7 ms·

Growing up in the 80s with VHS, Betamax, Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls), and being a dj in the late 90s when the thought of a "USB stick instead of traveling wi

by awacs 4y ago

Growing up in the 80s with VHS, Betamax, Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls), and being a dj in the late 90s when the thought of a "USB stick instead of traveling with all this vinyl was an impossibility", makes this whole nostalgia tour a fun one. I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about the first iPhone and then looking at one and realizing how damn small it actually was compared to modern versions. I started converting / collecting most of my movie collection onto a localized server years ago, and glad I did. Though I rarely watch all my old movies (a growing list of about 1000 including most of my favorite TV shows), the end game I think we all know is everything streamed, with no actual ownership of content. It's not a terrible notion, but the problem I think we've all seen is it's now turned into a corporate ownership game, and you never know where the content you're interested in watching is. One day Star Trek is on Netflix, the next Paramount, etc. The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes, even though I'm a firm believer in unless you're watching on something well over 100" a nice high-quality 1080P file looks just great on a large 85" tv (which I currently have).

rconti 4y ago
I ripped my entire DVD collection 15 years ago, and I just never watch any of it. If I want to watch one of the movies I just pay the $4 to 'rent' a 4k stream instead of suffering with DVD quality.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  It’s so funny reading this. I was remarking the other day to a friend how well I think DVD’s hold up. Nothing to write home about, but definitely a solid level above “tolerable” to me.
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  Man I am the exact opposite. If I have had it on DVD, I've ripped it and I'd rather watch that, rather then pay $4 to rent any other stream of a product I already have.
vlunkr 4y ago
It's interesting that when we revisit older movies, all the way up to the 90s, we're watching them at much much higher quality than we did originally. Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen. I think some older movies are unfairly judged by how they look on hardware that couldn't have existed at the time.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.
  - joosters 4y ago
    Older 'practical' special effects still hold up better than much more recent early CGI though. Even if you can tell that something is a physical model, IMO it still looks 100x better than a poorly rendered and animated low-poly 3d effect.
    - na85 4y ago
      Even modern CG is garbage and suffers from the uncanny valley effect. I don't enjoy Marvel films but even if I did they're unwatchable because of the awful CG.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > The special effects are really obvious. I've never understood this complaint. Almost all special effects are obvious, because they depict things that aren't real. I don't remember watching Ghostbusters in the theater and wondering if those were really ghosts.
    - SenHeng 4y ago
      Some people just cannot (or refuse to) recognise all the noise you can see around old/cheap/low quality effects. I often watched those silly Japanese horror varieties where they would show you a grainy video of some dark place, and then maybe a grainy shot of someone crawling out of something. But you know it's two separate things spliced together because the grains are of a different size, or when one area is gray-scale while another is simply decolourised to match. My friends could never tell the difference.
sokoloff 4y ago
It all depends on how close you sit. If you’re 12+ feet away, you may not be able to resolve the difference between 1080p and 4K, but at 6-8 feet away, I bet you can.
- omoikane 4y ago
  For me it's not so much the difference in resolution, but the fact that due to low resolution being the norm, all the on-screen text tend to be huge. This is readily noticeable for the credit text in TV shows (not so much for movies, which seem to have barely legible credit text going way back).
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    People get trained on what's supposed to be nice. There are people who will insist that anything less that 2K resolution on their computer monitor physically hurts their eyes and brain.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Blur can cause eye strain, and eye strain hurts. I don't think that's a weird thing to say. Also "2K" is mess of a term people shouldn't use. By better definitions it should mean either almost-1080p or a loose term for 1080p. 1440p is often called 2K but it really isn't. 2560x1440 is 2.5K if anything.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      I guess? But once I went to two 2.5k 32”coupled with 120hz it was hard to go back. It didn’t “physically hurt” in a very noticeable way, but I’m also definitely less tired and leaning over less frequently now.
jinto36 4y ago
One of the most noticeable things about playing laserdiscs on modern displays is the poor black levels and noise in shadows, and of course the difficulty in scaling interlaced material. Even with what should be a decent (but not nearly top of the line) FPGA-based deinterlacer/scaler I still feel like it should look better than it does, given how much better laserdisc resolution can be than VHS. But it's also analog video, and discs can degrade, as well as components in players going out-of-spec and increasing noise. I still like them, and there's something nice about large gatefold packaging, and these giant discs. Also got a hi-fi beta player recently and even though Beta is only 10 more lines than VHS at 250 (compared to 420 for LD and SVHS) it really did not look that bad on an LCD. It's also possible that the unit I received and the tape I tried it with have less wear than the average VHS VCR.
- dylan604 4y ago
  i'm sure there's a device somewhere you can insert inline to convert the colorspace from 601 to 709 for SD->HD. or change the picture profile on your monitor to help compensate for the 7.5IRE SD black.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chiph 4y ago
  Like you said, Laserdisc was way better than either tape format. But if you watched it on a Trinitron television, you noticed all the same artifacts you have. The best reason for owning a Laserdisc player in 2022 has decreased somewhat with the availability of the de-specialized versions of Star Wars. For decades that format was the only way to see the first 3 films as they were originally shown in the theater. Many thanks to the talented fans for putting the de-specialized versions together. I'm wondering with the resurgence in popularity of the LP, and with media stores re-configuring their store fixtures to sell them, if we'll get Bluray films being distributed in the large 12" size with large photos and booklets.
  - Arkadin 4y ago
    Non-special edition Star Wars was also available on VHS from same vintage as LD, but the thx remaster vhs version was best analog version imo. Although I fondly remember the taped off tv vhs versions I grew up watching. Fan versions of theatrical versions are amazing!
gnopgnip 4y ago
I think the endgame will be like music licensing, with a max royalty set by the government with a short exclusivity period. This is why smaller companies like deezer and tidal can compete with Apple Music, YouTube music, Spotify and still have substantially all of the same music
- scarface_74 4y ago
  There is no government imposed royalty on "music" for on demand music. Sites like Pandora where you can't choose your playlist do come under mandatory licenses. But services where you can play any music on demand is individually negotiated with the rights holders. The reason competition is ubiquitous is that the music labels didn't want to be beholden to one company during the streaming era like they were with Apple during the iTunes era. Besides, they make all of the money from streaming (70%+) and leave the services with a pittance. It's a horrible business to be in as a standalone service. It only makes sense as an integrated offering. Spotify and every other stand alone service is going to always be stuck with the "Dropbox problem". A streaming service is a feature not a product. There are also government mandated max royalties for songwriters. When I was a part time fitness instructor, the only way you could get music from the original artist was by knowing some DJs who did it low-key who could mix music on the 32 count phrase with a consistent beats per minute (step/cardio kickboxing etc.). The more mainstream fitness music had to use cover versions of the music. It's easier to get a license on the music, song writing than the entire performance. You or the studio also had to have a separate performance license to play the music during class. I can go on and on forever and I yada yada yada'd over the details on purpose.
tablespoon 4y ago
> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about the first iPhone and then looking at one and realizing how damn small it actually was compared to modern versions. I think the "what we've become accustomed to" is the most important factor there. Back in the VHS/NTSC days, without experience of anything else, I had not complaints about the quality.
- laumars 4y ago
  Really? I did. - Tapes would get chewed by the player - Took an age to find the right recording (you’d spend an age constantly rewinding) - Tapes would degrade the more you used them - sometimes they wouldn’t even sync vertically with your TV. Requiring all sorts of fun and games tuning your hardware - audio was often muffled and sounded like it was played through a sock - if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording - and even just getting the same content recorded was a game of chance. If the TV network was early or late airing your show or movie, there was a good chance you’ll end up missing some of it (back then there wasn’t an EPG so you had to programmed the VCR to start at a specific time rather than the start of a specific show). Not to mention my younger brother kept jamming Lego into the VCR (but at least that’s not the fault of the technology). I hated VHS. Switched to DVD the moment I could. Even though my computer wasn’t powerful enough to playback DVD properly I still massively preferred it.
  - SenHeng 4y ago
    Back here in Asia, aka land of the pirates and DivX, we could quickly moved to CDs, CDRs and VCDs. I think the huge proliferation of VCDs in Asia stunted the spread of DVDs for quite some time because they were just so cheap. It was a hassle having to switching discs midway through a movie, but there were a few enterprising people who sold players that let you insert two discs!
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Really? I did. I was talking about video quality, not that other stuff. > - if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything.
laumars 4y ago
> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then I don’t think anyone has forgotten how crappy VHS was/is. At least with vinyl, the sound quality was good even if the medium was bulky. But VHS just sucked in every way imaginable. Even in the 80s I hated VHS. It was the best we had but it always felt like a game of chance whether your recordings worked. I don’t miss a single thing about recording and playing video back then. > The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes A lot of the time content is just upscaled rather than remastered anyway. Particularly with TV shows but plenty of “HD” movies were just upscaled from DVDs rather than remastered from the original film rolls.
- jacobsievers 4y ago
  I don't know, VHS Hi-Fi wasn't bad. It had a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz and signal-to-noise ratio about 70 dB.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    I've known guys in the past that kept audio recordings on VHS, just for that reason.
  - laumars 4y ago
    Maybe. That wasn’t used by regular VHS rigs though was it (ie PAL or NTSC recordings)? I just remember VHS audio sounding muffled after the tape had been used a few times. To be fair, recording stuff from RF wouldn’t have helped much either.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      VHS has a mono track and a stereo track. Some copies have only the mono track, some setups use only the mono track, ever. My Harry Potter 2 copy has a garbled stereo track, so I manually switch to mono when watching that.
      - laumars 4y ago
pessimizer 4y ago
> Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls) Just coincidentally, today I came across the the wikipedia entry for the last Laserdisc release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Raiders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Raiders in September 2001.

by awacs 4y ago

rconti 4y ago

I ripped my entire DVD collection 15 years ago, and I just never watch any of it. If I want to watch one of the movies I just pay the $4 to 'rent' a 4k stream instead of suffering with DVD quality.

Forgeties79 4y ago
It’s so funny reading this. I was remarking the other day to a friend how well I think DVD’s hold up. Nothing to write home about, but definitely a solid level above “tolerable” to me.
PenguinCoder 4y ago
Man I am the exact opposite. If I have had it on DVD, I've ripped it and I'd rather watch that, rather then pay $4 to rent any other stream of a product I already have.

vlunkr 4y ago

It's interesting that when we revisit older movies, all the way up to the 90s, we're watching them at much much higher quality than we did originally. Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen. I think some older movies are unfairly judged by how they look on hardware that couldn't have existed at the time.

reaperducer 4y ago
Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.
- joosters 4y ago
  Older 'practical' special effects still hold up better than much more recent early CGI though. Even if you can tell that something is a physical model, IMO it still looks 100x better than a poorly rendered and animated low-poly 3d effect.
  - na85 4y ago
    Even modern CG is garbage and suffers from the uncanny valley effect. I don't enjoy Marvel films but even if I did they're unwatchable because of the awful CG.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > The special effects are really obvious. I've never understood this complaint. Almost all special effects are obvious, because they depict things that aren't real. I don't remember watching Ghostbusters in the theater and wondering if those were really ghosts.
  - SenHeng 4y ago
    Some people just cannot (or refuse to) recognise all the noise you can see around old/cheap/low quality effects. I often watched those silly Japanese horror varieties where they would show you a grainy video of some dark place, and then maybe a grainy shot of someone crawling out of something. But you know it's two separate things spliced together because the grains are of a different size, or when one area is gray-scale while another is simply decolourised to match. My friends could never tell the difference.

sokoloff 4y ago

It all depends on how close you sit. If you’re 12+ feet away, you may not be able to resolve the difference between 1080p and 4K, but at 6-8 feet away, I bet you can.

omoikane 4y ago
For me it's not so much the difference in resolution, but the fact that due to low resolution being the norm, all the on-screen text tend to be huge. This is readily noticeable for the credit text in TV shows (not so much for movies, which seem to have barely legible credit text going way back).
- pessimizer 4y ago
  People get trained on what's supposed to be nice. There are people who will insist that anything less that 2K resolution on their computer monitor physically hurts their eyes and brain.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Blur can cause eye strain, and eye strain hurts. I don't think that's a weird thing to say. Also "2K" is mess of a term people shouldn't use. By better definitions it should mean either almost-1080p or a loose term for 1080p. 1440p is often called 2K but it really isn't. 2560x1440 is 2.5K if anything.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    I guess? But once I went to two 2.5k 32”coupled with 120hz it was hard to go back. It didn’t “physically hurt” in a very noticeable way, but I’m also definitely less tired and leaning over less frequently now.

jinto36 4y ago

One of the most noticeable things about playing laserdiscs on modern displays is the poor black levels and noise in shadows, and of course the difficulty in scaling interlaced material. Even with what should be a decent (but not nearly top of the line) FPGA-based deinterlacer/scaler I still feel like it should look better than it does, given how much better laserdisc resolution can be than VHS. But it's also analog video, and discs can degrade, as well as components in players going out-of-spec and increasing noise. I still like them, and there's something nice about large gatefold packaging, and these giant discs. Also got a hi-fi beta player recently and even though Beta is only 10 more lines than VHS at 250 (compared to 420 for LD and SVHS) it really did not look that bad on an LCD. It's also possible that the unit I received and the tape I tried it with have less wear than the average VHS VCR.

dylan604 4y ago
i'm sure there's a device somewhere you can insert inline to convert the colorspace from 601 to 709 for SD->HD. or change the picture profile on your monitor to help compensate for the 7.5IRE SD black.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chiph 4y ago
Like you said, Laserdisc was way better than either tape format. But if you watched it on a Trinitron television, you noticed all the same artifacts you have. The best reason for owning a Laserdisc player in 2022 has decreased somewhat with the availability of the de-specialized versions of Star Wars. For decades that format was the only way to see the first 3 films as they were originally shown in the theater. Many thanks to the talented fans for putting the de-specialized versions together. I'm wondering with the resurgence in popularity of the LP, and with media stores re-configuring their store fixtures to sell them, if we'll get Bluray films being distributed in the large 12" size with large photos and booklets.
- Arkadin 4y ago
  Non-special edition Star Wars was also available on VHS from same vintage as LD, but the thx remaster vhs version was best analog version imo. Although I fondly remember the taped off tv vhs versions I grew up watching. Fan versions of theatrical versions are amazing!

gnopgnip 4y ago

I think the endgame will be like music licensing, with a max royalty set by the government with a short exclusivity period. This is why smaller companies like deezer and tidal can compete with Apple Music, YouTube music, Spotify and still have substantially all of the same music

scarface_74 4y ago
There is no government imposed royalty on "music" for on demand music. Sites like Pandora where you can't choose your playlist do come under mandatory licenses. But services where you can play any music on demand is individually negotiated with the rights holders. The reason competition is ubiquitous is that the music labels didn't want to be beholden to one company during the streaming era like they were with Apple during the iTunes era. Besides, they make all of the money from streaming (70%+) and leave the services with a pittance. It's a horrible business to be in as a standalone service. It only makes sense as an integrated offering. Spotify and every other stand alone service is going to always be stuck with the "Dropbox problem". A streaming service is a feature not a product. There are also government mandated max royalties for songwriters. When I was a part time fitness instructor, the only way you could get music from the original artist was by knowing some DJs who did it low-key who could mix music on the 32 count phrase with a consistent beats per minute (step/cardio kickboxing etc.). The more mainstream fitness music had to use cover versions of the music. It's easier to get a license on the music, song writing than the entire performance. You or the studio also had to have a separate performance license to play the music during class. I can go on and on forever and I yada yada yada'd over the details on purpose.

tablespoon 4y ago

> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about the first iPhone and then looking at one and realizing how damn small it actually was compared to modern versions. I think the "what we've become accustomed to" is the most important factor there. Back in the VHS/NTSC days, without experience of anything else, I had not complaints about the quality.

laumars 4y ago
Really? I did. - Tapes would get chewed by the player - Took an age to find the right recording (you’d spend an age constantly rewinding) - Tapes would degrade the more you used them - sometimes they wouldn’t even sync vertically with your TV. Requiring all sorts of fun and games tuning your hardware - audio was often muffled and sounded like it was played through a sock - if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording - and even just getting the same content recorded was a game of chance. If the TV network was early or late airing your show or movie, there was a good chance you’ll end up missing some of it (back then there wasn’t an EPG so you had to programmed the VCR to start at a specific time rather than the start of a specific show). Not to mention my younger brother kept jamming Lego into the VCR (but at least that’s not the fault of the technology). I hated VHS. Switched to DVD the moment I could. Even though my computer wasn’t powerful enough to playback DVD properly I still massively preferred it.
- SenHeng 4y ago
  Back here in Asia, aka land of the pirates and DivX, we could quickly moved to CDs, CDRs and VCDs. I think the huge proliferation of VCDs in Asia stunted the spread of DVDs for quite some time because they were just so cheap. It was a hassle having to switching discs midway through a movie, but there were a few enterprising people who sold players that let you insert two discs!
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Really? I did. I was talking about video quality, not that other stuff. > - if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything.

laumars 4y ago

> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then I don’t think anyone has forgotten how crappy VHS was/is. At least with vinyl, the sound quality was good even if the medium was bulky. But VHS just sucked in every way imaginable. Even in the 80s I hated VHS. It was the best we had but it always felt like a game of chance whether your recordings worked. I don’t miss a single thing about recording and playing video back then. > The only problem has been keeping up with resolution changes A lot of the time content is just upscaled rather than remastered anyway. Particularly with TV shows but plenty of “HD” movies were just upscaled from DVDs rather than remastered from the original film rolls.

jacobsievers 4y ago
I don't know, VHS Hi-Fi wasn't bad. It had a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz and signal-to-noise ratio about 70 dB.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  I've known guys in the past that kept audio recordings on VHS, just for that reason.
- laumars 4y ago
  Maybe. That wasn’t used by regular VHS rigs though was it (ie PAL or NTSC recordings)? I just remember VHS audio sounding muffled after the tape had been used a few times. To be fair, recording stuff from RF wouldn’t have helped much either.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    VHS has a mono track and a stereo track. Some copies have only the mono track, some setups use only the mono track, ever. My Harry Potter 2 copy has a garbled stereo track, so I manually switch to mono when watching that.
    - laumars 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago

> Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls) Just coincidentally, today I came across the the wikipedia entry for the last Laserdisc release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Raiders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Raiders in September 2001.