La Reina Catalina !j0siCathyI started this discussion 11 months ago#117,981
I am thankful there exists a store that still sells accessories for old technology. I saw blank VHS tapes there once. I am honestly thankful for the existence of these stores.
Anonymous I joined in and replied with this 3 months ago, 1 hour later, 8 months after the original post[^][v]#1,340,609
@1,297,432 (Meta !Sober//iZs)
VHS was actually much better than it is remembered. The reasons people think it looks so bad is due to a number of factors like watching old worn-out tapes on old worn-out VCRs, watching shoddy OTA broadcasts recorded at the slowest possible speed onto low-end blank tapes, the proliferation of modern TVs with very low quality de-interlacing and upscaling capabilities, and the absolute dogshit quality of the vast majority of tape digitizing equipment and techniques.
If you watch a good condition commercial tape with a properly maintained VCR on an era-appropriate television, you'd be surprised at the quality.
And actually, you know what, 240p Youtube actually looked better back in the day too. In recent years Google has been re-encoding all of their older videos with newer codecs that save space but also have lower image quality. Not only that, but several years ago Google also stopped storing the original source video files, meaning that all these re-encodes were created from the previous 240p encodes. Re-encoding a lossy video file with another lossy codec will necessary always result in a lower quality file (this is called a "bad transcode"). In other words, when you watch an old Youtube video from 2006, you're watching a heavily compressed version of an already heavily compressed video.
Did you know that there were VHS tapes in the early 90s that were capable of playing 1080i? It wasn't a successful format because there were no affordable HD screens at the time.