, but then these lyrics immediately made me think of something that would be used in an EATOT fan project, during Stages 1 & 2.
This is pretty illuminating, as I got into the bootleg-trading scene around 2002, collecting '80s recordings exclusively, but never had to personally duplicate VHS. I always assumed the B&W copies I received, that I eventually upgraded to color, were the result of someone with insanely outdated equipment. Guess they were just 10+ generations down the line.
I can imagine this in like a scary movie or a mystery, the main character walks into an abandoned house and this is playing on a tv on an infinite progression...
In the days before youtube (circa 2000-2001) I used to trade video tapes of old TV shows, and would get back something like a 5th or 6th generation copy of some old 1980s show. The colours would flicker and you had to whack up the volume to hear anything under the fuzz, but it was still pretty awesome at the time. Crystal-clear HD youtube uploads have spoiled all that fun.
Sony Trinitron Totally. I tried it just to get the idea. Your brain gets used to the low quality. It reminded me of when you watch a VHS and the Hi-Fi suddenly kicks in. Especially if you have a VCR that has Hi-Fi read issues.
They say it's actually not the girl saying "Tell me why." *Its actually the VHS repeatingly begging to be told why it has to suffer through so much torture by generation loss...*
This reminds me a whole lot of when i was a kid, probably sometime in the late 90s, how when you tried to tune in the scrambled channels way up at like channels 98 and 99 you would find something pretty similar to the 21st-22nd generations. I do remember the audio not coming through as well as this, although you could occasionally understand a couple of words if you watched long enough... Of course, the scrambled channels being PPV, HBO, 'Skinamax' etc, I may or may not have observed those mangled signals for the occasional seconds of B&W or bizzarely colored glory when the sync would line up close enough 😂😂😂
"The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two--is gone." Omar Kayyam "And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded Leave not a rack behind." Shakespeare
Gregory Colview Love the poetry references... reminds me of the time I put all my most loved mementos (Journal from my trip to Japan, High School Year book signed by friends, etc.) in a trunk in my parents basement, and after a flood it was destroyed totally by mold, because we didn't dry it out it in time... It taught me not to cling so tight to everything that "fades like a flower" ... “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:19-21
On the 666th gen if you press the tracking buttons to stabilize the picture you will see a gateway. If you stare into the gateway long enough chanting, "Fading like a rose" you will enter Hell.
My great uncle made a movie on VHS about the history of the town they grew up in and how their family made it there. He made a copy for everyone in the family but each time it was copied it suffered from generation loss. The copy I have (and the only copy of the tape that still exists) is not very clear, a bit noisy and has B&W spots here and there.
The second VCR doesn't get a perfect signal because it's an analogue signal. Each generation has more and more imperfections, even beyond the point where it becomes unwatchable.
Actually a good representation of the aging process in biology. As you age you need to make new cells, so your body just copies old ones. As the copies keep copying copies, the quality degrades. Skin is less elastic and soft, your organs and muscles function less, until eventually you pass away when the quality is too low.
Remarkable. I felt as though I were an alien happening upon earthly civilization years after an extinction event and this, being an artifact of them, was fruitlessly preserved only to be reduced to static in the hopes that someday, someone(thing) would find it and know--humans existed. Imagine combing through these strange and fascinating artifacts and having absolutely no idea about their purpose.
well stated,,,cheers. your comment reminds me of - "Bruce McCulloch:Aliens Lyrics" "When the aliens came down to Earth, they immediately understood everything: how motors worked, how matter grew and eroded, the death of the veranda. The only thing that puzzled them that day and night was: why is there laugh tracks on TV? It didn't compute. It made their gadgets go ga-ga. It's hard to explain a laugh track to an alien. It's so true it should be a cliche. But I digress, which is something an alien never does." google it to peep the rest. ;)
The "tell me why" even at the end is the clearest bit of audio in the entire clip, and you can just barely make out her burying her face into her hands, as if she is in a loop and all of her friends are getting completely unrecognizable, and she's the only survivor of the generation loss pandemic. Almost sad in a way. To see memories aging like this thoughts rough the years as your dementia gets worse and worse, gen 23 is near the end, worse things are coming. Be grateful for the things you have in your life right now, cherish your youth. Do things. Be things. Life is short.
The way PAL (not NTSC) works, color information is essentially delayed by one line. But this also means that without proper compensation, each generation will have its color shifted down by one more line. It's unfortunate that the video chosen here happens to have scenes with very uniform color, but if you look at her hair and the window scenes, where there is a bit of purple mixed in with the orange, you can sort of get an idea on how the color comes in later vertically. Much more obviously though, you can easily notice how the color just plain starts further and further down with each generation (for those that still have some color at all), with the top of the picture being in black and white!
Seems this somehow explains my PAL PS2 video issues with soft mod and AV to HDMI converter on NTSC tv, PAL games most of the time start with no video, only those displaying to switch to NTSC mode at start can appear. This issue is only with PAL games, NTSC games are totally visible.
several thoughts came to me while this was happening: 1- it's mildly ironic that this was uploaded in 2008, when the max resolution was 320, so it was kinda crappy to begin with 2- how would Beta have held up in comparison 3- it's really gonna suck when we start cloning people regularly 4- I really want to listen to this video now, if only to have more parts to the Mobius strip in my head 5- at about 17-18, brought back memories of watching softcore porn in my teens when it was scrambled analog
In analog each copy creates a generation loss. In digital each copy is identical to the original so there is no generation loss unless you convert it to another format which also creates a generation loss.
You can easily create generational loss in the digital space by using a non-lossless video (or audio) format (like most people are already doing), like the all too common H.264 for video or mp3 for audio. Simple experiment you can do with your own YT channel is upload an unlisted example/test video, let it finish processing, then download the result from within YT studio or some other way, and reupload that file, rinse and repeat. Things will degrade *very* quickly
Jax Hahn I'm guessing from this, the lower the quality of the video is, the more uncomfortable it is to watch. That's pretty true. P.S. I am pretty surprised I came across you in here.
There's something weirdly unsettling about the deterioration. Maybe it's just me having come off of a few games that revel in the use of glitches for their narrative, but it's weird watching something rapidly degrade as it's getting re-recorded over and over again, to the point where all you have is so much audio-visual garbage.
This video just made me buy Roxette's greatest hits. Can't believe we used to put up with this quality before DVDs existed. You know, a mate would get a cool new film and you'd borrow it and copy it, then another mate would borrow your copy and copy it, and so on.
Very interesting experiment, serves pretty good research material for those who want to understand the stages of VHS video degrading - I appreciate it.
The more I watched, the more degraded the signal, the more nostalgic I got (up to a point). Thanks for bringing me back in time to a simpler (but less video-quality-filled) word. :-)
The very first time I watched a fan-sub of an anime movie (around 1990), the quality of the picture was like the 6th generation of the Roxette video, very blurry and muddy. It was from that, as well as from making copies of audio cassettes, that I learned about the concept of generation loss.
It kind of resembles deep-frying a meme over and over. You get to the point where the image turns into B&W, and eventually - ends up distorted like in generations 20+.
Excellent demonstration, I wonder how many generations a VHS copy can go down before complete audio/video deterioration, also good as a gauge to determine what generation copy a video is, I used to do VHS trades and I have gotten some real shockers in my time that exceed 6th generation!
Video signals are ~3MHz, vs. audio which peaks at ~30kHz. Higher frequency signals are more sensitive to noise and signal degradation so that's why it takes nearly ten times as many generations for audio to become incoherent (neglecting loss of volume). If we say the end point of audio coherence is 24th gen then 2.4th (round down to 2nd) is where video coherence is lost, and it is as the colors have already begun to bleed and detail has been lost.
I saw a demonstration like this on TV long ago, but they had to point a camera at a TV screen (back then, the bad sync would play havoc with the broadcast equipment). Nice to see a demonstration like this with direct feed video. Did you use a time base corrector to stop the picture rolling?
The difference between the first generation / second generation is extremely big, I don't think the second VCR you used was in acceptable condition for this test
By the 3rd generation, it's just like a SECAM television signal, with the "SECAM-fire" color bleeding effect. By the 18th generation to the 22nd generation, it's just like a television signal being received via Sporadic E, or even PAL tapes played back in a non-PAL VCR. By the 23rd generation, it's just like a television signal being received via F2 skip.
Fivos Sakellis Aha i see you're from Greece (as your profile picture has the EPT logo, the Greek national broadcaster). Here in Malaysia everything uses PAL from VHS tapes all the way to game consoles (Some game consoles here are NTSC-M) and TV transmissions (Malaysia currently adopts PAL-B/G television standard, with NICAM-I stereo system). Analogue switch-off is scheduled by next year with all transmissions making the transition to digital television - followed with Singapore by 2018 and the rest of Southeast Asia by 2020.
Rikers Beard Like dying? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Yes, but then your 1st generation copy gets transferred to DVD, so when you get copied after that point, there's no degradation and you've become immortal. But then some jackass encodes you at a pointlessly low bitrate, and you become that slow kid who pushes buggies at the grocery store.
And to think digital media isn't any better, not because the technology is the same but preservation is an effort, and in today's age nobody puts in nearly as much care or effort as they did back then, to think of the lost or unrecoverable media that has been lost, it really is a shame.
Unironically VHS engineers focused too much in the audio even having digital audio over the analog is kind of weird that they dont focused on the image too.
@@HIDHIFDB They tried with SVHS in the late 80s. Nobody bought it cause it needed better quality tapes (read: more expensive), had to have everything hooked up via SVideo cables to make use of the better quality in the first place and the biggest technical drawback was that the underlying black and white image was higher resolution, but the color information wasn't much better than standard VHS, so the image was sharper overall but color was still pretty smeary. Too many drawbacks for semi-professional use, too expensive for average joe. Standard VHS was seen as "good enough". Some companies still didn't get the memo and developed VHS into D-VHS (Digital VHS, capable of 720p and 1080i video) some 12 years later in the early 00s, with predictable results: nobody bought them either
I thought this video was gone forever. I tried looking for it multiple times within the last few years and could never find it for some reason. I'm glad to see it's still kicking.
Lord. having grown up on vhs we had so many tapes that were dubbed to death. especially old punk concerts. you can barely see them but they are all we had of certain things
![COLOMBIA vs. CHILE [4-0] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 10](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TDjN4W3yy1k/mqdefault.jpg)
"It is getting more difficult to follow what is happening on the screen" - understatement of the year.
You mean for 15 years?
@NostalgicNumbers7 years ago, the video was made 15 years ago
@@ArchoDarkothe comment was made when this video was 8 years old
@@POLY990 mhm, 7 + 8 = 15
@@ArchoDarko mind blown
I read somewhere this actually happens to memories. every time you remember an event, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered said event.
this is scary
OH WAIT- SO THATS WHY I ACTUALLY THOUGHT GENERATION LOSS WAS LIKE MEMORIESSSS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I wonder what school memories will be like (and home memories and outside ones) when I’m like 50 yrs older… will my memory of getting venti from genshin just be a picture like one I have rn
@@tigerwolfpip
Our memory is really like VHS tapes. I read a few months ago that the chrominance ("color") signal can also be lost if a lot of years have passed since the event happened, or if you recalled that memory thousands of times, leaving it in black and white. I have some childhood memories in black and white, and this phenomenon explains it.
That explains why a few specific things I’ve repeatedly thought back to get more and more unrecognizable and broken down the more I remember them as time goes on
It's like memories slowly becoming obsolete.
Your memories actually do work that exact way; recalling memories is simply bringing up copies of copies and so on, acting as a game of telephone. Over time, said memories degrade more and more until they're just jumbled noise, and eventually, they're gone forever.
That's so sad. I'm. Thing just from reading the reply comment
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..."
@@VinchVolt but we can recall vivid memories when you see some memory-related things
Or you could say… a burning memory.
Now that small portion of this song is stuck in my head.
White Noise?
which generation of?
DH Productions Inc. 1-23
The audio actually held up pretty well, despite being reduced in quality you can still make it out even in the 20th generation... that or the song is now just on repeat in my head.
Funny enough, people who experience dementia remembers music the most.
Because the human mind is really good at picking up voices.
Edit: It is good at picking up anything human related. This is why (1) We see faces in things and (2)We know when machine generators failed to do humans.
Yeah, i can hear the “let go” even in 23th generation.
@@GabrielSantos-wv4vz oh yea me too
It lost it's stereo sound as early as the 2nd Generation.
the audio quality difference between 1st and 2nd gen is pretty amazing.
It's because obviously the Hi-fi signal was lost because the VCR could not copy it, and instead the standard audio signal was used from then on.
@@robertmoyse448 It's because the VCR isn't Hi-Fi. With Hi-Fi it looks even more interesting.
I'm from a developing country and back then in early 1980s pirated video tapes were very common and the picture quality at 1:50 was normal to us because most tapes we rented are like that until the late 1980s which a tape which had been copied from a LaserDisc became available and the picture is comparable to the 1st generation (0:00) which was eye popping to us because we never seen a tape that clear before.
thats actually so interesting. its awesome to see the world from a different perspective
@min840 true.
We Went From VHS To 4K Ultra HD
Darn Times Go Fast Quick
From 1980s To Now Crazy 😮
What country?
@@user-cvbnm Philippines.
This is what your childhood looks like as you get older.
1-23
really
My generation is 19. I'M 19 years old.
1-19
I am now 20 years old. Born on Valentine's Day.
That inspired my own attempt at this experiment. I took a 30-second clip from a movie I taped from TV, and I kept copying and copying and copying it.
On the 8th copy, you couldn't tell what ANYTHING was. I actually kept it going for 32 copies, and it was then that the TV finally resorted to a blue screen, which it RARELY ever does does when I'm watching a VHS movie (it's really determined to display the whole thing, good, bad AND ugly).
The "Tell me why" part, both sound and video, seems to stay intact even into the end...
It kinda does
I don't know how.
You should
You should...
_Tell me why_
It's interesting that the audio quality is the biggest difference (to me, at least) between the 1st and 2nd generation, but the audio far outlasts the video in the long run. It's still audible during the 16-17th generation. Even by the 18th, it's only beginning to warble.
Edit: clarity
Even in the final generation, I could still hear "Tell me why?" under all that noise.
First gen had hi-fi audio signal, but the VCR couldn't copy it so all passes after that had standard audio signal
Even after 23 generations, you can still just make out the leads singer burying her face in her hands in despair at the end of each take. As if she and her friend are trapped in void that's slowly withering away, and along with them, fading like a flower.
And yet they play, like the fine musicians of the Titanic, to the very end.
Damn that’s sad, but I love it at the same time
Unfun fact: The singer died back in 2019
Everytime I see you
Oh, I try to hide away
But when we meet it seems I can't let go
Everytime you leave the room
I feel I'm fading like a flower
Tell me why
Nice picture. I imagine by generation 5 that's a bootleg copy of the Evil Dead
x23
FEAR OF THE DARK
A valid description of this viewing experience!
I was going to say how perfect the song choice is for testing VHS Generation Loss, but then these lyrics immediately made me think of something that would be used in an EATOT fan project, during Stages 1 & 2.
After watching this whole video the original looks like a fucking Blu-Ray.
yeah, we reallt dont need blueray more like blurat
Holy shit this comment aged
Fr
this aged well
This is pretty illuminating, as I got into the bootleg-trading scene around 2002, collecting '80s recordings exclusively, but never had to personally duplicate VHS. I always assumed the B&W copies I received, that I eventually upgraded to color, were the result of someone with insanely outdated equipment. Guess they were just 10+ generations down the line.
Could also be that they pulled it off television and couldn’t get the colours to work for whatever reason.
unnerving towards the end. this is vaporwave in real life
Roxette - Fading Like A Flower
Thank you very much
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.
+spaceye I wouldn't be so sure.. turn around.
That was a little different. Video codec and vhs are not the same.
what if im watching this video with you?
Turn around
She's still a babe at least 12 passes in.
Shes so friggin hot, even in the late 80 early 90's goofy hair :)
9 at 144p
I can imagine this in like a scary movie or a mystery, the main character walks into an abandoned house and this is playing on a tv on an infinite progression...
didn't something similar happen in the ring?
In the days before youtube (circa 2000-2001) I used to trade video tapes of old TV shows, and would get back something like a 5th or 6th generation copy of some old 1980s show. The colours would flicker and you had to whack up the volume to hear anything under the fuzz, but it was still pretty awesome at the time.
Crystal-clear HD youtube uploads have spoiled all that fun.
Yeah, understandable
Goddamnit. That song is stuck in my head now.
+knight wing Same
I love this song. And this is HOW I FOUND the song. from this VIDEO!! LEGENDARY!!!
I actually like toward the 17th+ generation where the creepy note goes up on "try to hide away". It sounds really otherworldly and awesome.
Generation 7 is what i'd get when buying a bootleg movie from the guy in the corner
4th Generation looks like all those public domain tapes of "Gulliver's Travels" (1939) recorded in EP mode.
if play the video til the end then go back to the start of the video the Hi-Fi sound blows you away.
I didn't get it, you're saying that after watch the video with the messy audio, the good audio seems better?
Yeah thats what I meant
Sony Trinitron Totally. I tried it just to get the idea. Your brain gets used to the low quality. It reminded me of when you watch a VHS and the Hi-Fi suddenly kicks in. Especially if you have a VCR that has Hi-Fi read issues.
Chris Dixon I got a dozen VCR's they're mono but still good
+Sony Trinitron It sort of alleviates the dread feeling the video gives you as well.
Who needs 8k, 10 bit color, 120 FPS when you have 16th generation VHS?
b-b-b-but daiz said it makes me a better person
Colour bits in videos doesn't work that way...
True Serbian experience.
more like 23th generation VHS
@@TheElvisnator 23rd*
Notice how this song is stuck in my head now .......
I just witnessed VHS rot before my eyes. That's a trip
It was strangely beautiful wasn't it? Kinda poetic in a way.
Perhaps an expression for the generation we've come from. Indeed it was poetic...
They say it's actually not the girl saying "Tell me why."
*Its actually the VHS repeatingly begging to be told why it has to suffer through so much torture by generation loss...*
that’s funny
This is disturbingly depressing for a technical themed video..
For some reason I couldn't find this video searching here on RUclips. It looks like it was blocked for a time, but I'm glad it's back.
This reminds me a whole lot of when i was a kid, probably sometime in the late 90s, how when you tried to tune in the scrambled channels way up at like channels 98 and 99 you would find something pretty similar to the 21st-22nd generations. I do remember the audio not coming through as well as this, although you could occasionally understand a couple of words if you watched long enough... Of course, the scrambled channels being PPV, HBO, 'Skinamax' etc, I may or may not have observed those mangled signals for the occasional seconds of B&W or bizzarely colored glory when the sync would line up close enough 😂😂😂
Love her Guile from Street Fighter haircut.
This is absolutely horrifying and eerie and was very neat but also quite unpleasant to watch.
I'm probably going to have nightmares about this.
which is why i watched this in the morning instead of at night lol
EStarstruck Same!!! 😱😱😱😱
Why the hell people think this is sad? i think this is incredible.
coconuts edgy tumblr guys
This is a glitch art gold mine
I find it fascinating.
I know right?
coconuts yes.
I found this incredibly depressing for some reason...
"The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two--is gone."
Omar Kayyam
"And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind."
Shakespeare
It's because your memory of, say, your first kiss, will degrade in your brain in much the same way, as with everything else you ever knew and loved.
Gregory Colview
Love the poetry references... reminds me of the time I put all my most loved mementos (Journal from my trip to Japan, High School Year book signed by friends, etc.) in a trunk in my parents basement, and after a flood it was destroyed totally by mold, because we didn't dry it out it in time... It taught me not to cling so tight to everything that "fades like a flower" ...
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:19-21
For me it was a visual representation of how the truth of an event fades with each passing generation until all we are left with is legend.
I tried this with a Michael Bay film and at the 23rd generation it finally became watchable!
show us the video!
SeaOfTides When will you post that Video of the VHS GENERATION. I'm SO INTERESTED in seeing that!!!
@Florentina Gabriela r/whoosh
@Florentina Gabriela I am not spam in the comments, unlike you, butthurted dude
On the 666th gen if you press the tracking buttons to stabilize the picture you will see a gateway. If you stare into the gateway long enough chanting, "Fading like a rose" you will enter Hell.
H........... ELP............. M... E
My great uncle made a movie on VHS about the history of the town they grew up in and how their family made it there. He made a copy for everyone in the family but each time it was copied it suffered from generation loss. The copy I have (and the only copy of the tape that still exists) is not very clear, a bit noisy and has B&W spots here and there.
>and the only copy of the tape that still exists
ZOMG GIB TORRENT NAOOO
@@Mother2IsTheBestGame what does that mean
@@Mother2IsTheBestGame media preservation moment
you should digitize it
@@RealKeyFinder we did on DVD but we don’t know how to change the file from DVD file to mp4 or mov
What exactly was happening there? That video and sound was definitely fading like a flower
The second VCR doesn't get a perfect signal because it's an analogue signal. Each generation has more and more imperfections, even beyond the point where it becomes unwatchable.
By the time it gets beyond 20 years, expect the tape to get caught in the VCR.
Actually a good representation of the aging process in biology. As you age you need to make new cells, so your body just copies old ones. As the copies keep copying copies, the quality degrades. Skin is less elastic and soft, your organs and muscles function less, until eventually you pass away when the quality is too low.
if you look closely the 9th Generation actually had a flash of colour at the start but from then on it was B&W
One of the most frightening videos on RUclips!
With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.
This is actually just a metaphor for becoming an old.
I wished I’d never stumbled across these videos now I can’t stop watching them
i wonder if after 40 or so generations the vcr would be unable to read the data on the tape
41st gen-eif
+Tripper hydrogen I watched the 1st generation after watching the entire video though.
This is analog video.
It will read it as noise or even a blank tape
Remarkable. I felt as though I were an alien happening upon earthly civilization years after an extinction event and this, being an artifact of them, was fruitlessly preserved only to be reduced to static in the hopes that someday, someone(thing) would find it and know--humans existed. Imagine combing through these strange and fascinating artifacts and having absolutely no idea about their purpose.
Totally had the same thought.
well stated,,,cheers.
your comment reminds me of - "Bruce McCulloch:Aliens Lyrics"
"When the aliens came down to Earth, they immediately understood everything: how motors worked, how matter grew and eroded, the death of the veranda. The only thing that puzzled them that day and night was: why is there laugh tracks on TV? It didn't compute. It made their gadgets go ga-ga. It's hard to explain a laugh track to an alien. It's so true it should be a cliche. But I digress, which is something an alien never does."
google it to peep the rest. ;)
I imagined that when the 11th generation came around.
I keep getting this uncomfortable feeling that Satan will burst through my screen with each generation
lmfao
Really? I feel that it would be Slenderman.
You HAD to bring that up
This is like your memory of your childhood as you get older.
What happens to the audio is something I find even creeper than what happens to the picture.
The "tell me why" even at the end is the clearest bit of audio in the entire clip, and you can just barely make out her burying her face into her hands, as if she is in a loop and all of her friends are getting completely unrecognizable, and she's the only survivor of the generation loss pandemic. Almost sad in a way. To see memories aging like this thoughts rough the years as your dementia gets worse and worse, gen 23 is near the end, worse things are coming. Be grateful for the things you have in your life right now, cherish your youth. Do things. Be things. Life is short.
💀
I feel for the person who had to watch this each damn time they made the copy.
The way PAL (not NTSC) works, color information is essentially delayed by one line. But this also means that without proper compensation, each generation will have its color shifted down by one more line. It's unfortunate that the video chosen here happens to have scenes with very uniform color, but if you look at her hair and the window scenes, where there is a bit of purple mixed in with the orange, you can sort of get an idea on how the color comes in later vertically. Much more obviously though, you can easily notice how the color just plain starts further and further down with each generation (for those that still have some color at all), with the top of the picture being in black and white!
Seems this somehow explains my PAL PS2 video issues with soft mod and AV to HDMI converter on NTSC tv, PAL games most of the time start with no video, only those displaying to switch to NTSC mode at start can appear. This issue is only with PAL games, NTSC games are totally visible.
@@fabiumtaurinorum5573 Hmm, how does that explain your issue?
@@enojelly9452because I wish it does, and if it doesn't I want to know how to solve this without just buying another tv.
@@fabiumtaurinorum5573 it sounds to me like your TV simply doesn’t decode PAL?
From the very first copy there is a huge difference in audio quality.
This is genuinely creepy! I mean, I don't want to sound artsy fartsy, but there is some kind of poetic creepiness in there and it's beautiful.
several thoughts came to me while this was happening:
1- it's mildly ironic that this was uploaded in 2008, when the max resolution was 320, so it was kinda crappy to begin with
2- how would Beta have held up in comparison
3- it's really gonna suck when we start cloning people regularly
4- I really want to listen to this video now, if only to have more parts to the Mobius strip in my head
5- at about 17-18, brought back memories of watching softcore porn in my teens when it was scrambled analog
Thank goodness for VHS, this is beautiful. The medium of vhs needs to live on. Thank you for posting.
In analog each copy creates a generation loss. In digital each copy is identical to the original so there is no generation loss unless you convert it to another format which also creates a generation loss.
+bobskie321 Yeah, theoretically, but there's a thing called bit rot.
Converting to another format lasts much longer than VHS generation loss though.
You can easily create generational loss in the digital space by using a non-lossless video (or audio) format (like most people are already doing), like the all too common H.264 for video or mp3 for audio. Simple experiment you can do with your own YT channel is upload an unlisted example/test video, let it finish processing, then download the result from within YT studio or some other way, and reupload that file, rinse and repeat. Things will degrade *very* quickly
U can use any video and re re-render it in a video editor.
It will loose quality quickly.
Watch in 144p for maximum discomfort.
+Jax Hahn I can't :/ only 240p
Watch in 240p for maximum discomfort.
I did it
It really is unsettling
Jax Hahn I'm guessing from this, the lower the quality of the video is, the more uncomfortable it is to watch. That's pretty true.
P.S. I am pretty surprised I came across you in here.
There's something weirdly unsettling about the deterioration. Maybe it's just me having come off of a few games that revel in the use of glitches for their narrative, but it's weird watching something rapidly degrade as it's getting re-recorded over and over again, to the point where all you have is so much audio-visual garbage.
This video just made me buy Roxette's greatest hits.
Can't believe we used to put up with this quality before DVDs existed. You know, a mate would get a cool new film and you'd borrow it and copy it, then another mate would borrow your copy and copy it, and so on.
Very interesting experiment, serves pretty good research material for those who want to understand the stages of VHS video degrading - I appreciate it.
That great feeling when you watch the last copy, and then the first copy again and you feel refreshed.
When you go from retro, to vaporwave, to harsh noise wall.
The fading ov childhood memories, expressed perfectly through generation loss.
The more I watched, the more degraded the signal, the more nostalgic I got (up to a point). Thanks for bringing me back in time to a simpler (but less video-quality-filled) word. :-)
The very first time I watched a fan-sub of an anime movie (around 1990), the quality of the picture was like the 6th generation of the Roxette video, very blurry and muddy. It was from that, as well as from making copies of audio cassettes, that I learned about the concept of generation loss.
It kind of resembles deep-frying a meme over and over. You get to the point where the image turns into B&W, and eventually - ends up distorted like in generations 20+.
amazing that the audio managed to hold up for 21 generations
By the 18th generation it's just nightmare fuel
Excellent demonstration, I wonder how many generations a VHS copy can go down before complete audio/video deterioration, also good as a gauge to determine what generation copy a video is, I used to do VHS trades and I have gotten some real shockers in my time that exceed 6th generation!
Video signals are ~3MHz, vs. audio which peaks at ~30kHz. Higher frequency signals are more sensitive to noise and signal degradation so that's why it takes nearly ten times as many generations for audio to become incoherent (neglecting loss of volume).
If we say the end point of audio coherence is 24th gen then 2.4th (round down to 2nd) is where video coherence is lost, and it is as the colors have already begun to bleed and detail has been lost.
The TV is so weak, It loses the quality of it.
5th time around we get the normal quality of porn
💀
Like looking through someone's mind on the journey of dementia.
The sound survived 22nd generation.
YES!!!
by gen 16 the audio is botched to a the point of quality that reminds me of antique phonograph wax cylinders
I saw a demonstration like this on TV long ago, but they had to point a camera at a TV screen (back then, the bad sync would play havoc with the broadcast equipment). Nice to see a demonstration like this with direct feed video. Did you use a time base corrector to stop the picture rolling?
"The video is Fading like a flower by Roxette"
This sums up your video perfectly.
16th generation looks like old school cable scrambling
Finishing the video, then restarting it is like going from crappy quality analog TV, to crisp, digital, 1080p.
The difference between the first generation / second generation is extremely big, I don't think the second VCR you used was in acceptable condition for this test
Chapters:
1st Generation: 0:01
2nd Generation: 0:19
3rd Generation: 0:37
4th Generation: 0:55
5th Generation: 1:14
6th Generation: 1:32
7th Generation: 1:50
8th Generation: 2:09
9th Generation: 2:27
10th Generation: 2:46
11th Generation: 3:04
12th Generation: 3:22
13th Generation: 3:41
14th Generation: 4:00
15th Generation: 4:18
16th Generation: 4:36
17th Generation: 4:55
18th Generation: 5:14
19th Generation: 5:32
20th Generation: 5:51
21st Generation: 6:10
22nd Generation: 6:27
23rd Generation: 6:42
By the 3rd generation, it's just like a SECAM television signal, with the "SECAM-fire" color bleeding effect. By the 18th generation to the 22nd generation, it's just like a television signal being received via Sporadic E, or even PAL tapes played back in a non-PAL VCR. By the 23rd generation, it's just like a television signal being received via F2 skip.
Nerd...
Ryan Dobson I'm a TV DXer since 2007 and i recognize TV DX signals from far and how they look like on analog TV.
Yeah. Secam sucks! My country used that system in the 80s. All tapes recorded in secam have that red/blue snow effect...
Fivos Sakellis Aha i see you're from Greece (as your profile picture has the EPT logo, the Greek national broadcaster). Here in Malaysia everything uses PAL from VHS tapes all the way to game consoles (Some game consoles here are NTSC-M) and TV transmissions (Malaysia currently adopts PAL-B/G television standard, with NICAM-I stereo system). Analogue switch-off is scheduled by next year with all transmissions making the transition to digital television - followed with Singapore by 2018 and the rest of Southeast Asia by 2020.
How absolutely terrifying... like something out of a horror movie. Like it's all going to disappear.
Is this what dying feels like?
Rikers Beard Like dying? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Yes.
Yes, but then your 1st generation copy gets transferred to DVD, so when you get copied after that point, there's no degradation and you've become immortal.
But then some jackass encodes you at a pointlessly low bitrate, and you become that slow kid who pushes buggies at the grocery store.
my old vhs home videos are all at 7th generation quality nowadays. they deteriorated SO FREAKING MUCH over the last 20 years....
I heard the voice through all 23 generations
I was expecting a twist:
24th generation : Perfect HD version of the video.
And to think digital media isn't any better, not because the technology is the same but preservation is an effort, and in today's age nobody puts in nearly as much care or effort as they did back then, to think of the lost or unrecoverable media that has been lost, it really is a shame.
The creepiest thing about this was how the sound didn't deteriorate much until close to the end of the copying cycle.
Unironically VHS engineers focused too much in the audio even having digital audio over the analog is kind of weird that they dont focused on the image too.
@@HIDHIFDB They tried with SVHS in the late 80s. Nobody bought it cause it needed better quality tapes (read: more expensive), had to have everything hooked up via SVideo cables to make use of the better quality in the first place and the biggest technical drawback was that the underlying black and white image was higher resolution, but the color information wasn't much better than standard VHS, so the image was sharper overall but color was still pretty smeary. Too many drawbacks for semi-professional use, too expensive for average joe. Standard VHS was seen as "good enough". Some companies still didn't get the memo and developed VHS into D-VHS (Digital VHS, capable of 720p and 1080i video) some 12 years later in the early 00s, with predictable results: nobody bought them either
This must be what dementia feels like...
if you went into my mind you would see a 20th generation VHS copy of Feel Good Inc playing on repeat.
Kindof glad everyone switched to digital.
I thought this video was gone forever. I tried looking for it multiple times within the last few years and could never find it for some reason. I'm glad to see it's still kicking.
In the 21th generation(06:09), I see some words(load lagbiljetter ocksa)? What is it?
I don't know but Google thinks it's Norwegian and the only thing it translates is the last bit (ocksá) being "too"
Lord. having grown up on vhs we had so many tapes that were dubbed to death. especially old punk concerts. you can barely see them but they are all we had of certain things