VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
SVCD provided a near indistinguishable quality difference with DVDs when using most CRT TVs and had the advantage of being supported by any DVD player dinxe the same video and audio formats were used. You could burn the movie into 2 CDR if you wanted to maximize the quality, 2CDR were still cheaper than 1 DVDR.
From what I remember, SVCD uses roughly the same MPEG-2 video compression as DVD-Video, but with a much lower maximum bit rate. Even with a movie split onto two CDs, the bitrate was still less than half the bitrate of a professionally mastered DVD. I always found the quality of SVCDs to be noticeably poor.
It comes down to the glue (and distribution of said glue) used to bond the sides at the pressing plant.
This is still not easy without piracy, at least for liveTV.
The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.
Back in the 90s Singapore was such a big market for this that it acted as the major driver for motivating globally synchronized releases. i.e. for Reader's Digest magazine* in the US in 1995 if you did not release it on the same day in Singapore it would be easily available in pirated form within days, removing any ability to make money in that market for the legitimate product.
In UK pubs circa 2000 it was notorious that certain people would approach your table to sell you bootleg DVDs, and that if you indulged them you'd then get access to their "special" selection.
* And yes, that example is totally serious.
Sometimes they’d disappear for a while and you’d have to work with your existing collection or find a new guy.
But that was pre ubiquitous-ish high speed internet.
I think that made the tapes read-only.
VHS copy protection was mostly some flavour of Macrovision (at least in Canada).
But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.
At least this is my recollection.
At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days
An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head.
(Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")
Why would someone want to clean a VHS tape? It's full of data, and it's deliberately lubricated.
They always panic slightly thinking we're trying to give it to them (most libraries are inundated with out of date materials people donate), and are happy to give us names and numbers of churches and elderly centers who might take them.
It's not a ton of work and worth it overall.
the lab I was working at had an internal cable-tv network (which also ran ethernet on some of the channels), so we got a channel and hooked that to the output of the switch.
so you could get live visualization outputs from your office, or route them to the recorder to store your frames, and play them back at a smooth 30fps interleaved whenever you wanted.
What’s interesting is how much the timing of official releases shaped all this. If you had to wait months for a cinema run or home video, the “street version” was too tempting to pass up.
What about DivX/XviD?
VCDs had broad hardware support, and were more mainstream.
I used to travel around Southeast Asia a bit, and whenever I was in Hong Kong, I'd load up on VCD movies at mainstream stores like HMV.
I still have VCD copies of The Incredibles and On Her Majesty's Secret Service I bought at HMV.
I was only familiar with the second definition -
- a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
What's the use of the word "usage" when its use is clearly to just say "use?"