[awacs]

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).

[jinto36]

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.

[chiph]

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.

[mypalmike]

I think the only laserdisc I ever watched was at a friend's house: the original Star Wars. And what I most remember about that viewing was seeing artifacts in the intro credits (a Galaxy far far away...), particularly how the text was very noticeably quantized to scan lines.

[Arkadin]

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!

[dylan604]

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.

[vlunkr]

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.

[larrywright]

There’s a video floating around out there somewhere from the 80s show Knight Rider. One of the things about that car was that it could drive itself. I always assumed they used some sort of complex remote control system to film those scenes, but the video clearly shows that it’s just a guy wearing a suit that looks like the seat in the car. I guess simple wins out over cool.

EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/13356368964881203...

[blantonl]

That’s awesome: the author of that tweet is a friend of mine and a journalist out of Toronto. Small world.

[dasil003]

This is only strictly true if you're talking about television. The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers. But it was definitely better than anything seen on a television prior to at least 1080p if not 4k.

[reaperducer]

The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers.

It depends on the source material.

As luck would have it, I just recently got the 4K Blu-ray of Lawrence of Arabia, and it is very very grainy. Much more so than the 4K version of Rear Window, though that has a lot of noticeable grain.

Fortunately, some theaters still occasionally show classics like these, so when Lawrence comes around, we should find out. Hopefully. Assuming it comes in on big reels of film, and not over a digital link.

[Anthony-G]

A couple of years ago, I was lucky to see Lowrence of Arabia in a local cinema with a 70 mm film projector. The film was originally shot on 65mm and it looked fabulous on the big screen! I don’t remember the film grain being an issue. I usually notice it at the start of the film but then quickly get used to it. It’s also likely that the picture quality was cleaned to some degree.

I presume your Blu-Ray transfer was processed conservatively. Digital filters to remove film grain can introduce their own artifacts which degrade the image quality and make the picture look different from how it was originally intended to be seen.

[Arkadin]

A big difference is that the prints degrade and viewing conditions varied greatly. If you were watching Lawrence first run on 70mm print at large theater with the projector lamps cranked it was borderline religious experience. But if you weren’t in a big city and caught the end of the second or third run or a 35mm print with lamps at normal levels 4k on a newer tv is almost certainly better.

[pessimizer]

It's part of the Progress Quest™ style transfer from audiophiles trying to maximize numbers to videophiles trying to maximize numbers. Audiophiles are listening to music in "better" quality than the people who made it had through their monitors, and people are watching movies in "better" quality than the directors saw their final cuts in.

We're either moments before or moments after direct competition between UHD televisions and AI-aided upscaling and artificial sharpness, where details that never existed in the original are being precisely rendered by screens with higher resolutions than the human eye.

[thanatos519]

Television that was made on film has held up pretty well.

I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.

[jefftk]

Are you watching the original or the remaster?

The latter was only possible because it was originally shot in film, yes, but it was also an incredible amount of work. They needed to reassemble every episode from film!

[Anthony-G]

They did a fabulous job of the Star Trek transfers (I’m currently watching the original series).

However, some studios put very little effort into their film to HD transfers. Last year, I watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on Disney+ and its transfer from film is woefully bad. For certain scenes, the picture quality looked like upscaled standard definition and these transitions were very jarring. Also, whatever filter they used for grain removal made the flesh tones and facial features look “wrong”.

Even worse was the wholly unnecessary conversion from 4:3 to 16:9. The resulting composition of many scenes was distractingly bad. At one stage, they the second camera unit can be seen filming the action from the side!

Edit: Fortunately, Disney+ have made The Simpsons (another transfer from film) available in 4:3 – as well as the default 16:9. There’s a setting in the UI to play it in 4:3.

[jefurii]

I don't know about Buffy but some later Star Trek series like Deep Space 9 will be really hard to remaster because they were shot on video instead of film. The detail just isn't there to be enhanced.

[fitzroy]

Deep Space 9 was also shot on film. The editing, effects, and mastering were completed on video (same for TNG). This is true for nearly every 1-hour US prime-time drama of that era (Buffy, X-Files, etc).

https://www.slashfilm.com/549088/star-trek-voyager-deep-spac...

[HansHamster]

An this unfortunately also makes a remaster of VOY and DS9 very unlikely. I also read somewhere that they used more digital effects and 3D renders which makes a remaster even more difficult, as it would basically require to update or even redo them.

[rightbyte]

Theatres were a thing back then. But ye concerning TV you are right. My best example of that is playing Ocarina of Time on a big modern TV ... it was so much more impressive on a small ctr.

[amyjess]

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 use an emulator and apply some heavy shaders (some emulators have built-in shaders, but if one doesn't I'd recommend installing reshade and setting up CRT-Royale and GTUv050).

[goosedragons]

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.

[amyjess]

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 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.

[goosedragons]

RGB output is commonly desired in the retro gaming community. And RGB mods on the SNES and other consoles are commonly done. I've personally used HD Retrovisions component SNES (so RGB out) cables on a CRT and IMO the results look fantastic. Hell Nintendo themselves sold RGB cables for the Super Famicom and SNES in Europe. NTSC composite effects were a much bigger part of older 8 bit machines. Much less so on later consoles especially as expectations of the game heading to PAL regions rose.

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.

[vlunkr]

Yeah, video games are probably even worse off than movies. If you're playing on original hardware, most modern TVs don't scale them properly and they look terrible. There are external upscalers and RGB modding, but it's an expensive and esoteric thing to dig in to.

[reaperducer]

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.

[pessimizer]

> 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]

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.

[na85]

It's easier to suspend your disbelief when you can't see the little squares around the TIE Fighter as it attacks the Millennium Falcon.

[joosters]

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]

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.

[tomc1985]

The Blu-Ray release of Star Trek TNG suffers from this a ton -- it was great seeing one of my favorite childhood TV shows in high def but it made all of the costumes, makeup, and sets look so fake!

[tablespoon]

> 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]

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.

[tablespoon]

> 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]

> I was talking about video quality, not that other stuff.

I covered video quality too

> This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything.

It’s definitely not worse now. Or at least not in the U.K. Regular broadcasters all have on demand / catch up services (like BBC iPlayer). These services are neatly integrated into nearly all smart TVs via Freeview Play and have been for roughly a decade already.

Then you have purely streamed content that has all of the benefits of the above minus the drawbacks of following a TV schedule. Which is great because the 30 to 50 year olds (yes, I actually know these figures because I’ve worked in broadcasting) generally prefer binge watching content rather than weekly instalments.

Then you have younger generations who prefer streamed content like Twitch and YouTube. Both of which also support rewatching previously live content.

In addition to all that, for households that don’t have good internet, there are still PVRs available free with premium subscription TV like Sky+/Q. And just to be clear, you absolutely do not need a Sky subscription to use a PVR. My mum has one hooked up and she only has access to terrestrial TV (Freeview). Some TVs even have PVR software built in and all thus you need is to plug a USB storage device into in.

Finally, for us nerds, there are a plethora of additional options available like Kodi, Plex, AppleTV plus convenience protocols like DLNA, ChromeCast, AirPlay, etc.

It has literally never been easier to consume video content and catch up on missed TV. And the fact that terrestrial TV viewing figures are dropping rapidly (again, I’ve worked in the industry so have seen the actual statistics on these things) is proof that people are choosing to consume TV in different ways then they did back in the days of VHS. (And there’s literally nothing stopping anyone from still using VHS if they really wanted to).

[SenHeng]

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!

[blantonl]

I remember purchasing a Dolby pro logic processor and thinking I had unlocked some new home theater super dimension.

and now we have 4k and ATMOS

[laumars]

> 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]

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.

[laumars]

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]

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]

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 audio, like colour video, was an advancement that came after broadcasting had already been standardised. Which means they had to find room in the signal to squeeze that additional information in (this is why TV sets that aren’t sync with the broadcasting feed go black and white). Stereo was a relatively recent addition, maybe late 80s or early 90s (I remember really clearly when the technology was turned on but can’t recall how old I was) so it wouldn’t surprise me if stereo audio was subject to the same syncing issues as colour video.

VHS HiFi seems to be a different format entirely but which also used the same storage media (like how CDs have a few different storage formats supported by the same hardware optical discs)

[actionfromafar]

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

[michaelcampbell]

I've known guys in the past that kept audio recordings on VHS, just for that reason.

[pessimizer]

> 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 in September 2001.

[rconti]

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]

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]

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.

[sokoloff]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[gnopgnip]

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]

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.