One thing I've noticed is that people playing VHS tapes today will say how terrible they look. But that's because they are playing them back on a modern LCD TV with a terrible composite conversion. If you really want to experience analog VHS correctly, it is best viewed on a CRT. Preferably one about 12 inches.
Even on my 42" LCD, my VHS collection comes up looking perfect (by VHS standards). I imagine things like 4k UHD displays might be a different story but a 1080 display has no issues whatsoever with scaling it up.
Apologies for not contributing to the topic at hand, but I must say it’s pretty cool to see you on a Linus vid. Obviously not the most unlikely combo, but still surprised me.
You are absolutely right. It might still be a night and day difference compared to DVD and of course Bluray but it seems to be very common nowadays on RUclips talk of VHS and analog video in general as if it was total technical stone age. Which it wasn´t. At least not as it is represented on youtube. Most of the time they pull out the most generic featureless VHS machine, they can find and wonder how bad the quality is (even the DVHS player in this video is not top of the line for analog video, there have been more advanced, pure SVHS machines for that). And also, of course, there was S-Video connection and S-VHS, which was not too far away from the DVD by qualitiy standards, but nobody cares about technical details, when it is much easier to make a few jokes, and move on. But however, this youtube video actually is a quite nice look back at DVHS at least, nice 🙂.
Video mastering professional here. :) What you might be experiencing is likely the result of the 2008 Universal fire, where many of the masters and the original negatives/intermediates that were used to make the masters were destroyed. At this vintage, the master that made the D-VHS was likely make from a duplicate copy of the original negative (called a "timed inter-positive, effectively a negative of the negative) which is only a single film generation removed. The Universal fire required one of the largest remastering projects in the history of the industry, many of which were made from "safety" copies, which are film copies many generations removed from the versions they made the original masters from. This is one of the factors that would help explain the film grain difference as well. (The other the technology used to scan/transfer the film into a digital form, but that's a deeper discussion...) Not to disparage the work of the industry too much, but some of these replacement masters were also done on tight turn-arounds and may not have been as faithful of a replication of the original as time and budget would allow. Hope this helps explain what you might be seeing, and why certain films might look different than you would expect, or remember. That fire destroyed a considerable amount of archival media and recordings, and we'll never get back some of what was lost. (Many original audio masters were also destroyed.) The Hurricane, as far as I can tell, was released on Bluray is 2014, well into the time a replacement master would have been used. And since the encoding parameters between D-VHS and Bluray vary so much, it would not have been possible to use the previous encode for the Bluray.
@lowandapapa Beside that (btw Sony Picture Entertainment had a similar issue with its copies - but for different reasons) there were technical problems too. In the early 2000 the industry still had a lot to learn about digitizing film. One of the more obvious, but common mistakes was to use the film perforation as the reference for frame registration/positioning - when any good projectionist or cameraman of the day would tell you that the position of the frame relative to the perforation varied quite a bit depending on the device that exposed the film. Look at early DVDs and see how the opening credits "tremble" on screen. And don't get me started on chemical vs. optical scratch removal... Ah the good old days!
I wonder if you could rip the data off the D-Theater copy of "The Hurricane" and run it through QTGMC and/or Topaz Video Enhance AI and get a better copy than the BluRay then. I'd really like to play with that MPEG 2 file if it were possible to get it off and decrypt it.
Thank you for this info :) Very interesting to read, and to understand a bit more about how this works . (For instance, I believe I had a 'digitally remastered' version of Star Wars.. But on VHS, if I remember correctly... Which seems odd to me now :) Either way, it had slipped my mind until today) I understand a little more than in the olden days about what mastering actually is/does (from a music perspective). So I guess it could make sense, even for something that is ultimately distributed in an analog format. However, I never considered the "copy of a copy of a copy" part of the endeavor :) (The deterioration aspect, I mean.) It FEELS - (but I'm not sure if it IS) - a little akin to woodblock prints, where the original can be copied so many times before the details of the original carving begin to fade. Is there, in fact, a finite number of times that film can be watched or copied before the quality diminishes? (I've always wondered about that) Anyways, thanks for sharing :)
Before DTheater, there existed an even more obscure format called W-VHS. It was an *analog HD* format and could record up to 1080i. It's based in part on the MUSE Hi-Vision video system, which had been used in primarily in japan for HD television broadcasts and HD Laserdisc
I remember my neighbour across the street who collected new obscure tech had like the first plasma screen I think in our whole city. He had a plasma in '96 to go with his laser disc player and my mouth would drop to the floor when I watched it.
Agree, though it was mostly marketed towards the professional market (unlike D-VHS which was supposed to be a consumer format). I'm sometimes amazed about how little of past tech is known by the younger generation (I'm in my 40s and was in the CE industry in the '00s and '10s).
@@stefanglasenhardt3959 I would say the most surreal (nay, eerie) videos I've ever watched on RUclips are some HD recordings of NY taken in mid 1999… ruclips.net/video/xFqmzqIn2_Y/видео.html
I was one of the crazy mofo’s who bought D-VHS player, when they came out. You have understand: we kept *hearing* about the miracle of high-definition. The problem was, you couldn’t find a demo, ANYWHERE. I literally couldn’t take the suspense any longer, pooled my scant resources together, and took the plunge. Needless to say, my brain MELTED, upon first seeing the absolute GLORY of HD. I watched U571, about 100 times, just marveling at the quality before me. I also picked up an antenna for my house, because the local OTA stations, WERE broadcasting in HD. One thing a lot of people don’t realize, is that virtually ALL of the NY/NJ HD broadcasts, were being done from atop the World Trade Center. When they were demolished, our ability to view those OTA broadcasts, went with it. Seems such a petty thing to have been bothered by, considering the sheer HORROR of what occurred, but as an AV Zombie, it did hurt a bit.
If you find D-VHS strange, I'll tell you that HD Laser Discs have existed for a relatively long time, even if only in Japan. So a Laser Disc with 1080i and up to 5.1 DTS sound
Man the first time I saw a Laser Disc I was in awe they just looks so futuristic. Also confused the hell out of my 10 year old brain when halfway through the movie it said "flipping sides" or whatever I knew about flipping over records and was like how is it flipping the disc over in that (relatively) small case when in reality it was just moving the laser/reflector to the top of the player not attempting to flip a 12" disc in a 4" tall case. Later models had two different lasers and were a bit more streamlined in their transition.
It's hard to aquire D-Theater tapes but I have a pretty healthy collection of them. If you ever want to go back down the D-Theater route, reach out to me. There's a bunch of unopened tapes I have as well as my personal favorite, The Mummy and The Mummy returns and I can't help but defend the D-VHS for how perfect it looks. Universal was one of the studios that really put the most in to releasing D-Theater tapes. Other studios like Sony and Paramount just didn't see the value in it. Hence why most those movies, are Universal releases.
I was selling TVs at circuit city when the DT players were on the market. Never saw the HD tapes on shelves. The PS2 changed the market with DVD 📀. It was much cooler 😎 and the disk format made the shelf look futuristic for your movies.
I worked at JVC when this format came our. It was a huge jump in technology at the time. The core tech was derived from D-5, D-9 and DVC. Early cousin ( track ing for data) was audio format Alesis ADAT ( the decks were made by JVC and the tapes) . The actual tape was a very grade low drop out, extremely durable and designed for digital data. For several years D-VHS was used by movie industry for dailies as it could be encrypted and password protected! I was an amazing format and challenging to work on at the time ( 5 day training seminar just be allowed to work on them only a few techs at factory service were trained). At this point many of decks need to have the capacitors on the D-A boards replaced as well as some of the process boards.
@@Kevfactor Well the thing is that the tape wasn't _really_ VHS, but a tape cartridge with different technology inside that was similarly sized/shaped. Since there are tape technologies these days that can store stupidly large amounts of data (not to mention modern compression), it'd be 100% possible to create a tape that stored 8k--or larger--video. (Magnetic tapes have so many downsides compared to discs and other modern storage that it wouldn't be realistic to ever develop, of course, haha.)
@@Kevfactor you definitely could, you’re just encoding it with binary data. You will still be susceptible to dropouts as the tape degrades with use and time, so it’s not worth doing. The wider the tape and the faster the tape speed, the more reliable it becomes. There just isn’t a reason to use magnetic tape anymore.
This is nuts. I remember when this came out but I'm from the hood. No person I knew could afford a thing like that. I'd since forgotten this format ever happened. This is mindblowing.
I remember going to compute shows and arguing with other builders about firewire vs USB...Wow....firewire. The format wars were crazy man. Remember having to decided whether to invest in HD DVD or BluRay?
I'm still shocked that I've never heard of Digital VHS before now. I grew up on VHS tapes, and I seriously thought the next step up was DVD and all disc formats beyond that. This is a revelation, honestly.
Back in the days before Blu-ray I sailed the seven seas and "acquired" as many HDTV rips as possible, but D-Theater captures were the prized possessions. The movie Family Man with Nic Cage is another example were the D-Theater version is still the best looking version to date.
Mastering and data rate are the most important. There's some really bad DVD's with really low data rates and they can look like a VHS. This brought back memories of the data protection on VHS called Macrovision. A simple way to disable it was pass the output of the VHS through a 'video enhancer' box or a video mixer. Ah the memories of the glory of VHS. And the Format wars never seem to stop. Regular Show certainly focused on that nightmare.
There's also some really good DVDs. Found season 1 of Malcolm in the middle and the quality looks way better than it does streaming, it's even 60fps in most parts. Shit, even some burned movies from 10 years ago look better than streaming
I have 2 copies of an anime movie called Spriggan based off a Manga. The first one I bought was some Catonese version with english subs. It looked like a rip if a VHS, but the case and everything was super legit, very high effort. I ended up buying the rerelease and swapped cases lol.
There's the little button on the side of VHS tapes that allows the tape cover to be flipped up. The machines do this when you put a cassette in so the machine can get at the tape. Easy way to view the tape inside without unraveling anything.
This was totally fascinating. As someone who is really interested in video quality for older movies and videos this was really cool to see. Glad you guys stuck with it through 2 years.
Fun? More like sad asf. Seriously the distributor must truly despise James Cameron - 12 years to make Avatar and another huge break before Avatar 2 and he doesn't make a tiny amount of time to OK some new home video releases of his old stuff.
@@yodasama_productions I’ve heard that Spanish blu-ray is a either a bootleg or official through a shady loophole and not endorsed by James Cameron or the studio. It’s also a very dated master and not the superior, more recent one featured on streaming services.
I love these kinds of videos on obscure formats! I would love to see Linus and the guys take on Laserdisc since it was in the same era as VHS. While obsolete and relatively forgotten compared to VHS and even DVD, it’s still great to break out a Laserdisc every once in a while and watch a classic movie!
@@nooneinpart Not so much an attempt as that's just how physics worked out. Colours were even more crazy in the early days... using bleeding inherent in TVs to create colour blends.
No, it's because they pause the video. There's only one field on the screen. Of course that results in "staircases". It's not there when the video plays at normal speed.
The same issues why really old game consoles look uglier on modern tv's. And why you might want to throw some kind of soften/filter over it. Because CRT was a natural soften filter, but actual pixels on an actual screen and you see all the flaws.
@@MasticinaAkicta Yes, except in this particular case the issue is only because they pause the VCR, which results in it only displaying one field on the screen.
It never took off because it got to the market too late. By 2002, DVD players were starting to eek down into the $200 range (about what a VCR cost in the 90s) and video stores started building up decent DVD collections. Had high-definition VHS come around in 1997 or so, it may have had at least a few years of a run.
Well, it did begin in 1997, but since it was still a new technology when it came out, it was expensive, just like any new technology. Not only expensive, but not yet prevalent because it was new. But yes, it was too little too late, as video "tape" was getting superceded by optical technology because as we all know optical was a more rugged format on a plastic disc, beginning in the mid 1980's with CD's. And you can also skip around on that disc instead of waiting to a certain place on a tape through rewind or forward, whether VHS/DVHS tape, tape cassette or R2R. Tape had its negative quirks. And of course, the output on optical was cleaner. VHS sales, on the whole, also dropped by the early 2000's. I still have many VHS players/recorders & piles of VHS tapes (I have retail Star Wars original trilogy on VHS). But no D-VHS.
@@robwebnoid5763 Adding on to this, beyond the prohibitive price tag, it genuinely wouldn't surprise me if a sizeable portion of potential buyers simply didn't understand D-VHS was a different technology. As someone who has at least somewhat of an acuity for technology, the name reminded me of both HD-DVD and the Wii U. Companies often take the easier road, assume the market is full of monkey brain and to make the next big thing sound as simple as possible "You know that tape player you've got at home? Well here's a better one!". People are typically "smart" monkey brain so Playstation 2 to Playstation 3 is "Bigger number means big better" whereas adding a letter or two to a common acronym which designates a step in technological evolution isn't _different enough_ to trigger the "Oooo, shiny!" part of monkey brain.
@@daggern15 ... Yes I think that's a good observation with the naming aspect & how it affects consumers subliminally. What would you have called it, if not "D-VHS"? Would it have made more sense if it was called "VHS 2" or "VHS Max" (like Betamax, heh), or "Next Gen VHS" or maybe write it all out as"Digital VHS"? And "D-Theater" is also confusing. The other thing too was probably the advertising & the hype. There was not enough of it. Before I saw this Linus video about D-VHS, I realized I most likely forgot about this tech. It's been 25 years. Perhaps there was just not enough ad campaigns. I remember the failed Betamax so much more than I remember D-Vhs. And the world also knows more about the different major types of optical discs (CD, DVD, BD) than we do D-Vhs. So yes, this tech was too late & perhaps its naming was confusing. And people have probably invested more in DVD than DVHS because DVD had more of the hype & reviews & how it was more revolutionary than any sort of tape technology because DVD's output was sharper, with people already having the stigma & experience of VHS' blurry SD output. And yeah, the cost of DVHS was indeed prohibitive. And also the copyright headaches by film studios as said in the video. And DVHS should have probably started in the early 1990's instead of the late 1990's to give it a better head start (hindsight) ... with big budget campaigning. In a way, both DVD & DVHS came out the same year, with DVD winning out, in the same way that Betamax & VHS came out the same time, with VHS winning. The long-lasting king, VHS, finally got overthrown after about 25 years. My question though is, would a regular VHS tape have a relatively cleaner output on a DVHS player? One thing for sure is all my VCRs are still thankfully in working condition & to maximize a clean output, I clean the head drum with isopropyl when necessary, which helps keep the image was warping too much. I have also sometimes (well, rarely), opened a VHS tape to put some lithium grease at the bottom to make it ride better, although I'm unsure yet if that actually makes any difference, it's been years so I can't recall. And one thing I have also done with DVD is to watch it through a video image sharpening process on a PC so that the details come out just a little bit more, as if somehow its resolution went up somewhere between DVD & BD.
There are some niche groups out there that have defeated D-Theater's encryption. Information about how they did it is pretty hard to find, but it has been done.
I have the exact same Mitsubishi player (HS-HD2000U) that you started with. Got mine for next to nothing at a closeout, as it has case damage and no remote. That said, it's still shockingly useful, even though it won't play D-Theater tapes: that glowing green button on the front is for the built-in TBC (Time Base Correction), which clears up the playback immensely on older standard VHS tapes. It's especially noticeable on damaged tapes that won't produce an acceptable image on anything else, in those cases it's night and day. So if you have a need for transferring old VHS tapes to digital, this is the absolute best player I've ever found for that specific use case - it really works wonders. Cheers!
One thing I would like to note about the VHS tapes is that they often didn't use the highest quality tapes. I think the 8-Bit Guy has a video where he recorded a movie from DVD onto a new old stock high-quality VHS tape and compared it against the same movie unopened on VHS, and his recording was notably higher quality than the VHS you would have bought in stores.
that sounds right since they would have to mass produce the tapes using higher quality tapes would have been super expensive. they would have to produce fewer copies and sell them for higher prices which might have a negative effect on profits. also They thought majority of people dont have the proper setups to get the maximum visual quality anyways
VHS wasnt all that great to begin with. It was just the more affordable option for the home movie industry to adopt. Betamax was better but beibg made by sony, it cost more.
Also I have not noticed ANY degridation of VHS tapes (due to time) in my collection, I watched some last week which looked as good as they ever did 30 years ago.
I was deep in the anime Fan sub scene in the 90's so we did lot of fan subs on D-VHS from Laser Disk Masters. it also meant that coping D-VHS didnt suffer as bad from nth order copies like analog VHS did with fan subs. some of us also converted D-VHS fan subs to VCD in the early DVD player days in 99' though 01'. but by 02' divx and broadband had take over the fan sub world and digital subs where the thing now as bittorrent took over from newsgroups.
Seeing film grain doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lesser quality, if anything it’s a higher resolution scan of the film. Film grain is physically present as a chemical reaction on the originally shot film when developed, so you’re gonna get more of that grainy detail on a higher resolution digitization of that film.
@Ivan Zhao I think the goal is to remove as much grain as possible without removing any detail. Like that star wars remaster project that uses old degraded film as a source and needed a massive amount of denoising.
@@Greenleaf_ I believe you're talking about the Team Negative version which was indeed pretty rough but in recent years a new project has popped up called the 4k77 project which is like the holy grail of film preservation yes it's still grainy but it has so much detail that if cleaned up even slightly it looks like it coulda been filmed yesterday and they were lucky as hell to find a print in such amazing shape to get such a good scan. Previously all anyone had before either of these was a mix of different official releases on dvd, vhs, laserdisk, and the shitty special edition bluray which is one reason why even the crappier looking early film scans were important since they were cleaned up and used to make Harmy's Despecialized edition which I highly suggest looking up the making of video for cause that thing took an insane amount of work like comping together shots from multiple releases and in some cases using the special edition as a base and remaking some effects from scratch. I know you didn't ask but I just find this shit endlessly fascinating.
@@Greenleaf_ You can make an old film look much nicer with a lot of work and modern technology. I've recently seen the remastered version of Robocop and it looks like it was shot in 2020. The older BluRay release on the other hand looks like you've been transported back in time to a movie theater in 1987 where you get to see a theater copy of the film, including some dust and scratches. Because that's what it is, they just scanned an old copy of the film with close to no remastering.
@@Greenleaf_ "I think the goal is to remove as much grain as possible without removing any detail." Impossible. Film grain contains the detail. The detail is contained nowhere else. _Any_ film grain removal = detail removal, by definition. Film grain = the silver halide crystals that reacted to light to form the image in the first place. People who find film grain objectionable are daft.
"Seeing film grain doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lesser quality" It _never_ means it's lesser quality. It _always_ means it's higher quality, specifically, higher bitrate. It takes a lot of bitrate to preserve film grain (which = detail). The first thing that disappears when you lower the bitrate on a video encode is the film grain (which, again, = detail). Linus and his cohorts are nincompoops.
If you want something to really blow your mind, look up the demo reel for the D-VHS tape. It's of New York circa 1993, and it's absolutely surreal to see in 1080i.
Movies shot on film has a resolution way higher than 1080i. So you can go back to the 50s, and as long as the film is digitalised in resent years or shown in a theater on a film projector, the quality is better than many movies released today.
You should get hold of a Sony trinitron tube flat glass crt... They were the holy grail of crt monitors and tvs. They used electrical magnetic bands in the back to straighten out the curviture of the crt laser caused by the apex of a single point. Incredible for the time.
Yea, I agree. I also think Linus has not seen the colors of analog in a long time. Being he is so into HDR you would think he would go back. To check what the color representation used to be before digital. But it seems he has not.
I have a flat trin, picked it up for less than a 100 euro a few years ago in a thrift shop, (use it with my sli 3dfx pc and old consoles) they had no clue what they had! It was an amazing screen for the time but when I compare it to an Oled it's not in the same league
Born in 79, lived in Spain for 20 years, and Norway the latter 20+ years, never heard of D-Theater. But I still have a 42" Plasma Panasonic TV (HD-Ready) I use as my daily tv. Never had a "Full HD" or "4K" TV yet.
I've got two of those JVC DTheater VCRs. You didn't mention that you can record up to 24 HOURS on one single VHS cassette in 480 mode. It was great for recording from our cable box over Firewire at the time. You could then transfer it via Firewire to a PC for easy editing. I was living LARGE in 2003! LOL!
"You could then transfer it via Firewire to a PC for easy editing. I was living LARGE in 2003! LOL!" Yeah, windows XP came with drivers that would recognize and support cable/satellite STBs and D-vhs decks.
We used to have someone send over HDD from the US to the UK full of content. Then play it back from a PC via the Firewire to the D-theater player and out of the component video. Stuck that through a Lumagen video processor and it was absolutely brilliant. We even had a 2 hour demo video made up for use at the CEDIA trade shows for a couple of years when we were JVC Pro UK distributors. Good Times! 😁
Man, and I thought I was living large with I stumbled onto my 1st "HiFi" VCR in 2002 lol Who remembers them? The video quality was only slightly better than your SD VCR, but the audio was CRYSTAL CLEAR 😳 It just blew my mind, since my last VCR was bought in 1999 and had HORRIBLE audio, so this new one felt like alien tech to me 😅 Audio was most important to me since I recorded alot of sports games back then, and hearing the roar of the crowd in it's clearest form was simply amazing at the time, so this D-VHS stuff probably would have killed me lol
@@KoolKeithProductions all but the very very cheapest VCRs had Hi-Fi by the late 1990s, it was new tech in 1985 or so! Our NBC affiliate went stereo in 1986 and there was NO missing Friday Night Videos... wish I still had all those tapes. Even in 6 hour mode the audio was still good.
Large TV broadcasters used until recently (~2015) cassette tapes that could reach 1080p60 at 880Mbps and even 3D like Sony HDCAM SR. It was the state of art for many years due the high image quality and media durability. The high-precision mechanical technology was insane.
DVHS was really popular for News broadcasters as far as I know. It was used to record pretty much any footage you could think of for news, and then used as the playback source during broadcast.
Your referring to the Digital-S or D-9 format that was (surprise) made by JVC. It used nearly the same VHS cassette body form, the window and a few other details were different. It used a high quality metal tape, similar to D-VHS tapes. I believe you can use D-9 tapes for D-VHS; punch a hole in the right spot to fool a D-VHS deck to record and play from a D-9 tape. So they are an alternative source for D-VHS tape stock, or if nothing else you could open up the shell and swap the guts out of a VHS cassette and do the same hole punch. D-9 used the same codec as MiniDV, but with higher bitrate. They were used for newsgathering at some stations but not super popular as a format, Fox News used them extensively when they first got on the air. However Digital Betacam, and later Betacam SX as well as HDCAM (for HD video) won out the digital tape formats for most newsrooms, as well as DV based DVCAM (Sony) and DVCPro (Panasonic) that were also extensively used in newsgathering. D-9 never really got much of a following.
As DVDs (and Blu-rays for that matter) soon turned out to be even easier to make legal or illegal copies of, I think it is safe to assume that in the end what mattered for manufacturers was optical media being dirt cheap and fast to produce on top of being convenient for consumers.
@@souljastation5463 yah ya can if its by using with oldemr vcr machines apparently for rhe ones from before 1986? They can be used for it to do the record mode but why would one want to anyways lols
@@bsanchez3563 Of course today no one would want to copy a VHS, but back in the days it was useful. We used to make copies of anime (the unprotected ones) and pass them out.
You know, I really appreciate how much time LMG will commit to any given video topic. To be working on something for multiple years, even if not continuously, shows great dedication to making sure they have all their information correct and that they do a wide gamut of testing. I love these deep dives into older tech!
I'd never heard of D-VHS before, but seeing that stylized logo in the middle of the tape door on the Mitsubishi triggered a memory, I'm pretty sure my grandparents had a D-VHS player back in the day. I wish I had known!
I remember when I first saw HD content, my reaction was very similar. It was a PGA golf match and I just spent the entire time amazed by how green the picture of grass was and that there was variation in green shadings. I kept checking to see if the saturation was way off or something but then comparing other colors had no signs of bleed over. It blew my mind. It was painful to go back home to my SD stuff.
I saw this on Technoan a few years ago. I had dreams of buying up every dvhs tape and a player just for the novelty but now Linus has featured it the prices are probably going to go through the roof on eBay.
they were already expensive even before techmoan's video. scarcity + unreliable players + they were originally very expensive. I have a handful of D-Theater rips of movies (raw MPEG-2 .ts pulled straight from the cassettes by enterprising seafarers) and its interesting to see what older HD masters of films looked like, Fight Club comes to mind.
But don't the tapes only have a certain shelf life? I was collected Sega Megadrive games a couple of years ago but notices some games stopped working.(Probably due to capacitors no longer working). My point being older formats tend to degrade over time and it might be worth collecting old media because of that.
DVD's looked so chunky when large flatscreens were coming out, but then DVD upscaling was pretty phenomenal for its time as well. Fun fact: When they were (finally) making the dvd version of Ridley Scott's first flick, The Duellists, almost no work had to be done. Because it originally only got a 1-week viewing when it came out, the prints were in such amazing shape having barely seen the light of day for decades. The colours just pop.
I don't think it was just the scale, DVDs were presumably designed predominantly for CRTs, which they look great on. The inherent characteristics of CRTs seem to nullify much of the compression artifacts of DVDs.
@@DoubleMonoLR Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, after years of vhs, playing a dvd on crt looked like I was living in the future. I'm just commenting about 'the next' bit of tech (large flat hd screens) and how all of a sudden the image reverted back to being horrible... but then upscaling appears and it's all good.
Our first DVD player was $350 and played on 65” rear projection TV. I remember it looked so good. I can’t imagine today watching 480 resolution on such a big screen.
A friend of mine back in the late 90's / early 2000's got quite a large LaserDisc collection going. He used to record the movies onto VHS for his friends and while you only got standard VHS quality image and sound, because the source was so good, they just seemed very crisp. Then whole HD-DVD thing happened and blu-ray killed all competition. In the mid 2000's though, there were some really awesome quality HD-DVD sourced movies on various dodgy websites, usually in M2TS containers, that blew me away back then. Watching those movies, some absolute classics too, on a 22" Asus IPS really showed me for the first time what HD movies were all about.
Yup. I love vinyl but I've spent good money on bad pressings from bad masters. Some of the cheaper ones I have are much better. My pressing of Little Dark Age is probably my best vinyl but it was cheaper than a lot of my other albums.
This is very interesting info on D-VHS, which I've never seen in operation. I have 1 quibble. Describing standard (SD) VHS as "240i" seems to be an error. SD VHS tapes were intended to output to SD TVs, including CRTs. Their video would be interlaced, at either 525 lines (=480i of visible picture) or 625 lines in PAL/SECAM areas (=576i of visible picture). The "240" seems to refer to the fact that SD VHS could only display about 240 black-to-white transitions *along* each horizontal line (row of pixels, sort of). What it does mean, is a fuzzy picture on SD VHS. It could produce at best, a 240 vertical line pattern on a screen.This was far below broadcast quality even for SD. For comparison S-VHS (which was still SD) could do about 400 vertical lines, nearly broadcast quality. It's a confusing because "lines" is used for horizontal and vertical resolution measures.
Yeah shit bugged me too. At best he was either mistaking horizontal resolution or field resolution for actual vertical resolution. Personally I think the description should always be "[max rows displayed per full frame][i/c/p][number of full frames per second]", with i/p/c being interlaced (alternating even/odd-line fields that pair for full frames), checkerboard (even/odd-pixel checkerboard fields that pair for full frames), or progressive (just full frames). NTSC VHS could do 240p60 or it could do 480i30. I think PAL tapes were 288p50 and 576i25,
@@ItsBillsFault Hi; thanks for your reply.I agree with your ideas re specifying resolutions, as TV images are made of horizontal rows of pixels, that can be used to display so many black-white transitions per row. Putting many such rows together can display vertical bar patterns, but calling the latter "lines" causes endless confusion, especially the silly way some CCTV systems are specified. I'd not conceived of VHS doing double the horizontal (i.e, |||||||| lines) resolution for the progressive frame. Also, VHS horizontal resolution was described as 240 "lines" even for PAL/SECAM, as far as I have heard. SVHS vastly improved this, to about 400 lines horizontal resolution (380?? for NTSC?). I have 3 reasons for doubting the "480 and 576" *horizontal* resolution figures: 1.) The horizontal resolution is limited by the luminance bandwidth available from VHS tape (I think it was around 3MHz, c/f 4MHz bandwidth for broadcast NTSC and 5MHz (ish) for PAL ). 2.) AFAIK, VHS wouldn't handle progressive scan for either NTSC or PAL, as the record/play head switching is fundamentally linked to the framing pulses between odd and even FIELDS. (Incidentally that meant that VHS machines would happily record 405-line signals as the rate was also 25 frames/sec (50 fields/sec) for that system). 3.) 480 and 576 happen to be the number of active rows (*vertical resolution*) in NTSC and PAL/SECAM respectively (hence "480i, 480p, 576i, 576p, often seen in monitor options). The remaining 40 or so lines (to make it 525 or 625) are taken up with frame sync pulses, etc, that keep frame synchronisation happening, and also teletext. So I think you may be thinking of that. IF I'm wrong about any of these, I'd be genuinely happy to be corrected. I'd not heard of "checkerboard" scanning, but I can see how that would work, at least for a system whose (horizontal) resolution could cope with it.
@@mt-mg7tt I make a point of talking about rows and columns when I talk about resolution. Occasionally I will say scanlines but I never say lines, because too many people don't know if I mean vertical (top to bottom) lines or horizontal lines (left to right), whereas most people know a scanline is horizontal. 240p60 refers to 240 left-to-right rows or scanlines, not columns. This is referred to as vertical resolution, i.e. the number of rows/scanlines stacked vertically to form an image rectangle. Horizontal resolution would be the best possible number of pixels per row/scanline. I don't know what the various horizontal resolutions are for the different magnetic tape formats. The height of a scanline was constant within NTSC or PAL, so the vertical resolution was always reliable, but the medium might encode more or fewer pixels per scanline, which is where the confusion might be coming in, as the 240p60 mode could indeed also have 240 (wide) pixels per scanline, giving a net resolution of 240 x 240, (w x h) but both being 240 is just an arbitrary choice. I think the maximum number of pixels per line was in the neighborhood of 720, and beyond that you could NOT rely on standard equipment decoding it successfully, meaning you would be out of standard. Some equipment encoded far fewer than 730 columns/pixels per scanline, either because its internal frame buffer wasn't that wide, or because the backing medium didn't store that many columns/pixels per row. At any rate, annoyingly the horizontal resolution (pixels/columns per row) is almost never described in the standard nomenclature. 240p60 could describe anything from 240x240 to 720x240. This is probably because the same TV could display both widths without caring, but would balk if you changed the height. I guess this is because the number of scanlines is decidedly discrete, while pixels per scanline is pretty analog. BTW checkerboard only exists in certain very fringe digital encodings. You can consider that one not to appear on the final exam. :) Normally it's only i/p.
@@ItsBillsFault Aye to all that. The number of horizontal rows (scan lines) is basically fixed for a particular video system - it's what defines it along with frame rate.
He's just advertised that LTT has the tech to dub your obscure DVHS to a modern digital format, same as he did a month or two ago with clean dubs of Linus's summer camp videos.
I remember watching an ad for DVD as an amazing new format at the start of a VHS tape. It had zoomed in comparrisons of portions of VHS output beside incredibly clear DVD output. It was full of colour and movement and featured the 'amazing' sound quality you could be experiencing right now! "That looks amazing! Can't wait to try it out." said Rob. "But we're watching it on a VHS, Rob" "I know, but the DVD bit looks soo good." "But.. ..this is a VHS tape.." "Yeah, I heard you. Do you not think it looks amazing?!" Rob wasn't very smart.
Your experience reminds me of getting "remastered" albums on CD. The earliest CDs were often mastered straight from the original mixdown tapes. "Remastered" CDs are often crushed with digital limiting to make it sound louder. (The mantra is louder ALWAYS sounds better.) The result is that the original CDs often have more dynamic range, a more "open" sound, and sometimes a more accurate frequency response (even as analog to digital encoders have gotten better and better) as many "remastered" CDs have boosted lows and highs (resulting in reduced midrange... you know, where the majority of the SOUND is). Just like 4K can look "worse" than digital VHS depending on the master source and the grading, today's "remastered" CDs with better analog to digital encoders, better noise reduction, and decades of experience of restoration, can sound subjectively worse because of the post-processing applied to try to compete with modern compact discs.
I noticed this when I listened to a cassette of van halens 1984 on my walkman, it just sounded so GOOD compared to the digital versions I was used too.
@@TruthDoesNotExist I have that and VHII on cassette. Gotta love flip to the B side. One of my audio professors used to hound on this subject of remasters and compression. He recommended buying original CDs as much as possible, especially if they were minted pre 1995, because they wouldn't have that compression and would have all the dynamic range. Basically as close as digital can get to the dynamic range of vinyl.
Bro I saw this for sale at retail on our base in Okinawa Japan in 2002. It blew my freaking mind. I had never seen it again until this video posted. Thanks for the memory.
@@levoniust of course I’m having trouble finding it right now, but I know it used clips from this D-VHS video of NYC in the 1990’s ruclips.net/video/fT4lDU-QLUY/видео.html
I had the JVC D Theater player with a few D-VHS tapes. The main reason it didn't last was there were just a few movies available. The image on a 120" home theater was incredible at the time and still looked better than Blu-ray. The extra MB data stream per second seem to really help with the color, sharpness and dynamic range. The color was unreal at the time, everything just popped off the screen. I still have the machine and I think 8 tapes. I'll have to connect it up to a flat panel and check it out. One other thing, don't forget about S-VHS tape and laser disc. S-VHS came before DVD and D-VHS. It was only analogue, but looked so much better than VHS. Problem was very very few movies came out in S-VHS format and you had to have a S-VHS player. Laser disc's problem was you could only fit an hour on one side, so you had to flip the disc half way through the movie. Also the discs were huge, the size of a LP record. One movie to watch for showing the excellent capabilities of D-VHS is The Day After Tomorrow I bought the player near the end of the run on sale, I think about $300 and it came with 4 movies
Back in the early 2000's I would set up my VCR to record 6hr loops of those music streaming channels on DirecTV. You'd be surprised how much better the audio quality was compared to MP3 back then. I would then rip those songs to my mini disc player. To this day, those recordings are still some of the best audio I own with the exception being flac.
I too was in the AV industry during the early 2000s and those early Mpeg 2 Blu-ray disc's were awful, they barely looked better than the Superbit DVDs. The Fifth Element's first BR released was so underwhelming Sony had to re-release it in an Mpeg4 format.
I use to point a camcorder at MTV and then play the recorded VHS through the built in camcorder speaker, which I would then hold a mini tape recorder up to. I then mailed the tape to my aunt Susan who would listen to it and learn the music on her Casio keyboard which she would then play to me over the phone so I could easily enjoy high quality reproductions of my favorite song! I still have her recording of No Diggity and that shite is tight!
As noted in other comments, the film source and intermediate mastering format make a huge difference. It makes sense that they did a great job transferring "The Hurricane" to D-VHS both because it was a recent film (all materials easily available) and it was intended as a showcase for the D-VHS format. Later transfers may have been good enough for TV, DVD etc. and not worth the time and money to really spend time/money remastering for Blu-Ray.
There was a copy protection on VHS too. I think it was called "MacroVision". If you connected 2 Vhs Recorders with composite, its was making stuff on the luminance channel resulting in very dark pictures changes to bright and so on.... There were 2 workarounds: 1.) Connecting over HF Modulator - Picture was not good and mono audio. 2.) Get a MacroVision decoder (diy things were sold)
or get a VHS player that didn't have a responsive gain. I remember having a "Tashika" VHS player from about 1989 that could copy from any other VHS player.
@@gordonshumway7465 It was making stuff, it was making random spikes on the offscreen luminance signal lines. A High Frequency modulator might be a way to counter it by inserting fresh sync lines.
When I was going to college for video production, in the early-to-mid 2000s. We used digital video tapes. It was a common industry standard at the time. I didn't know that they did home media releases. Of movies on digital video.
Never thought I would see a video on D-Theater from Linus! As a collector I own a JVC HM-DT100 player, which in my opinion was the swan song of VHS technology. It outputs via HDMI, has a digital TV tuner, and to my knowledge is the only VCR that upconverts regular VHS tapes to 480i.
been a regular watcher of ltt but still he amazes me with uploads like these. my utmost respect to the entire ltt staff for being nothing less then simply amazing!
There was also Laserdiscs back in the mid 80's . Resolution was about 425 lines vertical but the sound was much better than VHS and it was watchable in letterbox format ,witch was a big thing back then . VHS hifi was great for actually recording music.
@@Endemoniada Not quite. Those DVDs were taken from the LD master tapes, not the LDs themselves, and had proper 480-line video instead of LDs ~400. It’s also why they were so grainy - the LDs had noise reduction done later in the process, and Lucasfilm didn’t replicate the process for the DVD. (If that wasn’t confusing enough, they also used the VHS audio for Empire, instead of the LD audio, as the LD audio had at least one glitch in it they didn’t want to replicate.)
@@Muffin_Man177 No John. Actually I first got to use a LD back in 89' when I worked for The Absolute Sound/The Perfect vision magazines. I believe our Pioneer elite was one of the top models we had. TAS was a high end audio review journal ,and TPV was the high end home theater component version. My job was System setups & testing and software acquisition . The best Laser discs were made by the Criterion collection . They were incredible . We were all drooling at the upcoming promise of HDTV as they had it in Japan in early 90's .Some of the best CRT's were not 4x3 aspect ,but closer to widescreen .Sony's XBR's were pro monitors and we had some nice ceiling mount projectors & rear projection sets that were ok . It was a nice jump from VHF & UHF ,old cable & VHS. TAS is still around, new owners ,& most of the original staff are gone.
I owned one of these and it was awesome. They were also backwards compatible with SVHS, not just VHS and I was able to use the FireWire connected to a PC with Windows 7 to capture digital video. The raw file sizes were huge but it worked. The JVC unit I had also had a component video output so you can connect it to either a CRT 16:9 HDTV or a plasma TV. In the early 2000’s there was a large community on AVSForum that used these to record HD movie broadcasts and play them back with their CRT projectors which they looked great on. I remember trading 1080i HD movies with other members and had a pretty good collection of DVHS movies as well as original D-Theater tapes. Watching this brings back memories. Kinda wish I never sold mine on eBay many years ago.
1:52 - AFAIK, most movie DVDs were encoded with MPEG-2 using an *interlaced* profile. Although newer players gave the option to deinterlace that, and output as 480p (or upscaled higher) via HDMI, for many years the best you could get was Composite, S-Video, RGB, then eventually Component for the progressive/upscaling models.
Well, OK, I should expand on that a bit, because somebody is SURE to call me out on it. lol NTSC movies were generally converted using a 3:2 pulldown, so were a bit harder to deinterlace without artifacts, since some fields were a blend of two original movie frames. PAL movies were usually sped up by 4%, to show 24FPS at 25FPS. (two fields per frame, so 50Hz, but each pair of fields was taken from the same original movie frame, so could be easily stitched together again to make one progressive frame.) On later DVD players and TVs, I guess PAL DVDs could be shown at the original 24FPS, if they both supported that. One big downside of the PAL method is they would also pitch-up the audio slightly (yes, even the Dolby Digital / DTS 5.1 tracks before encoding). So things like bass effects were a tiny bit less erm, bassy. I'm SO glad we don't need to use either of those methods now. I always hated interlacing for both movies and video camera footage. Unfortunately, they still used interlacing for 1080i TV broadcasts. I guess to make it easier to do the conversion from the older stuff. Blu-Ray movie disks are all encoded at the original 24FPS, AFAIK, as are most movie streaming services now. (or from digital movie cameras, it was 23.976FPS for a while, or erm, something. I can't remember now.)
Was a lot of differences with PAL and NTSC. DVDs are 480i or 576i (at 60 or 50 fields per second). But they can store progressive 480p or 576p content (at 30/24 or 25 frames per second), and have some special flags and handling to do so.
12:22 - A very good example of a terrible colour grading of an older movie is of The Matrix (1999). The original VHS and DVD had that (fairly) subtle green tint when they were in the Matrix, which was similar to the Director's previous movie "Bound". But on the recent UHD Blu Ray release, the green tiny was SO overblown, and distracting. It was meant to be a subtle hint originally. I think it was perfect on the DVD version (which I watched many many... many times on my first 5.1 and projector setup. lol) I don't know why the movie studios keep thinking they are improving on the original vision when they mess with the colour grading so much. Or maybe it's partly the thing where the consumer "expects" the colours to pop more on the latest 4K release, else they might think they're not getting their money's worth when re-buying the movie they'd already bought four times before? I didn't mind some of the minor changes to the re-release of Star Wars in 1997, but I thought the "dance number" in the Cantina was silly, and unnecessary. I don't agree that movies should ever be messed with too much from their original theatrical form. I'd rather see a classic movie as close to the original presentation, warts and all. (restoration of the frames is fine, like removing scratches and dirt, and boosting colours if the original celluloid lost colour over time. But adding or changing scenes, like when the replaced the shotguns near the end of E.T. with walkie-talkies... no thanks. lol)
@@electronash It wasn’t the UHD Blu-ray of The Matrix that had the overblown green tint, it was the original Blu-ray release. The UHD Blu-ray fixed the issue (and even came with a remastered Blu-ray (something that WB seems to decide on random to do with their UHD Blu-ray releases) that also fixed the issue).
I remember my dad an audiophile and visualphile back in the mid 2000's bought a Pioneer PDP-6010FD 60" Plasma TV, a JVC HM-DH30000U D-Theatre (D-VHS) player/recorder and a Klipsch CS-700 DVD Home Theater System for the home theater. The picture looked amazing and the audio sounded amazing at that time when I watched movies with my brother, mum and dad on a Friday night.
Most Disney and Pixar DVDs had a plasma TV picture set up functionality feature in the menu, helped massively. Also, there was set up DVD called digital video essentials which was a high end picture tuning utility, cost £50 in 2002 just for the disc. I had a Hitachi pd4200 plasma in 2001, you could heat a room with that bad boy. It was 30 kg, try wall mounting that by yourself!
Men, I love you guys. Just the 1.5 minute opening comments alone convince me time and time again that I am not the only geek and that there are actually even bigger nerds then me. What a comforting thought just before Christmas! Love you, guys.🎶🥁🎵
That's pretty awesome! In the 90's most professional music was recorded digitally on what looked like a VHS tape, called ADAT using Alesis ADAT digital multitrack recorders. So this totally makes sense. It totally would have been a hit if they would have come out with this earlier or before DVD. Digital to tape was already being used in the music recording industry for years.
Even before ADAT, the very first CDs were mastered onto Beta analog video tapes - the Sony PCM-F1 encoded the digital audio into a video track that the tape could store.
Never have heard of this format. Very interesting. I just remastered my old high school Senior Video from the class of 2000...that VHS tape lost SO much quality in 22 years, it was pretty scary. I digitally cleaned it up best I could, but, its pretty rough. Would have been so different if this D-VHS had become more mainstream.
D-VHS still had the deterioration that VHS was notorious for. The dropouts were worse because digital tapes tend to do that. Even Mini DV seems to hold up better. Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, and HDCAM were the best magnetic tape formats
@@jamespuso1627 they might still have the decks for duplication and archiving older content. I don’t think it’s being used on the production side anymore. XDCAM and other solid state media has taken over magnetic tape.
What did you use to capture the video? Unless you used some older encoding devices you are probably losing half your Resolution.. many devices made after say 2008 simply drop interlaced frames. Then you have the double whammy that if your hardware encoder didn’t drop the interlaced frame, modern software will ALSO also just ignore it. The industry collectively decided to give interlaced sources the finger about 8-10 years ago. In addition to this, you want a SVHS player that does not lower the bandwidth of an outgoing signal on S-Video ( or a rare one that has HDMI ) With all of these factors in your favor you can get amazingly higher quality from an VHS camera original that.
Another factor in why it failed was probably because of the prominence of the PS2 (and the Xbox to a lesser extent). Someone in a household wanted a new game console, someone wanted an upgraded video player... The VCR was a stand-alone unit. So was a DVD player. But if you just needed something that "could" play DVDs, you could pick up either of the 2 newest consoles. I'm sure there were a lot of PS2s that were purchased "for the kids" that were really purchased to be DVD players after the kids went to bed!
Was going through mum's old shed last week and found the ancient PS2 DVD remote control. We just chucked it in the bin, coz let's face it, who these days still uses their PS2 as a DVD player and doesn't already have one, but it was a cool find. Though in our case, with five kids, the PS2 was absolutely bought as a console first and a movie player second. Got it the same Christmas as the new family PC. Was a very happy bunch of kids that year.
@@tyrannicpuppy It was the same thing with the PS2 in my household...but my Dad did try convincing me to get it earlier, but nope! I wanted the Gamecube, haha
There’s also simply the price. Getting the proper HD experience was already fairly costly in 2006, but 2002 was just that much more so. Something so expensive was pretty much destined to be restricted to an enthusiast niche.
Yeah it occured to me as I was reading the comments and the PS3 being mentioned cementing Bluray as "The standard". The PS2 did that with DVD right as this thing was getting out the gate. Plus with the cost of DVD vs this entire setup it's a pretty open and shut case.
@@NEEDbacon It always seemed like Sony pushed the PS3 not to be the best console, but to get BluRay players into enough homes to make it the standard. The PS3 was super expensive when it came out...but they were like half the cost of contemporary BluRay players!
Amazing how the standard adopted by video games has so much impact. I remember that DVD also established itself at the time largely due to the PS2. Regarding old movies, I don't know if it's the same problem we have with music. Originally analog recordings never sound the same when remastered. The people who were in the study and mixing the sound were doing it for analogue listening as well.
I spent countless hours, as a child, in the electronics section of the local Hudson Bay dept store. The thing that compelled me to do so was a laser disc player. Hooked up to the biggest tube TV I had ever seen in my life. I must have watched A New Hope 80 times. They also had a Vectrex, Colecovision, and a Commodore Vic20. One of the best summers ever.
I worked for Circuit City in 1998 in the DFW area at one of only two stores nationwide that had a 42 inch plasma TV for sale. It had its own room. It cost 20k. One guy flew in from Denver just to look it over before buying one.
When I was 8-13 years old I gamed on a 13” crt with a built in VCR. I was ecstatic. My brother and I got it for Xmas 98. loved that TV. Now when I see CRT tvs or vhs tapes I just laugh at how far the tech has come. Now I have a 65” HDR 4k in my room to game on haha
There were actually copy protection methods for VHS that could potentially foil people trying to capture off of composite or component outputs. It was just a lot easier to defeat compared to digital copy protection.
Just needs a recorder that can fix the maligned sync signal to defeat Macrovision. Back in the days even electronic retailers like Conrad in Germany sold little boxes with two SCART connectors as "Video Enhancers".
@@mirabilis It mucked around with the signals in the Vertical Blanking Interval between frames to mess with the Automatic Gain Control circuit used in VCRs while recording. The way VCRs work, the Macrovision effery doesn't affect playing the tapes, most of the time. For DVDs the Macrovision stuff isn't encoded in the MPEG2 video. There's a copy protection bit set to 1 in the VOB (Video OBject) files that tells the DVD player's analog output circuitry to generate the copy protection signals and insert them into the outgoing video. But that made it fairly easy to convert a DVD player to be "VCR Friendly" by hacking the firmware to ignore the copy protection bit. Most of the early DVD players had firmware that could be flashed by burning a binary file (with the proper name) by itself onto a CD-R or DVD-R. Rewriteable discs typically didn't work for that, even if the player could play audio or DVD or VCD/SVCD off rewriteable discs. Some early DVD players had a hidden menu to disable copy protection or pressing a specific button combo or pattern on the remote would disable it. In the USA all those methods eventually were ferreted out by the studios and DVD player manufacturers sued or threatened into no longer having them available. But in New Zealand, the government banned the sale of DVD players with copy protection. The kiwis were able to record DVD to VHS all they wanted.
One of the problems of remastering back then was that you would transfer film to more film and the grain would increase. Depending on what the pipeline was for a remaster, you could end up with way too much film grain as it all stacks up.
@@tankmchavocproductions6907 It's mainly down to how an analog NTSC signal is structured. Any TV or device designed to receive it is expecting 525 lines of interlaced information (roughly 480 visible). Any deviation from that would render the signal incompatible with most stuff. Even 240p stuff like old game consoles technically output 480i, just both interlaced fields had the same information, making it 240p.
Most flat panel televisions do not interpret the signal from regular VHS properly causing loss of contrast and sharpness. Generally a good quality crt will give much better results. Also vhs doesn't degrade as quickly as we keep seeing advertised...I have a huge collection, many of which are from the 80s and 90s, and they all still look great.
It's actually not just the signal getting interpreted incorrectly but the gamma curve of a CRT is completely different to an LCD, and can't really be accurately reproduced on anything but OLED, and even there only with some fancy custom compensation. This causes colors to be completely out of whack on the lower and high ends. That problem is actually the reason why I got myself a tiny CRT for my retro consoles last week, even the best analog to digital conversion can't reproduce the gamma curves correctly making dark colors darker than they should be, losing quite a bit of detail.
I found with a lot of the old VHS tapes I had (especially ones used for home-recording), that the sound quality degraded a lot faster than the picture.
as a Blu-Ray enthusiast it's maddening how much the master can vary from release to release. If the movie has different cover art than what it used to have 3-4 years ago odds are the studio went with a new master and hopefully didn't blow out every color in the process. Thankfully there are review websites which compare and contrast the video + audio quality for each disc release which are essential ime to sus out the lesser quality copies
The copies are only as good as the quality of the reproduction. Studies do not want to spend a lot of money painstakingly recreating a movie that may not sell. Its a gamble. That's why some transfers look amazing, while other don't look any better than the content of the format that came before.
@@Whyyousnoopin sometimes a direct compare & contrast between the two disc images is the only real way to tell, but if you're used to analyzing pictures & film long enough you'll notice immediate differences in color balance (cool vs. warm), the contrast levels, or the blockiness of the image (resolution). There might be some graphic designer videos you could check out who could explain these things in greater detail, or videos on ppl calibrating their monitors & TVs that could explain this well too
There's also the issue of the 'experts' who do the transfer. Sometimes the film is sourced from the negatives but they haven't taken into account that the color timing is meant for a specific stock so they just transfer it as-is. Or in case of Star Trek the Next Generation, not leaving much headroom in the dark so you get pretty icky old-school pixel coring when values burn out before they hit black. And then there's The Matrix that has green cast applied to it after the cinema release (you won't find the original print in HD expect as a bootleg 35mm scan) and Jurassic Park that has all the night scenes turned into 'hey I used the brightness knob so now you can see the mattelines of the dinos' horror. :D
17:30 "People didn't care about HD nearly as much as they thought..." Back in the early 2000's I actually worked at a "Radio Shack" in New York City... yes... hilarious. One of my jobs was to go into upscale apartments and help setup, and troubleshoot home entertainment systems. I can't tell you how many people had Red, White, and Yellow RCA cables running from their fancy blue ray machines to their 50" plasma screens. I think that even more than people not caring about HD... MANY people just didn't understand it. Great Video! Fun to watch.
I’ve never cared about picture quality. I had friends growing up whose dad would all buy the latest and greatest TV with every upgrade. Didn’t really see the fuss, I would always stick with what I had till it ceased working. Now I’m back down a VHS wormhole and it’s so obvious, but in real time the changes were unnoticeable. Oh and yeah all those dads are bitter divorced and likely still paying off those TVs today 😂
We had one of these early pioneer plasma tv. I can attest to how heavy it actually is. It was mounted in a case that was built into the wall instead of just a traditional tv mount.
I still have my D-Theater VCR and a bunch of tapes. I mainly bought it to record HD from my cable box that had a firewire connection. You could also connect it to your PC and dump the files on your computer.
People were certainly getting around the copy protection for D-Theater VHS. The way I found out about the format, and the only way I’d ever heard of it before Techmoan’s coverage, was from HD rips floating around online around 2005 or so. I had a crisp looking copy of Moulin Rouge and Fight Club I could play in high definition on my laptop and I thought that was amaaazing.* And I remember that D-Theater logo playing at the start as well. *lol but come to think of it, I wonder if my laptop back then even got up to 720 resolution.
Linus saying “there is so much film grain” as a negative thing physically pains me. That’s the director and DP’s intent. And there’s no “upscaling” involved at all. This was a 2K scan, transferred at 1080p. Film is a format with far higher resolution than anything these formats could touch.
The neat part about tape storage was how much data could be packed. I am looking up the data on the VHS tape, which a 2 hour tape appears to be around 248 meters long, a cassette could hold a max of 430 meters. I did some math using IBM's LTO tape back up. Using the specs of the LTO-1, its tape is 609m long and holds 100 GB (uncompresed). At 248 meters length, that should be ~40GB of data, which is enough room for many Blu-Ray films. The trick is the read speed. The articles suggests LTO-1 has an uncompressed speed of 20MB/s, but uncertain if read and write are the same rates, as these are typically used for recording back ups. LTO-1 is from 2000. Move up to 2010, IBM has LTO-5 with 1.5 TB over 849m, making it 438GB on 248m of tape. Tape storage is no slouch. The latest from IBM, LTO-9 is 18TB uncompressed over 1,035m, about 4.3 TB on 248m of tape. Oh, I forgot to mention that the tape width for IBM's LTO is the same as the VHS tape. The sad part about tape storage is you really can't skip, right? With the latest tech, we can install several GB of RAM or a decent hard drive in such a tape machine, even a decent NVMe drive. If your seek times are decent or depending on how the data is written across the tape, you can buffer the film data onto the internal drive to allow some quick skipping. Everything there depends on how fast the data can be read to the random access storage, kind of like playing a movie while it downloads. Using LTO-9, a 1TB tape would be around 58m long. Depending on how fast the tape drive can read the data can determine how quickly an SSD could be filled for quick access. Once the entire film is stored, the device can automatically rewind the tape and just playback from storage.
My uncle had D-VHS player, going back lots of years now lol. I remember how good it looked back then. I never had a dad, so once a month uncle would bring his DVHS round to my mum's house for a movie night. Great video, bought back some awesome memories.
I still have that JVC D-VHS Player. Got it for close to nothing after the format failed in the early aughts. Still works! The gap between the CD and the CD-R was fairly short. You were able to copy CD digitally not long after they came out (IIRC). But DVDs were a well established thing and there was no way to record it digitally until D-VHS. Same goes for all the TV shows that were moving over to Hi-Def. I remember the Daily Show was one of the last shows to make it to Hi-Def and the thrill of brain able to record it DIGITALLY! Wooo!
This was one of the most well put together and interesting videos I have watched in the past 5 years of this channel. I wish there was a channel dedicated to TV and audio that also talked about legacy products like this. Keep up the good work!
When I was in Japan back in 2006, I still saw shelves of d and w-vhs in nearly every electronics store. I thought it was amazing to have menus, chapter selection, multiple audio and subtitle tracks... DVD was more popular for PC stuff, but vhs still ruled the video scene. I don't think Japan really started transitioning until much later than the US.
My buddies dad had this exact same TV, and boy it was the coolest thing... i remember watching a dvd for the first time on it, man it blew my mind, and yes this is when they first came out and he paid for it...
01:50 Regular VHS outputs 480i in NTSC land (576i in PAL/SECAM) albeit with reduced horizontal resolution. All analogue video formats have the full vertical resolution of their respective television standard, they have no way to actively throw away scan lines because that would require elaborate image processing. Their quality difference is in horizontal resolution only.
@@varno I believe you are mistaken. Just anecdotally I've watched VHS on a high quality CRT and it's definitely better than 240 lines. Practically, it's technically impossible (because of the nature of interlaced video) to output a 240i source on a 480i display without advanced image processing.
@@eDoc2020 it is kinda, sort, both.... VHS does have 240 lines of resolution per field, however the colour resolution is substantially less, and in lp, and elp modes, there is some. Trickery done with acoustic delay lines to allow for line doubling iircm
@@varno Colour resolution in television and video is low in general. The definition rests entirely on luminance (ie brightness or black and white information), and that works fairly well because of how the human eye works. This is not specific to VHS but is also true for analogue broadcast television and even most digital video formats including DVD, Bluray and HD broadcasts. About the delay line you likely misunderstood something. The European PAL and SECAM colour standards require a delay of exactly 1 scan line for decoding, which indeed lowers colour resolution somewhat (but not brightness resolution). This is a property of all PAL /SECAM decoders, it also affects broadcast viewing. It has nothing to do with VHS, and does not change the fact that VHS vertical resolution is 480i or 576i, depending on what continent you're in. NTSC decoding does not require such a delay anyway.
@@xaverlustig3581 no, I was aware of the colour loss in secam/pal. This was an additional delay line needed just for vhs, and was used in the creation of the composite signal from the vhs colour under encoding. The whole scheme is somewhat arcane, and I can't find the specific details right now.
I would love to see D-VHS make a comeback today. It would be the perfect format for movie collectors who want something that'll last a long time but will also be in HD
I have that same player you finally got your hands on. I didn't buy many movies, just "U-571" and "I, Robot" and they looked amazing. I want to say that player does 1080i on the component output as well. I think back when I first got it the HDTV were out of my price range, but I had my 21" 1920x1440 CRT on my PC desk with a Creative DDTS-100 digital audio decoder and Creative 7.1 speakers. I had a component to VGA adaptor I used, and it worked great. I'm fairly sure it was outputting at 1080i because the detail was incredible at the time. Last I used that player and the remote were still going strong. PlayStation 3 converted me to BD though.
Blue ray disc is kinda silly, first of all the players are SUPER expensive and they have streaming apps which chances are you already have another streaming device. Also the disks are expensive
@@RonanB99 True but i've seen many dvd players with HDMI and 1080p upscaling so that pretty much just renders blu ray useless, in fact I have one. its a sony. But yeah, the issue I find is that I can't find a single blu ray player without internet/streaming apps.
@@Warp2090 The cheaper ones don't have WiFi so they can only connect to the internet with an ethernet cable. My Sony player has Netflix but the device is never connected to the internet. It's easy to ignore the apps, just put in the disc and it plays. While upscaled DVDs can look good, they're not as high quality as blu ray. Blu ray releases tend to have all the best special features too.
The first VCR I bought was a top-of-the-line Hitachi VHS recorder. Back in 1981, it cost me $1,200. I still own it and it still works. Blank tapes in those days were $20 each and I bought a box of ten, which are still in my huge collection. I was working and top quality was always my priority. It is amazing to see this digital tape design work so well. My eyes are shitty now so I probably wouldn't be able to appreciate the fine details it can deliver but it's quite the technological feat. Thanks for bringing this format to my attention.
I think you're generally right on the convenience factor, but a contrarian view (courtesy of my 8 year old) was "VHS tape is better than DVD, because it 'remembers' where you left off in the middle of a movie and does not force you watch the previews again." :) I remember seeing a demo of a JVC Digital VHS player in a HiFi store back in the day, and it was also something they had recorded over-the-air - John Williams conducting at the Olympics I think...
My 1st flat panel was a Panasonic 50" 720P plasma that also worked in 1080i. I had bought it back in 2007 and used it for 10 years before giving it to my parents that have it on all day and everyday since. Yes they still watch TV on it. Before then I had a JVC 27" CRT, I think the max output was at 700 lines of resolution. I didn't have a D-Theater VCR, but did have one that for some reason had a multi head reader and made the auto tracking work amazingly. When playing the tapes on my old VCR the tapes where unwatchable but with my newer VCR, the image was perfect, mind you for that time.
We still have a 50 inch plasma TV in the living room. It was awesome when we got it to replace our rear projection TV (2008-ish I think?) but it’s super unimpressive now. It handles colors and contrast so poorly. The color banding is actually insane, especially in dark scenes. Shots of the night sky with the moon look like 4 or 5 distinct chunks of navy, black, and gray surrounding the moon. It also gets so hot. I think it’s rated for almost 300 watts while in operation? It noticeably warms up the room.
I can only imagine how great this format would have looked on something like the Sony 1080i HD CRT's of the time. Unfortunate that there aren't a lot of films released in the format.
I don’t know why people hate film grain, film grain is beautiful, especially in 4k transfers, like “Terminator 2” in 4k for example, i heard is bad, because they messed with the film too much, making it look digital by taking all of the film grain out of it, to the point where people looked plasticy, having horrible colors, and just made the movie look too clean.
if you watch movies shot on film from recent years I don't think the grain is too noticeable. It only enhance the movie imo. Once Upon a time in Hollywood was shot on 35mm and can't really see much grain. It starts to get noticeable on movies shot on 16mm, and I can see why some prefer 35mm over 16mm, but the the 16mm grain gives something to the film indeed.
One thing I've noticed is that people playing VHS tapes today will say how terrible they look. But that's because they are playing them back on a modern LCD TV with a terrible composite conversion. If you really want to experience analog VHS correctly, it is best viewed on a CRT. Preferably one about 12 inches.
Even on my 42" LCD, my VHS collection comes up looking perfect (by VHS standards). I imagine things like 4k UHD displays might be a different story but a 1080 display has no issues whatsoever with scaling it up.
And PAL/SECAM regions had better picture quality, which was how most of the world expeienced VHS.
I’ve got a 19 inch CRT and vhs looks incredible. I even upgraded my Wii to Component video over AV and the difference is night and day
Apologies for not contributing to the topic at hand, but I must say it’s pretty cool to see you on a Linus vid. Obviously not the most unlikely combo, but still surprised me.
You are absolutely right. It might still be a night and day difference compared to DVD and of course Bluray but it seems to be very common nowadays on RUclips talk of VHS and analog video in general as if it was total technical stone age. Which it wasn´t. At least not as it is represented on youtube. Most of the time they pull out the most generic featureless VHS machine, they can find and wonder how bad the quality is (even the DVHS player in this video is not top of the line for analog video, there have been more advanced, pure SVHS machines for that). And also, of course, there was S-Video connection and S-VHS, which was not too far away from the DVD by qualitiy standards, but nobody cares about technical details, when it is much easier to make a few jokes, and move on. But however, this youtube video actually is a quite nice look back at DVHS at least, nice 🙂.
Video mastering professional here. :)
What you might be experiencing is likely the result of the 2008 Universal fire, where many of the masters and the original negatives/intermediates that were used to make the masters were destroyed. At this vintage, the master that made the D-VHS was likely make from a duplicate copy of the original negative (called a "timed inter-positive, effectively a negative of the negative) which is only a single film generation removed. The Universal fire required one of the largest remastering projects in the history of the industry, many of which were made from "safety" copies, which are film copies many generations removed from the versions they made the original masters from. This is one of the factors that would help explain the film grain difference as well. (The other the technology used to scan/transfer the film into a digital form, but that's a deeper discussion...)
Not to disparage the work of the industry too much, but some of these replacement masters were also done on tight turn-arounds and may not have been as faithful of a replication of the original as time and budget would allow. Hope this helps explain what you might be seeing, and why certain films might look different than you would expect, or remember. That fire destroyed a considerable amount of archival media and recordings, and we'll never get back some of what was lost. (Many original audio masters were also destroyed.) The Hurricane, as far as I can tell, was released on Bluray is 2014, well into the time a replacement master would have been used. And since the encoding parameters between D-VHS and Bluray vary so much, it would not have been possible to use the previous encode for the Bluray.
nice. how do you even get a job as a video mastering professional?
@@oldfrend Being as well informed as this guy
@lowandapapa
Beside that (btw Sony Picture Entertainment had a similar issue with its copies - but for different reasons) there were technical problems too.
In the early 2000 the industry still had a lot to learn about digitizing film. One of the more obvious, but common mistakes was to use the film perforation as the reference for frame registration/positioning - when any good projectionist or cameraman of the day would tell you that the position of the frame relative to the perforation varied quite a bit depending on the device that exposed the film. Look at early DVDs and see how the opening credits "tremble" on screen.
And don't get me started on chemical vs. optical scratch removal...
Ah the good old days!
I wonder if you could rip the data off the D-Theater copy of "The Hurricane" and run it through QTGMC and/or Topaz Video Enhance AI and get a better copy than the BluRay then. I'd really like to play with that MPEG 2 file if it were possible to get it off and decrypt it.
Thank you for this info :)
Very interesting to read, and to understand a bit more about how this works
. (For instance, I believe I had a 'digitally remastered' version of Star Wars.. But on VHS, if I remember correctly... Which seems odd to me now :)
Either way, it had slipped my mind until today)
I understand a little more than in the olden days about what mastering actually is/does (from a music perspective).
So I guess it could make sense, even for something that is ultimately distributed in an analog format.
However, I never considered the "copy of a copy of a copy" part of the endeavor :)
(The deterioration aspect, I mean.)
It FEELS - (but I'm not sure if it IS) - a little akin to woodblock prints, where the original can be copied so many times before the details of the original carving begin to fade.
Is there, in fact, a finite number of times that film can be watched or copied before the quality diminishes? (I've always wondered about that)
Anyways, thanks for sharing :)
Before DTheater, there existed an even more obscure format called W-VHS. It was an *analog HD* format and could record up to 1080i. It's based in part on the MUSE Hi-Vision video system, which had been used in primarily in japan for HD television broadcasts and HD Laserdisc
Now LTT just needs to find one of the cameras which records onto them..
I remember my neighbour across the street who collected new obscure tech had like the first plasma screen I think in our whole city. He had a plasma in '96 to go with his laser disc player and my mouth would drop to the floor when I watched it.
Agree, though it was mostly marketed towards the professional market (unlike D-VHS which was supposed to be a consumer format). I'm sometimes amazed about how little of past tech is known by the younger generation (I'm in my 40s and was in the CE industry in the '00s and '10s).
It was made by JVC and Introduced in 1994
@@stefanglasenhardt3959 I would say the most surreal (nay, eerie) videos I've ever watched on RUclips are some HD recordings of NY taken in mid 1999… ruclips.net/video/xFqmzqIn2_Y/видео.html
I was one of the crazy mofo’s who bought D-VHS player, when they came out. You have understand: we kept *hearing* about the miracle of high-definition. The problem was, you couldn’t find a demo, ANYWHERE. I literally couldn’t take the suspense any longer, pooled my scant resources together, and took the plunge. Needless to say, my brain MELTED, upon first seeing the absolute GLORY of HD. I watched U571, about 100 times, just marveling at the quality before me. I also picked up an antenna for my house, because the local OTA stations, WERE broadcasting in HD. One thing a lot of people don’t realize, is that virtually ALL of the NY/NJ HD broadcasts, were being done from atop the World Trade Center. When they were demolished, our ability to view those OTA broadcasts, went with it. Seems such a petty thing to have been bothered by, considering the sheer HORROR of what occurred, but as an AV Zombie, it did hurt a bit.
Watching the farrago of ahistorical nonsense that is U571 just the once was enough for me.
great ! but you nearly ruined your dvhs tape ?! it was said to be ~100 times readable..
I thought the twist was you didn't have an hd tv
Are you still a crzy mfo and do you have a 4k 90" oled tv?
If you find D-VHS strange, I'll tell you that HD Laser Discs have existed for a relatively long time, even if only in Japan.
So a Laser Disc with 1080i and up to 5.1 DTS sound
There is actually an analog version of D-VHS it's called W-VHS (from 1992 or 93)...
Man the first time I saw a Laser Disc I was in awe they just looks so futuristic. Also confused the hell out of my 10 year old brain when halfway through the movie it said "flipping sides" or whatever I knew about flipping over records and was like how is it flipping the disc over in that (relatively) small case when in reality it was just moving the laser/reflector to the top of the player not attempting to flip a 12" disc in a 4" tall case. Later models had two different lasers and were a bit more streamlined in their transition.
laserdiscs were in the U.S. too, I remember cuz I had one in the 90s, and I have 4 laserdisc players NOW in the US
Always wanted to watch movie from HD laser video disc on Barco CRT projector - to feel whole analogue home cinema experience!!!
And Techmoan covered both DTheater and MUSE LD a few years ago.
Edit: They mentioned Techmoan's DTheater vid.
It's hard to aquire D-Theater tapes but I have a pretty healthy collection of them. If you ever want to go back down the D-Theater route, reach out to me. There's a bunch of unopened tapes I have as well as my personal favorite, The Mummy and The Mummy returns and I can't help but defend the D-VHS for how perfect it looks.
Universal was one of the studios that really put the most in to releasing D-Theater tapes. Other studios like Sony and Paramount just didn't see the value in it. Hence why most those movies, are Universal releases.
I was selling TVs at circuit city when the DT players were on the market. Never saw the HD tapes on shelves. The PS2 changed the market with DVD 📀. It was much cooler 😎 and the disk format made the shelf look futuristic for your movies.
Would it look best on a Sony triniton hd tub tv?
@@kidsonblackops on DLP rear projector set for that cinema experience.
I'm sure some datahoarders would love to have copies of that data before it degrades too much
So, I collect movies and cartoons and stuff on 16mm film.
I wonder which had higher quality, I don't know.
I collect stuff that's on Technicolor.
I worked at JVC when this format came our. It was a huge jump in technology at the time. The core tech was derived from D-5, D-9 and DVC. Early cousin ( track ing for data) was audio format Alesis ADAT ( the decks were made by JVC and the tapes) . The actual tape was a very grade low drop out, extremely durable and designed for digital data. For several years D-VHS was used by movie industry for dailies as it could be encrypted and password protected! I was an amazing format and challenging to work on at the time ( 5 day training seminar just be allowed to work on them only a few techs at factory service were trained). At this point many of decks need to have the capacitors on the D-A boards replaced as well as some of the process boards.
Do you think it's possible to make 8k VHS with today's tech?
@@Kevfactor Well the thing is that the tape wasn't _really_ VHS, but a tape cartridge with different technology inside that was similarly sized/shaped. Since there are tape technologies these days that can store stupidly large amounts of data (not to mention modern compression), it'd be 100% possible to create a tape that stored 8k--or larger--video. (Magnetic tapes have so many downsides compared to discs and other modern storage that it wouldn't be realistic to ever develop, of course, haha.)
Great post
@@Kevfactor you definitely could, you’re just encoding it with binary data. You will still be susceptible to dropouts as the tape degrades with use and time, so it’s not worth doing. The wider the tape and the faster the tape speed, the more reliable it becomes. There just isn’t a reason to use magnetic tape anymore.
Thanks for info brother
This is nuts. I remember when this came out but I'm from the hood. No person I knew could afford a thing like that. I'd since forgotten this format ever happened. This is mindblowing.
I remember going to compute shows and arguing with other builders about firewire vs USB...Wow....firewire. The format wars were crazy man. Remember having to decided whether to invest in HD DVD or BluRay?
@@Swimm12984 I still haven't owned either an HD-DVD or BluRay player. 😅
HD DVD vs Blu-ray lol. I remember Xbox thought HD DVD was the future and Sony went with Blu Ray.
nigga that's nuts
@@Swimm12984 Firewire used to be faster than USB and video cameras only had firewire.
I'm still shocked that I've never heard of Digital VHS before now. I grew up on VHS tapes, and I seriously thought the next step up was DVD and all disc formats beyond that. This is a revelation, honestly.
In some parts of the world, from late 90s to early/mid 2000s there's the VCD (video CD) which sits between VHS & DVD.
And I'm really shocked I've never heard about Laser Discs until now from this comment section. What the hell is that! 😅
@@eustache_dauger video cd still lingers around in poor country s because it is cheaper then even dvd.
@@metaleuman I remember watching Voyage of the Mimi on Laser Disc in like 4th grade in school. It starred Ben Affleck.
Try searching for W-VHS, it's even more obscure than D-VHS and D-Theater, it was a format that recorded up to 1080i in ANALOG format!
Back in the days before Blu-ray I sailed the seven seas and "acquired" as many HDTV rips as possible, but D-Theater captures were the prized possessions. The movie Family Man with Nic Cage is another example were the D-Theater version is still the best looking version to date.
True Lies as well, has no Blu-Ray. The D-Theater release is the best you can get.
Any other examples?
I'd have loved to see Face-Off in DTheater
now we can acquire digital copies of things without sailing any sea
@@GP1138Somewhat disagree. I think the 35mm scan is pretty great looking.
Nice to hear Techmoan being credited; here in the UK I watch his Saturday offering before I catch up with the WAN show.
As soon as I've read the title of the video, good ol Techmoan came immediately to mind, great channel
Mastering and data rate are the most important. There's some really bad DVD's with really low data rates and they can look like a VHS. This brought back memories of the data protection on VHS called Macrovision. A simple way to disable it was pass the output of the VHS through a 'video enhancer' box or a video mixer. Ah the memories of the glory of VHS. And the Format wars never seem to stop. Regular Show certainly focused on that nightmare.
It will also depend on the VHS Generation Loss. If it's the 2nd Generation or higher, it won't be the best.
There's also some really good DVDs. Found season 1 of Malcolm in the middle and the quality looks way better than it does streaming, it's even 60fps in most parts. Shit, even some burned movies from 10 years ago look better than streaming
A signal booster also did the trick. I used to do copies of vhs movies back then.
I have 2 copies of an anime movie called Spriggan based off a Manga. The first one I bought was some Catonese version with english subs. It looked like a rip if a VHS, but the case and everything was super legit, very high effort. I ended up buying the rerelease and swapped cases lol.
There's the little button on the side of VHS tapes that allows the tape cover to be flipped up. The machines do this when you put a cassette in so the machine can get at the tape. Easy way to view the tape inside without unraveling anything.
My favorite fidget toy
Knowledge lost to all but not to the Old World Sages
D-VHS Puppet combo HD
Hmmm place of your birth below⏬
We'll see who Reallyyyy understands 😏
Absolute state of cringe millennials not knowing this at 3:18 and staring at the tapes like the walking Dunning-Kruger effect examples that they are.
This was totally fascinating. As someone who is really interested in video quality for older movies and videos this was really cool to see. Glad you guys stuck with it through 2 years.
No problem, thanks.
Fun fact, it's still the only official physical HD version of True Lies available.
Fun?
More like sad asf.
Seriously the distributor must truly despise James Cameron - 12 years to make Avatar and another huge break before Avatar 2 and he doesn't make a tiny amount of time to OK some new home video releases of his old stuff.
@@yodasama_productions I’ve heard that Spanish blu-ray is a either a bootleg or official through a shady loophole and not endorsed by James Cameron or the studio. It’s also a very dated master and not the superior, more recent one featured on streaming services.
That's sad
I feel like another one of Arnold's movies was the last Laser Disc too, but I'm 40 and about to go to bed, so
@@robertcop3736 Sounds like there's a demand for someone with a DTheater player and a copy of True Lies and some recording software.
I love these kinds of videos on obscure formats! I would love to see Linus and the guys take on Laserdisc since it was in the same era as VHS. While obsolete and relatively forgotten compared to VHS and even DVD, it’s still great to break out a Laserdisc every once in a while and watch a classic movie!
6:05 Also, these "staircases" weren't really visible on CRT, which is what was typically used to watch VHS back in these days
@@nooneinpart Not so much an attempt as that's just how physics worked out. Colours were even more crazy in the early days... using bleeding inherent in TVs to create colour blends.
No, it's because they pause the video. There's only one field on the screen. Of course that results in "staircases". It's not there when the video plays at normal speed.
unless you had the money to afford the $10,000 plasma televisions.
The same issues why really old game consoles look uglier on modern tv's. And why you might want to throw some kind of soften/filter over it. Because CRT was a natural soften filter, but actual pixels on an actual screen and you see all the flaws.
@@MasticinaAkicta Yes, except in this particular case the issue is only because they pause the VCR, which results in it only displaying one field on the screen.
It never took off because it got to the market too late. By 2002, DVD players were starting to eek down into the $200 range (about what a VCR cost in the 90s) and video stores started building up decent DVD collections. Had high-definition VHS come around in 1997 or so, it may have had at least a few years of a run.
Well, it did begin in 1997, but since it was still a new technology when it came out, it was expensive, just like any new technology. Not only expensive, but not yet prevalent because it was new. But yes, it was too little too late, as video "tape" was getting superceded by optical technology because as we all know optical was a more rugged format on a plastic disc, beginning in the mid 1980's with CD's. And you can also skip around on that disc instead of waiting to a certain place on a tape through rewind or forward, whether VHS/DVHS tape, tape cassette or R2R. Tape had its negative quirks. And of course, the output on optical was cleaner. VHS sales, on the whole, also dropped by the early 2000's. I still have many VHS players/recorders & piles of VHS tapes (I have retail Star Wars original trilogy on VHS). But no D-VHS.
@@robwebnoid5763 Adding on to this, beyond the prohibitive price tag, it genuinely wouldn't surprise me if a sizeable portion of potential buyers simply didn't understand D-VHS was a different technology. As someone who has at least somewhat of an acuity for technology, the name reminded me of both HD-DVD and the Wii U. Companies often take the easier road, assume the market is full of monkey brain and to make the next big thing sound as simple as possible "You know that tape player you've got at home? Well here's a better one!". People are typically "smart" monkey brain so Playstation 2 to Playstation 3 is "Bigger number means big better" whereas adding a letter or two to a common acronym which designates a step in technological evolution isn't _different enough_ to trigger the "Oooo, shiny!" part of monkey brain.
@@daggern15 ... Yes I think that's a good observation with the naming aspect & how it affects consumers subliminally. What would you have called it, if not "D-VHS"? Would it have made more sense if it was called "VHS 2" or "VHS Max" (like Betamax, heh), or "Next Gen VHS" or maybe write it all out as"Digital VHS"? And "D-Theater" is also confusing. The other thing too was probably the advertising & the hype. There was not enough of it. Before I saw this Linus video about D-VHS, I realized I most likely forgot about this tech. It's been 25 years. Perhaps there was just not enough ad campaigns. I remember the failed Betamax so much more than I remember D-Vhs. And the world also knows more about the different major types of optical discs (CD, DVD, BD) than we do D-Vhs. So yes, this tech was too late & perhaps its naming was confusing. And people have probably invested more in DVD than DVHS because DVD had more of the hype & reviews & how it was more revolutionary than any sort of tape technology because DVD's output was sharper, with people already having the stigma & experience of VHS' blurry SD output. And yeah, the cost of DVHS was indeed prohibitive. And also the copyright headaches by film studios as said in the video. And DVHS should have probably started in the early 1990's instead of the late 1990's to give it a better head start (hindsight) ... with big budget campaigning. In a way, both DVD & DVHS came out the same year, with DVD winning out, in the same way that Betamax & VHS came out the same time, with VHS winning. The long-lasting king, VHS, finally got overthrown after about 25 years.
My question though is, would a regular VHS tape have a relatively cleaner output on a DVHS player? One thing for sure is all my VCRs are still thankfully in working condition & to maximize a clean output, I clean the head drum with isopropyl when necessary, which helps keep the image was warping too much. I have also sometimes (well, rarely), opened a VHS tape to put some lithium grease at the bottom to make it ride better, although I'm unsure yet if that actually makes any difference, it's been years so I can't recall. And one thing I have also done with DVD is to watch it through a video image sharpening process on a PC so that the details come out just a little bit more, as if somehow its resolution went up somewhere between DVD & BD.
The PS2 coming out with a DVD player in 2000 killed any hopes of anything competing with DVD.
I mean PS2 was a dvd player and people bought it bc of that reason 😂
There are some niche groups out there that have defeated D-Theater's encryption. Information about how they did it is pretty hard to find, but it has been done.
Are there links where i could read more about this, and if so would you mind linking them?
@@IamLegendAnon search around for posts on forums like digitalfaq, videohelp, and doom9. that's as far as i got.
@@MisterSheeple Thanks.
so if d-theater encryption has been defeated, are there rips of d-theater releases floating around the internet? obligatory asking for a freind.
@@oldfrend Yes, I found some.
I’m not sure if you would need d-theater decrypted to break it though…
I have the exact same Mitsubishi player (HS-HD2000U) that you started with. Got mine for next to nothing at a closeout, as it has case damage and no remote. That said, it's still shockingly useful, even though it won't play D-Theater tapes: that glowing green button on the front is for the built-in TBC (Time Base Correction), which clears up the playback immensely on older standard VHS tapes. It's especially noticeable on damaged tapes that won't produce an acceptable image on anything else, in those cases it's night and day. So if you have a need for transferring old VHS tapes to digital, this is the absolute best player I've ever found for that specific use case - it really works wonders. Cheers!
One thing I would like to note about the VHS tapes is that they often didn't use the highest quality tapes. I think the 8-Bit Guy has a video where he recorded a movie from DVD onto a new old stock high-quality VHS tape and compared it against the same movie unopened on VHS, and his recording was notably higher quality than the VHS you would have bought in stores.
that sounds right since they would have to mass produce the tapes using higher quality tapes would have been super expensive. they would have to produce fewer copies and sell them for higher prices which might have a negative effect on profits. also They thought majority of people dont have the proper setups to get the maximum visual quality anyways
You have a strip of plastic coated with a magnetic metallic medium. Better quality tapes basically have more "stuff" on the tape to record on.
VHS wasnt all that great to begin with. It was just the more affordable option for the home movie industry to adopt. Betamax was better but beibg made by sony, it cost more.
Yeah that VHS looked TERRIBLE compared to what I've found with VHS, looked like it must have been an EP cassette.
Also I have not noticed ANY degridation of VHS tapes (due to time) in my collection, I watched some last week which looked as good as they ever did 30 years ago.
It’s like watching a Techmoan video if we bought Techmoan from Wish and then recorded it to VHS.
Savage.
Oof
911, I'd like to report a murder.
Wow.
yes, and in north America we are just catching up to the rest of the world in tech
I was deep in the anime Fan sub scene in the 90's so we did lot of fan subs on D-VHS from Laser Disk Masters. it also meant that coping D-VHS didnt suffer as bad from nth order copies like analog VHS did with fan subs. some of us also converted D-VHS fan subs to VCD in the early DVD player days in 99' though 01'. but by 02' divx and broadband had take over the fan sub world and digital subs where the thing now as bittorrent took over from newsgroups.
ANIME EXISTED IN 90'S!?
@@flintfrommother3gaming I'm sure you are joking...
@@flintfrommother3gaming how old are you, kid? There was anime in the 70s.
Hero
@@flintfrommother3gaming Indeed the best stuff was made in the period from the '80s to early '00s.
I'd just like to comment that The hurricane is a very solid and an always safe choice for a project of this type
Seeing film grain doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lesser quality, if anything it’s a higher resolution scan of the film. Film grain is physically present as a chemical reaction on the originally shot film when developed, so you’re gonna get more of that grainy detail on a higher resolution digitization of that film.
@Ivan Zhao I think the goal is to remove as much grain as possible without removing any detail. Like that star wars remaster project that uses old degraded film as a source and needed a massive amount of denoising.
@@Greenleaf_ I believe you're talking about the Team Negative version which was indeed pretty rough but in recent years a new project has popped up called the 4k77 project which is like the holy grail of film preservation yes it's still grainy but it has so much detail that if cleaned up even slightly it looks like it coulda been filmed yesterday and they were lucky as hell to find a print in such amazing shape to get such a good scan.
Previously all anyone had before either of these was a mix of different official releases on dvd, vhs, laserdisk, and the shitty special edition bluray which is one reason why even the crappier looking early film scans were important since they were cleaned up and used to make Harmy's Despecialized edition which I highly suggest looking up the making of video for cause that thing took an insane amount of work like comping together shots from multiple releases and in some cases using the special edition as a base and remaking some effects from scratch.
I know you didn't ask but I just find this shit endlessly fascinating.
@@Greenleaf_ You can make an old film look much nicer with a lot of work and modern technology. I've recently seen the remastered version of Robocop and it looks like it was shot in 2020. The older BluRay release on the other hand looks like you've been transported back in time to a movie theater in 1987 where you get to see a theater copy of the film, including some dust and scratches. Because that's what it is, they just scanned an old copy of the film with close to no remastering.
@@Greenleaf_ "I think the goal is to remove as much grain as possible without removing any detail."
Impossible. Film grain contains the detail. The detail is contained nowhere else. _Any_ film grain removal = detail removal, by definition. Film grain = the silver halide crystals that reacted to light to form the image in the first place.
People who find film grain objectionable are daft.
"Seeing film grain doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lesser quality"
It _never_ means it's lesser quality. It _always_ means it's higher quality, specifically, higher bitrate. It takes a lot of bitrate to preserve film grain (which = detail). The first thing that disappears when you lower the bitrate on a video encode is the film grain (which, again, = detail).
Linus and his cohorts are nincompoops.
If you want something to really blow your mind, look up the demo reel for the D-VHS tape.
It's of New York circa 1993, and it's absolutely surreal to see in 1080i.
I believe that was recorded for Japan's Muse HiVision system
Movies shot on film has a resolution way higher than 1080i. So you can go back to the 50s, and as long as the film is digitalised in resent years or shown in a theater on a film projector, the quality is better than many movies released today.
You should get hold of a Sony trinitron tube flat glass crt... They were the holy grail of crt monitors and tvs.
They used electrical magnetic bands in the back to straighten out the curviture of the crt laser caused by the apex of a single point.
Incredible for the time.
Yea, I agree.
I also think Linus has not seen the colors of analog in a long time. Being he is so into HDR you would think he would go back. To check what the color representation used to be before digital. But it seems he has not.
What laser?
I have a flat trin, picked it up for less than a 100 euro a few years ago in a thrift shop, (use it with my sli 3dfx pc and old consoles) they had no clue what they had! It was an amazing screen for the time but when I compare it to an Oled it's not in the same league
well, I can only speak for myself, but I found the two horizontal stabilization wires to be super annoying.
I remember, for a short time, it was the pinnacle of CRT purity.
Born in 79, lived in Spain for 20 years, and Norway the latter 20+ years, never heard of D-Theater. But I still have a 42" Plasma Panasonic TV (HD-Ready) I use as my daily tv. Never had a "Full HD" or "4K" TV yet.
I've got two of those JVC DTheater VCRs. You didn't mention that you can record up to 24 HOURS on one single VHS cassette in 480 mode. It was great for recording from our cable box over Firewire at the time. You could then transfer it via Firewire to a PC for easy editing. I was living LARGE in 2003! LOL!
"You could then transfer it via Firewire to a PC for easy editing. I was living LARGE in 2003! LOL!"
Yeah, windows XP came with drivers that would recognize and support cable/satellite STBs and D-vhs decks.
We used to have someone send over HDD from the US to the UK full of content. Then play it back from a PC via the Firewire to the D-theater player and out of the component video. Stuck that through a Lumagen video processor and it was absolutely brilliant. We even had a 2 hour demo video made up for use at the CEDIA trade shows for a couple of years when we were JVC Pro UK distributors. Good Times! 😁
Man, and I thought I was living large with I stumbled onto my 1st "HiFi" VCR in 2002 lol Who remembers them? The video quality was only slightly better than your SD VCR, but the audio was CRYSTAL CLEAR 😳 It just blew my mind, since my last VCR was bought in 1999 and had HORRIBLE audio, so this new one felt like alien tech to me 😅 Audio was most important to me since I recorded alot of sports games back then, and hearing the roar of the crowd in it's clearest form was simply amazing at the time, so this D-VHS stuff probably would have killed me lol
Back when the consumer had control over their media and could own it outright
@@KoolKeithProductions all but the very very cheapest VCRs had Hi-Fi by the late 1990s, it was new tech in 1985 or so! Our NBC affiliate went stereo in 1986 and there was NO missing Friday Night Videos... wish I still had all those tapes. Even in 6 hour mode the audio was still good.
Large TV broadcasters used until recently (~2015) cassette tapes that could reach 1080p60 at 880Mbps and even 3D like Sony HDCAM SR. It was the state of art for many years due the high image quality and media durability. The high-precision mechanical technology was insane.
DVHS was really popular for News broadcasters as far as I know. It was used to record pretty much any footage you could think of for news, and then used as the playback source during broadcast.
Your referring to the Digital-S or D-9 format that was (surprise) made by JVC. It used nearly the same VHS cassette body form, the window and a few other details were different. It used a high quality metal tape, similar to D-VHS tapes. I believe you can use D-9 tapes for D-VHS; punch a hole in the right spot to fool a D-VHS deck to record and play from a D-9 tape. So they are an alternative source for D-VHS tape stock, or if nothing else you could open up the shell and swap the guts out of a VHS cassette and do the same hole punch.
D-9 used the same codec as MiniDV, but with higher bitrate. They were used for newsgathering at some stations but not super popular as a format, Fox News used them extensively when they first got on the air. However Digital Betacam, and later Betacam SX as well as HDCAM (for HD video) won out the digital tape formats for most newsrooms, as well as DV based DVCAM (Sony) and DVCPro (Panasonic) that were also extensively used in newsgathering. D-9 never really got much of a following.
I was one of those lucky kids who's parents were always early adopters of home theater equipment. Yeah, D-VHS was pretty badass.
The sound is also awesome.
When this guy got hacked I FREAKING DIED
Too bad you didn't learn the difference between who's and whose.
Sure lol .. a lot of you just say you had something or experienced something to feel included
They are billionaires 😭
As DVDs (and Blu-rays for that matter) soon turned out to be even easier to make legal or illegal copies of, I think it is safe to assume that in the end what mattered for manufacturers was optical media being dirt cheap and fast to produce on top of being convenient for consumers.
Other than that, movies on VHS had Macrovision (TM) copy protection, you couldn't copy them so easily. So it's not like they were unprotected before.
''illegal copies''
Lmfao no
Just needed a TV with AV-OUT 😁
@@souljastation5463 yah ya can if its by using with oldemr vcr machines apparently for rhe ones from before 1986? They can be used for it to do the record mode but why would one want to anyways lols
@@bsanchez3563 Of course today no one would want to copy a VHS, but back in the days it was useful.
We used to make copies of anime (the unprotected ones) and pass them out.
You know, I really appreciate how much time LMG will commit to any given video topic. To be working on something for multiple years, even if not continuously, shows great dedication to making sure they have all their information correct and that they do a wide gamut of testing. I love these deep dives into older tech!
* most of their information correct. Agree on everything else!
I'd never heard of D-VHS before, but seeing that stylized logo in the middle of the tape door on the Mitsubishi triggered a memory, I'm pretty sure my grandparents had a D-VHS player back in the day. I wish I had known!
I remember when I first saw HD content, my reaction was very similar. It was a PGA golf match and I just spent the entire time amazed by how green the picture of grass was and that there was variation in green shadings. I kept checking to see if the saturation was way off or something but then comparing other colors had no signs of bleed over. It blew my mind. It was painful to go back home to my SD stuff.
Damn dude i had the EXACT same experience at my brother in law's. It was golf too lol
I saw this on Technoan a few years ago. I had dreams of buying up every dvhs tape and a player just for the novelty but now Linus has featured it the prices are probably going to go through the roof on eBay.
they were already expensive even before techmoan's video. scarcity + unreliable players + they were originally very expensive. I have a handful of D-Theater rips of movies (raw MPEG-2 .ts pulled straight from the cassettes by enterprising seafarers) and its interesting to see what older HD masters of films looked like, Fight Club comes to mind.
Oh yeah, finally some good news, now it's the time to sell my stuff on ebay.
Techmoan
Nah, Techmoan's videos already do that.
But don't the tapes only have a certain shelf life? I was collected Sega Megadrive games a couple of years ago but notices some games stopped working.(Probably due to capacitors no longer working). My point being older formats tend to degrade over time and it might be worth collecting old media because of that.
DVD's looked so chunky when large flatscreens were coming out, but then DVD upscaling was pretty phenomenal for its time as well.
Fun fact: When they were (finally) making the dvd version of Ridley Scott's first flick, The Duellists, almost no work had to be done. Because it originally only got a 1-week viewing when it came out, the prints were in such amazing shape having barely seen the light of day for decades. The colours just pop.
I don't think it was just the scale, DVDs were presumably designed predominantly for CRTs, which they look great on. The inherent characteristics of CRTs seem to nullify much of the compression artifacts of DVDs.
@@DoubleMonoLR Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, after years of vhs, playing a dvd on crt looked like I was living in the future. I'm just commenting about 'the next' bit of tech (large flat hd screens) and how all of a sudden the image reverted back to being horrible... but then upscaling appears and it's all good.
Our first DVD player was $350 and played on 65” rear projection TV. I remember it looked so good. I can’t imagine today watching 480 resolution on such a big screen.
DVD superior to VHS
Weird, I've never had any issues watching 480 on my 44" screen from 32" or so away.
Y’all could’ve got the ps2/xbox for cheaper, even if you weren’t interested in video games.
A friend of mine back in the late 90's / early 2000's got quite a large LaserDisc collection going. He used to record the movies onto VHS for his friends and while you only got standard VHS quality image and sound, because the source was so good, they just seemed very crisp. Then whole HD-DVD thing happened and blu-ray killed all competition. In the mid 2000's though, there were some really awesome quality HD-DVD sourced movies on various dodgy websites, usually in M2TS containers, that blew me away back then. Watching those movies, some absolute classics too, on a 22" Asus IPS really showed me for the first time what HD movies were all about.
I love that he talked about format vs master. Vinyl records tend to be a similar issue
I had laser disc back in the day
Yup. I love vinyl but I've spent good money on bad pressings from bad masters. Some of the cheaper ones I have are much better. My pressing of Little Dark Age is probably my best vinyl but it was cheaper than a lot of my other albums.
i think that would be something interesting to see, how much generation loss can go through this before it becomes unrecognisable
This is very interesting info on D-VHS, which I've never seen in operation.
I have 1 quibble. Describing standard (SD) VHS as "240i" seems to be an error. SD VHS tapes were intended to output to SD TVs, including CRTs. Their video would be interlaced, at either 525 lines (=480i of visible picture) or 625 lines in PAL/SECAM areas (=576i of visible picture). The "240" seems to refer to the fact that SD VHS could only display about 240 black-to-white transitions *along* each horizontal line (row of pixels, sort of).
What it does mean, is a fuzzy picture on SD VHS. It could produce at best, a 240 vertical line pattern on a screen.This was far below broadcast quality even for SD. For comparison S-VHS (which was still SD) could do about 400 vertical lines, nearly broadcast quality. It's a confusing because "lines" is used for horizontal and vertical resolution measures.
Yeah I came to say this as well. "P" (progressive) scanning was old CRT tech (hence the moving lines)
Yeah shit bugged me too.
At best he was either mistaking horizontal resolution or field resolution for actual vertical resolution. Personally I think the description should always be "[max rows displayed per full frame][i/c/p][number of full frames per second]", with i/p/c being interlaced (alternating even/odd-line fields that pair for full frames), checkerboard (even/odd-pixel checkerboard fields that pair for full frames), or progressive (just full frames).
NTSC VHS could do 240p60 or it could do 480i30. I think PAL tapes were 288p50 and 576i25,
@@ItsBillsFault Hi; thanks for your reply.I agree with your ideas re specifying resolutions, as TV images are made of horizontal rows of pixels, that can be used to display so many black-white transitions per row. Putting many such rows together can display vertical bar patterns, but calling the latter "lines" causes endless confusion, especially the silly way some CCTV systems are specified.
I'd not conceived of VHS doing double the horizontal (i.e, |||||||| lines) resolution for the progressive frame. Also, VHS horizontal resolution was described as 240 "lines" even for PAL/SECAM, as far as I have heard.
SVHS vastly improved this, to about 400 lines horizontal resolution (380?? for NTSC?).
I have 3 reasons for doubting the "480 and 576" *horizontal* resolution figures:
1.) The horizontal resolution is limited by the luminance bandwidth available from VHS tape (I think it was around 3MHz, c/f 4MHz bandwidth for broadcast NTSC and 5MHz (ish) for PAL ).
2.) AFAIK, VHS wouldn't handle progressive scan for either NTSC or PAL, as the record/play head switching is fundamentally linked to the framing pulses between odd and even FIELDS. (Incidentally that meant that VHS machines would happily record 405-line signals as the rate was also 25 frames/sec (50 fields/sec) for that system).
3.) 480 and 576 happen to be the number of active rows (*vertical resolution*) in NTSC and PAL/SECAM respectively (hence "480i, 480p, 576i, 576p, often seen in monitor options). The remaining 40 or so lines (to make it 525 or 625) are taken up with frame sync pulses, etc, that keep frame synchronisation happening, and also teletext. So I think you may be thinking of that.
IF I'm wrong about any of these, I'd be genuinely happy to be corrected.
I'd not heard of "checkerboard" scanning, but I can see how that would work, at least for a system whose (horizontal) resolution could cope with it.
@@mt-mg7tt I make a point of talking about rows and columns when I talk about resolution. Occasionally I will say scanlines but I never say lines, because too many people don't know if I mean vertical (top to bottom) lines or horizontal lines (left to right), whereas most people know a scanline is horizontal. 240p60 refers to 240 left-to-right rows or scanlines, not columns. This is referred to as vertical resolution, i.e. the number of rows/scanlines stacked vertically to form an image rectangle. Horizontal resolution would be the best possible number of pixels per row/scanline.
I don't know what the various horizontal resolutions are for the different magnetic tape formats. The height of a scanline was constant within NTSC or PAL, so the vertical resolution was always reliable, but the medium might encode more or fewer pixels per scanline, which is where the confusion might be coming in, as the 240p60 mode could indeed also have 240 (wide) pixels per scanline, giving a net resolution of 240 x 240, (w x h) but both being 240 is just an arbitrary choice.
I think the maximum number of pixels per line was in the neighborhood of 720, and beyond that you could NOT rely on standard equipment decoding it successfully, meaning you would be out of standard. Some equipment encoded far fewer than 730 columns/pixels per scanline, either because its internal frame buffer wasn't that wide, or because the backing medium didn't store that many columns/pixels per row.
At any rate, annoyingly the horizontal resolution (pixels/columns per row) is almost never described in the standard nomenclature. 240p60 could describe anything from 240x240 to 720x240. This is probably because the same TV could display both widths without caring, but would balk if you changed the height. I guess this is because the number of scanlines is decidedly discrete, while pixels per scanline is pretty analog.
BTW checkerboard only exists in certain very fringe digital encodings. You can consider that one not to appear on the final exam. :) Normally it's only i/p.
@@ItsBillsFault Aye to all that. The number of horizontal rows (scan lines) is basically fixed for a particular video system - it's what defines it along with frame rate.
It's incredible how much time and money you spent just for a 20 minutes long video. Love you guys
He's just advertised that LTT has the tech to dub your obscure DVHS to a modern digital format, same as he did a month or two ago with clean dubs of Linus's summer camp videos.
Yeah , wooow, almost as if it was his job , shocker 😱
@@terrabiker he also probably made 10x what he spent on this video lol
@@sanmiai111 probably more like 20-50x
I remember watching an ad for DVD as an amazing new format at the start of a VHS tape. It had zoomed in comparrisons of portions of VHS output beside incredibly clear DVD output. It was full of colour and movement and featured the 'amazing' sound quality you could be experiencing right now!
"That looks amazing! Can't wait to try it out." said Rob.
"But we're watching it on a VHS, Rob"
"I know, but the DVD bit looks soo good."
"But.. ..this is a VHS tape.."
"Yeah, I heard you. Do you not think it looks amazing?!"
Rob wasn't very smart.
Your experience reminds me of getting "remastered" albums on CD. The earliest CDs were often mastered straight from the original mixdown tapes. "Remastered" CDs are often crushed with digital limiting to make it sound louder. (The mantra is louder ALWAYS sounds better.)
The result is that the original CDs often have more dynamic range, a more "open" sound, and sometimes a more accurate frequency response (even as analog to digital encoders have gotten better and better) as many "remastered" CDs have boosted lows and highs (resulting in reduced midrange... you know, where the majority of the SOUND is).
Just like 4K can look "worse" than digital VHS depending on the master source and the grading, today's "remastered" CDs with better analog to digital encoders, better noise reduction, and decades of experience of restoration, can sound subjectively worse because of the post-processing applied to try to compete with modern compact discs.
I noticed this when I listened to a cassette of van halens 1984 on my walkman, it just sounded so GOOD compared to the digital versions I was used too.
@@TruthDoesNotExist I have that and VHII on cassette. Gotta love flip to the B side. One of my audio professors used to hound on this subject of remasters and compression. He recommended buying original CDs as much as possible, especially if they were minted pre 1995, because they wouldn't have that compression and would have all the dynamic range. Basically as close as digital can get to the dynamic range of vinyl.
Bro I saw this for sale at retail on our base in Okinawa Japan in 2002. It blew my freaking mind. I had never seen it again until this video posted. Thanks for the memory.
I’ve been fascinated by this format ever since I heard Technology Connections talk about it in a video some time ago
I love his channel. do you have a link to that episode?
@@levoniust of course I’m having trouble finding it right now, but I know it used clips from this D-VHS video of NYC in the 1990’s ruclips.net/video/fT4lDU-QLUY/видео.html
And before that TechMoan
I had the JVC D Theater player with a few D-VHS tapes. The main reason it didn't last was there were just a few movies available. The image on a 120" home theater was incredible at the time and still looked better than Blu-ray. The extra MB data stream per second seem to really help with the color, sharpness and dynamic range. The color was unreal at the time, everything just popped off the screen. I still have the machine and I think 8 tapes. I'll have to connect it up to a flat panel and check it out.
One other thing, don't forget about S-VHS tape and laser disc. S-VHS came before DVD and D-VHS. It was only analogue, but looked so much better than VHS. Problem was very very few movies came out in S-VHS format and you had to have a S-VHS player.
Laser disc's problem was you could only fit an hour on one side, so you had to flip the disc half way through the movie. Also the discs were huge, the size of a LP record.
One movie to watch for showing the excellent capabilities of D-VHS is The Day After Tomorrow
I bought the player near the end of the run on sale, I think about $300 and it came with 4 movies
Back in the early 2000's I would set up my VCR to record 6hr loops of those music streaming channels on DirecTV. You'd be surprised how much better the audio quality was compared to MP3 back then. I would then rip those songs to my mini disc player. To this day, those recordings are still some of the best audio I own with the exception being flac.
I too was in the AV industry during the early 2000s and those early Mpeg 2 Blu-ray disc's were awful, they barely looked better than the Superbit DVDs. The Fifth Element's first BR released was so underwhelming Sony had to re-release it in an Mpeg4 format.
I did the same thing and all of my friends thought I was nuts. I still have those tapes, and they still play.
Hey mate, while reading your comment I noticed your user name and checked your channel. Hope you still have that NA 20B and keep it in good shape!
I use to point a camcorder at MTV and then play the recorded VHS through the built in camcorder speaker, which I would then hold a mini tape recorder up to. I then mailed the tape to my aunt Susan who would listen to it and learn the music on her Casio keyboard which she would then play to me over the phone so I could easily enjoy high quality reproductions of my favorite song! I still have her recording of No Diggity and that shite is tight!
@@FerrowTheFox Yep still have it. Engine is currently out so I can rebuild the intake and replace the coolant seals.
As noted in other comments, the film source and intermediate mastering format make a huge difference. It makes sense that they did a great job transferring "The Hurricane" to D-VHS both because it was a recent film (all materials easily available) and it was intended as a showcase for the D-VHS format. Later transfers may have been good enough for TV, DVD etc. and not worth the time and money to really spend time/money remastering for Blu-Ray.
that makes no sense.
There was a copy protection on VHS too. I think it was called "MacroVision". If you connected 2 Vhs Recorders with composite, its was making stuff on the luminance channel resulting in very dark pictures changes to bright and so on.... There were 2 workarounds: 1.) Connecting over HF Modulator - Picture was not good and mono audio. 2.) Get a MacroVision decoder (diy things were sold)
or get a VHS player that didn't have a responsive gain. I remember having a "Tashika" VHS player from about 1989 that could copy from any other VHS player.
@@drcl7429 yep. There were ways around it
LOL at "making stuff" and "HF Modulator". Were you even born when VHS was popular?
@@gordonshumway7465 sorry but english is not my native Language
@@gordonshumway7465 It was making stuff, it was making random spikes on the offscreen luminance signal lines. A High Frequency modulator might be a way to counter it by inserting fresh sync lines.
When I was going to college for video production, in the early-to-mid 2000s. We used digital video tapes. It was a common industry standard at the time. I didn't know that they did home media releases. Of movies on digital video.
Never thought I would see a video on D-Theater from Linus! As a collector I own a JVC HM-DT100 player, which in my opinion was the swan song of VHS technology. It outputs via HDMI, has a digital TV tuner, and to my knowledge is the only VCR that upconverts regular VHS tapes to 480i.
been a regular watcher of ltt but still he amazes me with uploads like these. my utmost respect to the entire ltt staff for being nothing less then simply amazing!
There was also Laserdiscs back in the mid 80's . Resolution was about 425 lines vertical but the sound was much better than VHS and it was watchable in letterbox format ,witch was a big thing back then . VHS hifi was great for actually recording music.
Laserdiscs were so large that people that I knew who had them often joked that they were watching their newest records!
@@Endemoniada Not quite. Those DVDs were taken from the LD master tapes, not the LDs themselves, and had proper 480-line video instead of LDs ~400. It’s also why they were so grainy - the LDs had noise reduction done later in the process, and Lucasfilm didn’t replicate the process for the DVD. (If that wasn’t confusing enough, they also used the VHS audio for Empire, instead of the LD audio, as the LD audio had at least one glitch in it they didn’t want to replicate.)
Mid 80’s? Think you mean mid 90’s lol.
@@Muffin_Man177 LD first came out in 1978. Was finally dropped from the market as DVDs began to pick up around 2000.
@@Muffin_Man177 No John. Actually I first got to use a LD back in 89' when I worked for The Absolute Sound/The Perfect vision magazines. I believe our Pioneer elite was one of the top models we had. TAS was a high end audio review journal ,and TPV was the high end home theater component version. My job was System setups & testing and software acquisition . The best Laser discs were made by the Criterion collection . They were incredible . We were all drooling at the upcoming promise of HDTV as they had it in Japan in early 90's .Some of the best CRT's were not 4x3 aspect ,but closer to widescreen .Sony's XBR's were pro monitors and we had some nice ceiling mount projectors & rear projection sets that were ok . It was a nice jump from VHF & UHF ,old cable & VHS. TAS is still around, new owners ,& most of the original staff are gone.
I owned one of these and it was awesome. They were also backwards compatible with SVHS, not just VHS and I was able to use the FireWire connected to a PC with Windows 7 to capture digital video. The raw file sizes were huge but it worked.
The JVC unit I had also had a component video output so you can connect it to either a CRT 16:9 HDTV or a plasma TV.
In the early 2000’s there was a large community on AVSForum that used these to record HD movie broadcasts and play them back with their CRT projectors which they looked great on.
I remember trading 1080i HD movies with other members and had a pretty good collection of DVHS movies as well as original D-Theater tapes.
Watching this brings back memories. Kinda wish I never sold mine on eBay many years ago.
1:52 - AFAIK, most movie DVDs were encoded with MPEG-2 using an *interlaced* profile.
Although newer players gave the option to deinterlace that, and output as 480p (or upscaled higher) via HDMI, for many years the best you could get was Composite, S-Video, RGB, then eventually Component for the progressive/upscaling models.
Well, OK, I should expand on that a bit, because somebody is SURE to call me out on it. lol
NTSC movies were generally converted using a 3:2 pulldown, so were a bit harder to deinterlace without artifacts, since some fields were a blend of two original movie frames.
PAL movies were usually sped up by 4%, to show 24FPS at 25FPS.
(two fields per frame, so 50Hz, but each pair of fields was taken from the same original movie frame, so could be easily stitched together again to make one progressive frame.)
On later DVD players and TVs, I guess PAL DVDs could be shown at the original 24FPS, if they both supported that.
One big downside of the PAL method is they would also pitch-up the audio slightly (yes, even the Dolby Digital / DTS 5.1 tracks before encoding). So things like bass effects were a tiny bit less erm, bassy.
I'm SO glad we don't need to use either of those methods now. I always hated interlacing for both movies and video camera footage. Unfortunately, they still used interlacing for 1080i TV broadcasts. I guess to make it easier to do the conversion from the older stuff.
Blu-Ray movie disks are all encoded at the original 24FPS, AFAIK, as are most movie streaming services now.
(or from digital movie cameras, it was 23.976FPS for a while, or erm, something. I can't remember now.)
Was a lot of differences with PAL and NTSC. DVDs are 480i or 576i (at 60 or 50 fields per second). But they can store progressive 480p or 576p content (at 30/24 or 25 frames per second), and have some special flags and handling to do so.
12:22 - A very good example of a terrible colour grading of an older movie is of The Matrix (1999).
The original VHS and DVD had that (fairly) subtle green tint when they were in the Matrix, which was similar to the Director's previous movie "Bound".
But on the recent UHD Blu Ray release, the green tiny was SO overblown, and distracting.
It was meant to be a subtle hint originally. I think it was perfect on the DVD version (which I watched many many... many times on my first 5.1 and projector setup. lol)
I don't know why the movie studios keep thinking they are improving on the original vision when they mess with the colour grading so much.
Or maybe it's partly the thing where the consumer "expects" the colours to pop more on the latest 4K release, else they might think they're not getting their money's worth when re-buying the movie they'd already bought four times before?
I didn't mind some of the minor changes to the re-release of Star Wars in 1997, but I thought the "dance number" in the Cantina was silly, and unnecessary.
I don't agree that movies should ever be messed with too much from their original theatrical form.
I'd rather see a classic movie as close to the original presentation, warts and all.
(restoration of the frames is fine, like removing scratches and dirt, and boosting colours if the original celluloid lost colour over time. But adding or changing scenes, like when the replaced the shotguns near the end of E.T. with walkie-talkies... no thanks. lol)
P.S. Han Solo shot first.
@@electronash It wasn’t the UHD Blu-ray of The Matrix that had the overblown green tint, it was the original Blu-ray release. The UHD Blu-ray fixed the issue (and even came with a remastered Blu-ray (something that WB seems to decide on random to do with their UHD Blu-ray releases) that also fixed the issue).
I remember my dad an audiophile and visualphile back in the mid 2000's bought a Pioneer PDP-6010FD 60" Plasma TV, a JVC HM-DH30000U D-Theatre (D-VHS) player/recorder and a Klipsch CS-700 DVD Home Theater System for the home theater. The picture looked amazing and the audio sounded amazing at that time when I watched movies with my brother, mum and dad on a Friday night.
Most Disney and Pixar DVDs had a plasma TV picture set up functionality feature in the menu, helped massively. Also, there was set up DVD called digital video essentials which was a high end picture tuning utility, cost £50 in 2002 just for the disc. I had a Hitachi pd4200 plasma in 2001, you could heat a room with that bad boy. It was 30 kg, try wall mounting that by yourself!
Men, I love you guys. Just the 1.5 minute opening comments alone convince me time and time again that I am not the only geek and that there are actually even bigger nerds then me. What a comforting thought just before Christmas! Love you, guys.🎶🥁🎵
That's pretty awesome! In the 90's most professional music was recorded digitally on what looked like a VHS tape, called ADAT using Alesis ADAT digital multitrack recorders. So this totally makes sense.
It totally would have been a hit if they would have come out with this earlier or before DVD. Digital to tape was already being used in the music recording industry for years.
Even before ADAT, the very first CDs were mastered onto Beta analog video tapes - the Sony PCM-F1 encoded the digital audio into a video track that the tape could store.
At uni, I used the TASCAM competitor DA-88, based on Hi-8 tapes, flipping brilliant system.
@@NathanMendel Ha, look at the Technics SV-P100 digital audio player/recorder on VHS format casettes, from 1981. And yes, Techmoan has one.
Never have heard of this format. Very interesting. I just remastered my old high school Senior Video from the class of 2000...that VHS tape lost SO much quality in 22 years, it was pretty scary. I digitally cleaned it up best I could, but, its pretty rough. Would have been so different if this D-VHS had become more mainstream.
D-VHS still had the deterioration that VHS was notorious for. The dropouts were worse because digital tapes tend to do that. Even Mini DV seems to hold up better. Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, and HDCAM were the best magnetic tape formats
@@alexs3187 Don't some production companies still use HDCam and Betacam to master things? I remember hearing that not too long ago.
@@jamespuso1627 they might still have the decks for duplication and archiving older content. I don’t think it’s being used on the production side anymore. XDCAM and other solid state media has taken over magnetic tape.
Hey at least you got something. Some of us don't have any videos of our childhood
What did you use to capture the video? Unless you used some older encoding devices you are probably losing half your Resolution.. many devices made after say 2008 simply drop interlaced frames. Then you have the double whammy that if your hardware encoder didn’t drop the interlaced frame, modern software will ALSO also just ignore it. The industry collectively decided to give interlaced sources the finger about 8-10 years ago.
In addition to this, you want a SVHS player that does not lower the bandwidth of an outgoing signal on S-Video ( or a rare one that has HDMI )
With all of these factors in your favor you can get amazingly higher quality from an VHS camera original that.
Another factor in why it failed was probably because of the prominence of the PS2 (and the Xbox to a lesser extent).
Someone in a household wanted a new game console, someone wanted an upgraded video player...
The VCR was a stand-alone unit. So was a DVD player. But if you just needed something that "could" play DVDs, you could pick up either of the 2 newest consoles.
I'm sure there were a lot of PS2s that were purchased "for the kids" that were really purchased to be DVD players after the kids went to bed!
Was going through mum's old shed last week and found the ancient PS2 DVD remote control. We just chucked it in the bin, coz let's face it, who these days still uses their PS2 as a DVD player and doesn't already have one, but it was a cool find. Though in our case, with five kids, the PS2 was absolutely bought as a console first and a movie player second. Got it the same Christmas as the new family PC. Was a very happy bunch of kids that year.
@@tyrannicpuppy It was the same thing with the PS2 in my household...but my Dad did try convincing me to get it earlier, but nope! I wanted the Gamecube, haha
There’s also simply the price. Getting the proper HD experience was already fairly costly in 2006, but 2002 was just that much more so. Something so expensive was pretty much destined to be restricted to an enthusiast niche.
Yeah it occured to me as I was reading the comments and the PS3 being mentioned cementing Bluray as "The standard". The PS2 did that with DVD right as this thing was getting out the gate. Plus with the cost of DVD vs this entire setup it's a pretty open and shut case.
@@NEEDbacon It always seemed like Sony pushed the PS3 not to be the best console, but to get BluRay players into enough homes to make it the standard.
The PS3 was super expensive when it came out...but they were like half the cost of contemporary BluRay players!
Nice to give a shoutout to Techmoan, good channel for a 1 man band
Amazing how the standard adopted by video games has so much impact. I remember that DVD also established itself at the time largely due to the PS2. Regarding old movies, I don't know if it's the same problem we have with music. Originally analog recordings never sound the same when remastered. The people who were in the study and mixing the sound were doing it for analogue listening as well.
Sony really.
DVD was fast growing cconsumwr electeonic medium before the PS2 was even released. DVD helped PS2 adoption, not the other way around.
Later on, the PS3 supporting blu-ray was the deciding factor in the blu-ray vs HD-DVD format war.
I spent countless hours, as a child, in the electronics section of the local Hudson Bay dept store. The thing that compelled me to do so was a laser disc player. Hooked up to the biggest tube TV I had ever seen in my life. I must have watched A New Hope 80 times. They also had a Vectrex, Colecovision, and a Commodore Vic20. One of the best summers ever.
I worked for Circuit City in 1998 in the DFW area at one of only two stores nationwide that had a 42 inch plasma TV for sale. It had its own room. It cost 20k. One guy flew in from Denver just to look it over before buying one.
I cant believe I'm here geeking out over tape
When I was 8-13 years old I gamed on a 13” crt with a built in VCR. I was ecstatic. My brother and I got it for Xmas 98. loved that TV. Now when I see CRT tvs or vhs tapes I just laugh at how far the tech has come. Now I have a 65” HDR 4k in my room to game on haha
There were actually copy protection methods for VHS that could potentially foil people trying to capture off of composite or component outputs. It was just a lot easier to defeat compared to digital copy protection.
There's always a way around things. Shadowplay works great for recording movies. Granted If you want quality the file sizes are rather large.
Just needs a recorder that can fix the maligned sync signal to defeat Macrovision. Back in the days even electronic retailers like Conrad in Germany sold little boxes with two SCART connectors as "Video Enhancers".
Macrovision?
@@mirabilis yep, that was the trademark name at least here in Germany.
@@mirabilis It mucked around with the signals in the Vertical Blanking Interval between frames to mess with the Automatic Gain Control circuit used in VCRs while recording. The way VCRs work, the Macrovision effery doesn't affect playing the tapes, most of the time. For DVDs the Macrovision stuff isn't encoded in the MPEG2 video. There's a copy protection bit set to 1 in the VOB (Video OBject) files that tells the DVD player's analog output circuitry to generate the copy protection signals and insert them into the outgoing video.
But that made it fairly easy to convert a DVD player to be "VCR Friendly" by hacking the firmware to ignore the copy protection bit. Most of the early DVD players had firmware that could be flashed by burning a binary file (with the proper name) by itself onto a CD-R or DVD-R. Rewriteable discs typically didn't work for that, even if the player could play audio or DVD or VCD/SVCD off rewriteable discs.
Some early DVD players had a hidden menu to disable copy protection or pressing a specific button combo or pattern on the remote would disable it. In the USA all those methods eventually were ferreted out by the studios and DVD player manufacturers sued or threatened into no longer having them available.
But in New Zealand, the government banned the sale of DVD players with copy protection. The kiwis were able to record DVD to VHS all they wanted.
It killed me when Linus said "I don't know that it looks better, it has so much film grain." Grain is beautiful, Linus. Embrace it.
One of the problems of remastering back then was that you would transfer film to more film and the grain would increase. Depending on what the pipeline was for a remaster, you could end up with way too much film grain as it all stacks up.
yeah hes gotta be a newbee
Yeah same 😔
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Its a film artifact, but we've learned to embrace it.
I love the look of Analog Video , it has something that feels so soulful in a way i can't properly describe.
1:51 VHS was actually 480i. The 240 lines refers to the equivalent horizontal resolution, which was bottlenecked by the low bandwidth of VHS.
and also because of NTSC
@@phelissimo_ Exactly
Yeah 240i would mean each field would be 120 lines of the image, good luck doing that without digital scaling on an ntsc crt
Yes! Thank you! NTSC was 480i at 60Hz, while PAL was 576i at 50Hz.
@@tankmchavocproductions6907 It's mainly down to how an analog NTSC signal is structured. Any TV or device designed to receive it is expecting 525 lines of interlaced information (roughly 480 visible). Any deviation from that would render the signal incompatible with most stuff. Even 240p stuff like old game consoles technically output 480i, just both interlaced fields had the same information, making it 240p.
Most flat panel televisions do not interpret the signal from regular VHS properly causing loss of contrast and sharpness. Generally a good quality crt will give much better results. Also vhs doesn't degrade as quickly as we keep seeing advertised...I have a huge collection, many of which are from the 80s and 90s, and they all still look great.
I have a Jurassic Park VHS, and it still looks great on my CRT. These guys are just using the wrong technology for VHS.
@@wojtek-33 ok, they still look as good as they did new...no need to be snobby
It's actually not just the signal getting interpreted incorrectly but the gamma curve of a CRT is completely different to an LCD, and can't really be accurately reproduced on anything but OLED, and even there only with some fancy custom compensation. This causes colors to be completely out of whack on the lower and high ends.
That problem is actually the reason why I got myself a tiny CRT for my retro consoles last week, even the best analog to digital conversion can't reproduce the gamma curves correctly making dark colors darker than they should be, losing quite a bit of detail.
My last CRT TV was a Panasonic Quintrix 28 inch wide screen, the picture on that was second to none for that time
I found with a lot of the old VHS tapes I had (especially ones used for home-recording), that the sound quality degraded a lot faster than the picture.
as a Blu-Ray enthusiast it's maddening how much the master can vary from release to release. If the movie has different cover art than what it used to have 3-4 years ago odds are the studio went with a new master and hopefully didn't blow out every color in the process. Thankfully there are review websites which compare and contrast the video + audio quality for each disc release which are essential ime to sus out the lesser quality copies
So there’s different bluray versions of the same movie? how do people tell the difference?
The copies are only as good as the quality of the reproduction. Studies do not want to spend a lot of money painstakingly recreating a movie that may not sell. Its a gamble. That's why some transfers look amazing, while other don't look any better than the content of the format that came before.
@@Whyyousnoopin sometimes a direct compare & contrast between the two disc images is the only real way to tell, but if you're used to analyzing pictures & film long enough you'll notice immediate differences in color balance (cool vs. warm), the contrast levels, or the blockiness of the image (resolution). There might be some graphic designer videos you could check out who could explain these things in greater detail, or videos on ppl calibrating their monitors & TVs that could explain this well too
There's also the issue of the 'experts' who do the transfer. Sometimes the film is sourced from the negatives but they haven't taken into account that the color timing is meant for a specific stock so they just transfer it as-is. Or in case of Star Trek the Next Generation, not leaving much headroom in the dark so you get pretty icky old-school pixel coring when values burn out before they hit black. And then there's The Matrix that has green cast applied to it after the cinema release (you won't find the original print in HD expect as a bootleg 35mm scan) and Jurassic Park that has all the night scenes turned into 'hey I used the brightness knob so now you can see the mattelines of the dinos' horror. :D
17:30 "People didn't care about HD nearly as much as they thought..."
Back in the early 2000's I actually worked at a "Radio Shack" in New York City... yes... hilarious. One of my jobs was to go into upscale apartments and help setup, and troubleshoot home entertainment systems. I can't tell you how many people had Red, White, and Yellow RCA cables running from their fancy blue ray machines to their 50" plasma screens. I think that even more than people not caring about HD... MANY people just didn't understand it.
Great Video! Fun to watch.
I’ve never cared about picture quality. I had friends growing up whose dad would all buy the latest and greatest TV with every upgrade. Didn’t really see the fuss, I would always stick with what I had till it ceased working. Now I’m back down a VHS wormhole and it’s so obvious, but in real time the changes were unnoticeable.
Oh and yeah all those dads are bitter divorced and likely still paying off those TVs today 😂
We had one of these early pioneer plasma tv. I can attest to how heavy it actually is. It was mounted in a case that was built into the wall instead of just a traditional tv mount.
Sooo True 😂
I still have my D-Theater VCR and a bunch of tapes. I mainly bought it to record HD from my cable box that had a firewire connection. You could also connect it to your PC and dump the files on your computer.
People were certainly getting around the copy protection for D-Theater VHS. The way I found out about the format, and the only way I’d ever heard of it before Techmoan’s coverage, was from HD rips floating around online around 2005 or so. I had a crisp looking copy of Moulin Rouge and Fight Club I could play in high definition on my laptop and I thought that was amaaazing.* And I remember that D-Theater logo playing at the start as well.
*lol but come to think of it, I wonder if my laptop back then even got up to 720 resolution.
The conviction, the passion of that "TO WHAT F***ING END" is so great.
Linus saying “there is so much film grain” as a negative thing physically pains me. That’s the director and DP’s intent.
And there’s no “upscaling” involved at all. This was a 2K scan, transferred at 1080p. Film is a format with far higher resolution than anything these formats could touch.
The neat part about tape storage was how much data could be packed. I am looking up the data on the VHS tape, which a 2 hour tape appears to be around 248 meters long, a cassette could hold a max of 430 meters. I did some math using IBM's LTO tape back up. Using the specs of the LTO-1, its tape is 609m long and holds 100 GB (uncompresed). At 248 meters length, that should be ~40GB of data, which is enough room for many Blu-Ray films. The trick is the read speed. The articles suggests LTO-1 has an uncompressed speed of 20MB/s, but uncertain if read and write are the same rates, as these are typically used for recording back ups. LTO-1 is from 2000. Move up to 2010, IBM has LTO-5 with 1.5 TB over 849m, making it 438GB on 248m of tape. Tape storage is no slouch. The latest from IBM, LTO-9 is 18TB uncompressed over 1,035m, about 4.3 TB on 248m of tape. Oh, I forgot to mention that the tape width for IBM's LTO is the same as the VHS tape.
The sad part about tape storage is you really can't skip, right? With the latest tech, we can install several GB of RAM or a decent hard drive in such a tape machine, even a decent NVMe drive. If your seek times are decent or depending on how the data is written across the tape, you can buffer the film data onto the internal drive to allow some quick skipping. Everything there depends on how fast the data can be read to the random access storage, kind of like playing a movie while it downloads. Using LTO-9, a 1TB tape would be around 58m long. Depending on how fast the tape drive can read the data can determine how quickly an SSD could be filled for quick access. Once the entire film is stored, the device can automatically rewind the tape and just playback from storage.
Thanks 🙏 that is insane how tape can still compete lb for lb (literally!) with disc and SSD’s.
Easier to just look at the specs for D-VHS which shows 50 gigabytes on a 4-hour tape (T-240 VHS equivalent)
.
I seem to remember seeing a gadget (I think it was on the LGR channel) that allowed for backup on like a stanard vhs tape
Or just stop using tapes for anything except long term archive now that there’s cheap massive hard drives and nvmes.
@@martinlutherkingjr.5582 Party pooper
My uncle had D-VHS player, going back lots of years now lol. I remember how good it looked back then. I never had a dad, so once a month uncle would bring his DVHS round to my mum's house for a movie night. Great video, bought back some awesome memories.
I still have that JVC D-VHS Player. Got it for close to nothing after the format failed in the early aughts. Still works! The gap between the CD and the CD-R was fairly short. You were able to copy CD digitally not long after they came out (IIRC). But DVDs were a well established thing and there was no way to record it digitally until D-VHS. Same goes for all the TV shows that were moving over to Hi-Def. I remember the Daily Show was one of the last shows to make it to Hi-Def and the thrill of brain able to record it DIGITALLY! Wooo!
I remember when DVD came out, the local Blockbusters still put the “Be Kind, Rewind” stickers inside the boxes for the discs.
hahahaha fun fact
This was one of the most well put together and interesting videos I have watched in the past 5 years of this channel. I wish there was a channel dedicated to TV and audio that also talked about legacy products like this. Keep up the good work!
Look up Techmoan
Or Cathode Ray Dude!
Or Dave’s Retro Video Lab
Techmoan.
And "Technology Connections".
When I was in Japan back in 2006, I still saw shelves of d and w-vhs in nearly every electronics store. I thought it was amazing to have menus, chapter selection, multiple audio and subtitle tracks... DVD was more popular for PC stuff, but vhs still ruled the video scene. I don't think Japan really started transitioning until much later than the US.
This is a great concept. Having missed out on a technology when it was current is one of the best reasons to go back and revisit retro tech
My buddies dad had this exact same TV, and boy it was the coolest thing... i remember watching a dvd for the first time on it, man it blew my mind, and yes this is when they first came out and he paid for it...
01:50 Regular VHS outputs 480i in NTSC land (576i in PAL/SECAM) albeit with reduced horizontal resolution. All analogue video formats have the full vertical resolution of their respective television standard, they have no way to actively throw away scan lines because that would require elaborate image processing. Their quality difference is in horizontal resolution only.
Sadly that is not true. VHS actually did have an analog (acoustic) line double as a part of the standard that made it 240i.
@@varno I believe you are mistaken. Just anecdotally I've watched VHS on a high quality CRT and it's definitely better than 240 lines. Practically, it's technically impossible (because of the nature of interlaced video) to output a 240i source on a 480i display without advanced image processing.
@@eDoc2020 it is kinda, sort, both.... VHS does have 240 lines of resolution per field, however the colour resolution is substantially less, and in lp, and elp modes, there is some. Trickery done with acoustic delay lines to allow for line doubling iircm
@@varno Colour resolution in television and video is low in general. The definition rests entirely on luminance (ie brightness or black and white information), and that works fairly well because of how the human eye works. This is not specific to VHS but is also true for analogue broadcast television and even most digital video formats including DVD, Bluray and HD broadcasts.
About the delay line you likely misunderstood something. The European PAL and SECAM colour standards require a delay of exactly 1 scan line for decoding, which indeed lowers colour resolution somewhat (but not brightness resolution). This is a property of all PAL /SECAM decoders, it also affects broadcast viewing. It has nothing to do with VHS, and does not change the fact that VHS vertical resolution is 480i or 576i, depending on what continent you're in. NTSC decoding does not require such a delay anyway.
@@xaverlustig3581 no, I was aware of the colour loss in secam/pal. This was an additional delay line needed just for vhs, and was used in the creation of the composite signal from the vhs colour under encoding. The whole scheme is somewhat arcane, and I can't find the specific details right now.
I would love to see D-VHS make a comeback today. It would be the perfect format for movie collectors who want something that'll last a long time but will also be in HD
no thanks
Brilliant show AGAIN! Please do an episode on Sony's Extended Definition Betamax
I have that same player you finally got your hands on. I didn't buy many movies, just "U-571" and "I, Robot" and they looked amazing. I want to say that player does 1080i on the component output as well. I think back when I first got it the HDTV were out of my price range, but I had my 21" 1920x1440 CRT on my PC desk with a Creative DDTS-100 digital audio decoder and Creative 7.1 speakers. I had a component to VGA adaptor I used, and it worked great. I'm fairly sure it was outputting at 1080i because the detail was incredible at the time.
Last I used that player and the remote were still going strong. PlayStation 3 converted me to BD though.
Blue ray disc is kinda silly, first of all the players are SUPER expensive and they have streaming apps which chances are you already have another streaming device. Also the disks are expensive
@@Warp2090 Blu Ray players aren't expensive anymore, you can get one for around £70. There's so many movies you can get only a few quid as well
@@RonanB99 True but i've seen many dvd players with HDMI and 1080p upscaling so that pretty much just renders blu ray useless, in fact I have one. its a sony. But yeah, the issue I find is that I can't find a single blu ray player without internet/streaming apps.
@@Warp2090 The cheaper ones don't have WiFi so they can only connect to the internet with an ethernet cable. My Sony player has Netflix but the device is never connected to the internet. It's easy to ignore the apps, just put in the disc and it plays. While upscaled DVDs can look good, they're not as high quality as blu ray. Blu ray releases tend to have all the best special features too.
The first VCR I bought was a top-of-the-line Hitachi VHS recorder. Back in 1981, it cost me $1,200. I still own it and it still works.
Blank tapes in those days were $20 each and I bought a box of ten, which are still in my huge collection.
I was working and top quality was always my priority. It is amazing to see this digital tape design work so well. My eyes are shitty now so I probably wouldn't be able to appreciate the fine details it can deliver but it's quite the technological feat. Thanks for bringing this format to my attention.
I think you're generally right on the convenience factor, but a contrarian view (courtesy of my 8 year old) was "VHS tape is better than DVD, because it 'remembers' where you left off in the middle of a movie and does not force you watch the previews again." :) I remember seeing a demo of a JVC Digital VHS player in a HiFi store back in the day, and it was also something they had recorded over-the-air - John Williams conducting at the Olympics I think...
My 1st flat panel was a Panasonic 50" 720P plasma that also worked in 1080i. I had bought it back in 2007 and used it for 10 years before giving it to my parents that have it on all day and everyday since. Yes they still watch TV on it.
Before then I had a JVC 27" CRT, I think the max output was at 700 lines of resolution. I didn't have a D-Theater VCR, but did have one that for some reason had a multi head reader and made the auto tracking work amazingly. When playing the tapes on my old VCR the tapes where unwatchable but with my newer VCR, the image was perfect, mind you for that time.
We still have a 50 inch plasma TV in the living room. It was awesome when we got it to replace our rear projection TV (2008-ish I think?) but it’s super unimpressive now. It handles colors and contrast so poorly. The color banding is actually insane, especially in dark scenes. Shots of the night sky with the moon look like 4 or 5 distinct chunks of navy, black, and gray surrounding the moon. It also gets so hot. I think it’s rated for almost 300 watts while in operation? It noticeably warms up the room.
I can only imagine how great this format would have looked on something like the Sony 1080i HD CRT's of the time. Unfortunate that there aren't a lot of films released in the format.
I don’t know why people hate film grain, film grain is beautiful, especially in 4k transfers, like “Terminator 2” in 4k for example, i heard is bad, because they messed with the film too much, making it look digital by taking all of the film grain out of it, to the point where people looked plasticy, having horrible colors, and just made the movie look too clean.
if you watch movies shot on film from recent years I don't think the grain is too noticeable. It only enhance the movie imo. Once Upon a time in Hollywood was shot on 35mm and can't really see much grain. It starts to get noticeable on movies shot on 16mm, and I can see why some prefer 35mm over 16mm, but the the 16mm grain gives something to the film indeed.
@@dre400 Yeah movies shot on film I feel are just way better all together, they hold up for years.
This video absolutely blew my mind. I had no idea this format existed, much less the fact the DVHS would have a better master