251–260 of 264 posts
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> We're making a better world for consumers, but sometimes I wonder if it's a better world for people. Have you actually on multiple occasions wondered about this? Or has your brain just been colonized by pithy statements?
Do you have anything constructive to say or are you just going to be a jerk?
I am old enough to remember when the wife would call me at work on a Friday and say hey, stop by the video store and get a movie for tonight and I'll stop and get wine and take out. What was special was the "Dave" at the video rental place (it wasn't blockbuster but whatever). I don't recall the guy's name, but he always remembered me and what we liked and had great suggestions and sometimes if you said, nah but how…
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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.
From why I understand of VHS (and I could be wrong here since I’ve not written software to read VHS tapes) is that they don’t have a separate audio track. They just encode NTSC or PAL signals as it would be broadcast over the airwaves. That means audio will be encoded in the signal after the video frame. It also means Teletext is also recorded too (which has been useful for Teletext achievers / historians). Stereo au…
But no need to speculate:
I am old enough to remember when the wife would call me at work on a Friday and say hey, stop by the video store and get a movie for tonight and I'll stop and get wine and take out. What was special was the "Dave" at the video rental place (it wasn't blockbuster but whatever). I don't recall the guy's name, but he always remembered me and what we liked and had great suggestions and sometimes if you said, nah but how…
What's funny about all this Blockbuster nostalgia is that back in the day they were actually the bad guys. They were the big homogenous corporate chain that drove all the independent stores out of business. One of their key differentiators was to overstock Hollywood blockbusters at the expense of indie films, art films, cult classics etc. and to make sure that the indie stores wouldn't be able to get their hands on t…
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From why I understand of VHS (and I could be wrong here since I’ve not written software to read VHS tapes) is that they don’t have a separate audio track. They just encode NTSC or PAL signals as it would be broadcast over the airwaves. That means audio will be encoded in the signal after the video frame. It also means Teletext is also recorded too (which has been useful for Teletext achievers / historians). Stereo au…
Eh, no. Think about it. If the audio was encoded in the video signal, it would need to be buffered. (Such systems existed, but not in VHS.) Audio in VHS is a continuous analog thing. But no need to speculate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
To quote:
> Each of the diagonal-angled tracks is a complete TV picture field, lasting 1/60 of a second (1/50 on PAL) on the display. One tape head records an entire picture field. The adjacent track, recorded by the second tape head, is another 1/60 or 1/50 of a second TV picture field, and so on. Thus one complete head rotation records an entire NTSC or PAL frame of two fields.
Edit: This a diagram here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC that illustrates how each transmissions frequency is divided up for different aspects of the broadcast.
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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).
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.
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Eh, no. Think about it. If the audio was encoded in the video signal, it would need to be buffered. (Such systems existed, but not in VHS.) Audio in VHS is a continuous analog thing. But no need to speculate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
You’re thinking digitally. PAL and NTSC are analogue formats. In fact that link you cited even says that’s VHS stores the PAL or NTSC signal verbatim and what I described is exactly how PAL and NTSC store audio. To quote: > Each of the diagonal-angled tracks is a complete TV picture field, lasting 1/60 of a second (1/50 on PAL) on the display. One tape head records an entire picture field. The adjacent track, recorde…
VHS stores the video as it was broadcast.
But how the audio is stored, has nothing to do with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_television
There were different ways to transmit audio over the air waves, but it was done on a different frequency from the video. There were even schemes to broadcast the audio on regular FM stereo as. Some VCRs had a separate audio in so you could use a separate audio source for instance for dubbing. (But you had to record video at the same time, because of the head switching. So no going back and edit only the audio or only the video, with VHS.)
The audio on VHS was originally stored just like on audio cassette tapes, quoth the VHS wikipedia:
"audio was recorded as baseband in a single linear track, at the upper edge of the tape, similar to how an audio compact cassette operates."
HiFi quote from the same article:
"Hi-Fi audio is thus dependent on a much more exact alignment of the head switching point than is required for non-HiFi VHS machines. Misalignments may lead to imperfect joining of the signal, resulting in low-pitched buzzing"
The audio is not stored at the end or beginning of anything, it's continuous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF_rTTptah0
The HiFi audio is recorded "deeper" in the tape, then they video is laid down on top of that.
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You’re thinking digitally. PAL and NTSC are analogue formats. In fact that link you cited even says that’s VHS stores the PAL or NTSC signal verbatim and what I described is exactly how PAL and NTSC store audio. To quote: > Each of the diagonal-angled tracks is a complete TV picture field, lasting 1/60 of a second (1/50 on PAL) on the display. One tape head records an entire picture field. The adjacent track, recorde…
I am not thinking digitally. VHS stores the video as it was broadcast. But how the audio is stored, has nothing to do with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_television There were different ways to transmit audio over the air waves, but it was done on a different frequency from the video. There were even schemes to broadcast the audio on regular FM stereo as. Some VCRs had a separate audio in so you could use…
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For video games, there's another factor: much of the artwork in old-school games was specifically designed to be altered by both CRT scanlines and NTSC composite effects. So many sprites in 2D games and textures in 3D games rely on NTSC effects to antialias the graphics and turn dithering into real gradients and you're missing out on so much with a modern screen. The closest you can get to that experience now is to u…
Modern upscalers/HDMI conversion devices with retro consoles in mind like the retrotink offer the ability to add scanlines as well. So it is possible on real hardware for those that care enough.
1. A much bigger issue is NTSC composite. Making it look like a CRT is a much smaller part of the picture than what NTSC composite effects do. For example, If you were to hook up the RGB headers on an SNES (yes, the SNES has RGB headers on the board) to an actual CRT it would look awful because SNES games were designed with NTSC blending effects in mind.
2. There are scanlines and there are good scanlines. Most artificial scanlines look like garbage and not at all like an actual CRT's scanlines. There are some good filters out there, but you really have to do your research. If you see the words "slot mask" used to describe the filter, it's probably good. This is one of the reasons I'm a fan of the CRT-Royale reshade filter, because it does an excellent job at emulating the look of a slot mask.
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Modern upscalers/HDMI conversion devices with retro consoles in mind like the retrotink offer the ability to add scanlines as well. So it is possible on real hardware for those that care enough.
So I basically have two concerns with that: 1. A much bigger issue is NTSC composite. Making it look like a CRT is a much smaller part of the picture than what NTSC composite effects do. For example, If you were to hook up the RGB headers on an SNES (yes, the SNES has RGB headers on the board) to an actual CRT it would look awful because SNES games were designed with NTSC blending effects in mind. 2. There are scanli…
Just watch My Life in Gaming's YouTube videos about getting the best output from a console.
The Retrotink and the OSSC are very highly praised and designed by retro game enthusiasts. While I have not personally used one I'm sure they're probably pretty good.