Fun With Dead Video Formats!
One time,
a wise man once asked, once a technology is finished, where does it go? Is it trashed? Is it forgotten? Until recently, new electronics in the U.S.
would settle in and be played to death for years, even decades, but that is not
the case anymore. In Japan, newly
introduced technology has a life-expectancy on average of only 18 months!
Skipping
the puns about things being cheap, I am ever amused on how on one side, you get
a bunch of people complaining about an old format, how bad a format is, how
disposable it is and how it was somehow such a burden on both them and humanity
as if it were an incurable disease. Then
when it becomes available as cheap and for next to nothing, a bunch of people
swoop in and suddenly want to see it, enjoy it and check out what could have
been. You know, the case where a store
has a bunch of discs and/or machine(s) cheap or “Uncle George” has a collection
and/or player gathering dust he is willing to part with or let you at least look
at.
So what
if the picture quality is analog in almost all the cases or if the content is
limited, the fun is what these things play like and also how bad that audio may
or may not be. Recently, video formats
and video games have been experiencing their first wave of nostalgia. Who knew?
Let’s take a look at some of the video technologies that actually made
it to the consumer marketplace and are goners…
Sony Reel-To-Reel Videotape – Made for the consumer market
and recently featured in Paul Schrader’s Auto
Focus (where they managed to find one that had never been opened to make
the feature film with!) you get a format that was fuzzy, black & white and
at least could copy TV shows, very badly.
In Schrader’s film, it is used to shoot sex!
U-Matic – Sony’s precursor to Betamax (250
lines!) was usually used by TV stations, though a few used it to tape shows at
home and the picture was an improvement over the reel-to-reel system. However, despite the tape being larger than
VHS or Beta, it could only hold an hour of video!
Betamax – It had a better picture that
VHS, but lost the tape war to VHS because Sony thought they could take over the
home video market and dominate it as they had for TV stations using U-Matic and
Beta. However, the VHS camp went on a
licensing frenzy and buried the better looking tape. Like the previous formats, it started with
lousy analog sound with much tape hiss on a small segment of the slow-moving
videotape. Like VHS, Beta began offering
Dolby Noise Reduction on their tapes much like audio cassettes, but that did
not help. Then both offered Hi-Fi sound,
which was an FM Stereo audio signal weaved into the video signal, which was
state of the art at the time, but for Beta, it did not mater.
Selectavision 12” Videodisc/CED
Format – When the
12” LaserDisc format was introduced (even ahead of sister format Compact Disc,)
RCA thought they had a format as good with Selectavision. Unlike the format that used a laser beam,
this one actually used a needle like a record that could play audio and
video! To make sure the grooves were
protected, each disc (a few hundred were issued) came in a giant hard sleeve
which all machines could remove by the owner sliding and unsliding the whole
cover into the machine. So what went
wrong? The needle skipped, the discs
overheated trapping dirt in the grooves & even warping them, plus the discs
got stuck and the playback quality was a wreck in any case. By the time the company pulled the plug and
discs/software was discontined by mid-1986, RCA reportedly lost over $150
Million in money of the time, which you could multiply a few times by today’s
inflation and you can see why General Electric eventually bought the company. Ironically, discs still turn up at
memorabilia shows and flea markets and even have a few collectors, though the
sellers do not always know what it really is or how it works.
Sony 8mm Videotape – Because VHS taped required big
camcorders, the makers created VHS-C, a compact version of their tapes for
smaller handheld cameras, some of the earliest small machines ever to hit the
market. With Beta no longer around, Sony
took the 8mm version of their Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and turned it into a
videotape. At first, people loved
recording with it, until they found out how volatile in the way of dropouts the
tapes were, though they can hold up well if taken care of very carefully. Sony eventually warned that they were not
archival. At the same time, Sony managed
to get a hundred or so prerecorded tapes issued of hit movies, but the format
eventually bombed, even after the picture-improved Hi8 (to counter Super VHS) and
low-def Digital8 were introduced. All
three combined were less successful than Beta.
Super VHS – With VHS the first long-term
hit home video format, the company behind it decided to try an improved version
for increasingly larger TVs and to take advantage in the growing interest in
home theaters with more definition than even regular Beta. However, the movie industry was happy with
regular VHS, did not want to upgrade, nor did customers for what seemed a relabeled
format and very few prerecorded tapes were ever produced. It did help to introduce the S-Video hook-up
that 12” LaserDisc & regular DVD eventually used and was made available in
a watered-down version for regular VHS that did not require the more expensive
and more volatile S-VHS tapes that the original system required. No prerecorded films seemed to have surfaced
in the format.
ED Beta – Not to be outdone, Sony
introduced Extended Definition (or ED) Beta that had even better picture
definition than Super-VHS. It was so
expensive that few consumers bought it, but so close to professional Beta TV
stations were using that Sony took a bath when those stations bought the consumer
ED tapes and equipment cheaper instead of the actual professional version that
was more expensive! Beta bombed again.
12” LaserDisc – originally announced as
DiscoVision, these optical discs were the first to use a laser to read them,
the first video format ever to have stereo (FM analog), first to have PCM
CD-type sound, broke in letterboxing to home video and even introduced Dolby
Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 in their final years before DVD overtook the format
once it got good enough. Like Beta, thousands
of titles were issued, but many of them have laser rot that makes them
unplayable. However, many still play
just fine and their uncompressed PCM sound in most cases annihilates the Dolby
Digital 2.0 equivalent on many a DVD which simply recycled analog Laser
masters. Until DVD, it was the Rolls
Royce of home video software often with prices to match even if it only had up
to an hour per side, though a few machines flipped the laser element to the
other side without anyone having to do this by hand. An attempt to do anamorphically-enhanced
analog widescreen and even HD Lasers were tried, but only a few discs were
pressed before the format was finally laid to rest after 18 years as the
then-second successful format in home video history.
W-VHS – The second attempt to expand
profits on the VHS name died before it got out of the gate, offering a
widescreen image (the now familiar HDTV 1.78 X 1 frame) as the “W” means
widescreen and was the first-ever high definition format to be produced, if
barely. Despite it’s up to 1,125 lines
of definition and obviously improved detail, this was analog high definition,
digital was needed instead and the format was shelved.
D-VHS – With a 1080i capacity at best,
the fourth and final version of VHS finally hit the market and this was not
only the first digital HD format to make it, but the most successful since
regular VHS. But DVD was a hit by then,
people knew HD discs were inevitable and though four studios offered
prerecorded titles in the format (around a hundredish) that were not bad, the
format was for the curious with money to spend at best and was obsolete by 2006
on the consumer market.
DIVX (Digital Video Express) DVD – Copyright concerns were so
significant among the studios, many of them did not trust regular DVD and
instead wanted a DVD with a limited playback life. One option was a vaporware idea
environmentalists killed quickly, but the other was a DVD that after a very
short period, you would have to pay for watching each time you played it! Sponsored by Circuit City as a way to overtake
Best Buy and the industry, DIVX offered a machine that could only run with a
telephone hook-up but could play DVDs and CDs without it, as well as these
goofy discs with no extras and letterboxing (the creators said people would
never want/did not really ant or need these “things”) and playback quality that
was not as sharp as the better DVDs or anything else but lame Dolby Digital
sound. One of the dumbest ideas in
electronics history, it bombed, the industry embraced open DVD after this and
Circuit City had a $200+ Million disaster that to date, the company has never totally
recovered from. Long dead, few of the
discs originally made for it are playable anymore.
HD-DVD – Though you did not have to pay
for it every time you used it, Bill Gates hoped you would want it
more than the Blu-ray and would get royalties for every one sold, the many
glitches regular DVD had and still has were expected by many to carry over to
the new format. Remarkably, they did
not, but with 30GBs at best could not compete with the future-proof 50GBs+
rival Blu-ray offered and the little-discussed layer change HD-DVDs still had
to go through on some discs were a legacy many did not want in a new
format. At first HD-DVDs were looking
better than Blu-rays and both offered the best home video soundtracks yet in
DTS-HD, DTS-MA and Dolby TrueHD, but that quickly changed and any lead HD-DVD
had that made it appealing were lost. Dead
by February 2008, weeks under the first two years of its introduction, the
players offered the same fun windfall/curio factor as LaserDisc and Beta for
those only used to DVD and VHS.
Now that
the remaining machines were selling cheap like the DIVX machines, it becomes a
cheap way to get a high quality player for DVD-Video and CD, which made all
HD-DVD players more attractive, especially as so many DVD-Video-only players in
the last few years have become noticeably cheap and flimsy in build and
appearance. That makes for a nice
windfall and as far as the High Definition playback is concerned, HD-DVD easily
outperforms high definition on the Internet, from downloads, form cable TV and from
satellite TV. Even as it dies, it will
turn out to be a crash-course introduction to better high definition to show
people what the fuss is all about along with the rise of Blu-ray.
Once you
see how good the best HD playback looks, it becomes harder and harder to watch
and tolerate lower definition. With
Blu-ray now the new dominant format, it will be a long time (say a generation)
before anyone will even attempt a new format, leaving behind a graveyard of
dead formats as fun as Dracula and The Mummy.
All you have to do is dust off the casket and look inside. The less you criticize, the more fun they
are.
That
should be it for a generation or two, as Blu-ray has so much room to grow and
expand, especially with 50GB to start.
But if you run into one of those other formats and can get them cheap,
enjoy!
- Nicholas Sheffo
