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Tapeheads and the Quiet Return of VHS
Hugh Pickens writes "Joshua Phillips writes that something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams as browsing aisles is no more and the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country. Future generations may know little of the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down and when getting a movie meant you had to scour aisles of boxes in search of one whose cover art called back a story that echoed your interests. Josh Johnson, one of the filmmakers behind the upcoming documentary 'Rewind This!' hopes to tell the story of how and why home video came about, and how it changed our culture giving B movies and films that didn't make the silver screen their own chance to shine. 'Essentially, the rental market expanded, because of voracious consumer demand, into non-blockbuster, off-Hollywood video content which would never have had a theatrical life otherwise,' says Palmer. While researching the documentary Palmer found something interesting: there is a resurgence taking place of people going back to VHS because a massive number of films are 'trapped on VHS' with 30 and 40 percent of films released on VHS never to be seen again on any other format. 'Most of the true VHS fanatics are children of the 1980s,' says Palmer. 'Whether they are motivated by a sense of nostalgia or prefer the format for the grainy aesthetic qualities of magnetic tape or some other reason entirely unknown, each tapehead is unique like a snowflake.'"
TFA (http://techzwn.com/2012/02/interview-filmmakers-tell-of-the-home-video-revolution/ ) says "Something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams. Browsing aisles is no more, as the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country."
So the submitter actually changed it.
Sigh.
In fact, the author even gave the real reason for "going back to VHS":
If you want to see one of those movies, you really have no other choice but VHS. If they were released on DVD, I'm sure there would be no such thing as a "return of VHS".
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Yeah, no. Vinyl captures a greater spectrum of sound than CDs do.
But we have youtube. And there are a lot of people who have taken pains to put up such documentaries on the site. The Cold War documentary that you mentioned can be seen at Cold War Full Length Documentary
CDs can clip audio pretty aggressively resulting in distortion if the music is improperly mastered. There's no clipping in vinyl since it's an analog format, a lot of records do end up sounding better than CDs.
Because vinyl has an infinite dynamic range? Truth is, if vinyl was still mainstream these days, then records would be produced by the very same people who make bad CDs today, and they would only have disadvantages over their digital counterparts. Terparts. Terparts. Terparts. *thud* :-)
Mastering vinyl is a pain in the ass, you can't just send music to a vinyl factory and get it pressed. You have to get test pressings (white pressing) done first. The reason for this is that average vinyl can't reproduce everything flawlessly. Vinyl comes in different grades, highest grade (audiophile) costs $$$'s and can produce low frequencies quite well, but the stuff you get at the vinyl store will buckle badly in the white pressing stage if you're not careful. Low frequencies reduce the groove gap and if you push it too far the grooves will collide and cause the needle to skip. Not good.
Mastering to CD is much easier. Producing things like downloadable FLAC is the easiest and best method.
Task Mangler
Laserdiscs suffered from bitrot and separation of layers.
you had to store them flat or they would get a bend in them.
And yes, those of us that had Laserdiscs were better than you proles with VHS :-)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As a video software engineer, I know your pain from a slightly different angle.
Your "waterfall effect" is over quantization of DCT blocks (in rare cases it could also be misuse of the deblocking filters). It's pretty easy to avoid and most encoders can actually give feedback about quantization rates and whether artifacting will be visible in output frames.
The problem is that people don't know how to use their encoders correctly, use them with completely the wrong settings and then don't inspect the output to see the result.
The MPEG4 High Profile 4.1 used in BluRay discs is capable of practically flawless encoding at any motion rate if operated with a little care. MPEG4 allows custom and dynamic quantization and a two pass encoder can use the second pass to fix any mistakes by adapting the local bitrate and quantization method.
I actually suspect though that you're seeing MPEG2 video getting pumped at an MPEG4 bitrate which is causing massive over quantization. This generally happens when studios have MPEG2 encoding hardware but no MPEG4 encoding hardware but they are told "keep your video at X bitrate" – even though this leaves half the disc empty and the video looking like a stream of 8x8 shiny cubes.
Of course, some decoders don't implement deblocking algorithms correctly and actually *increase* blockiness in some cases. This would be the fault of your BluRay player – you'd need to play on a good software player and compare.
And don't get me started on interlacing in digital video. It's a "feature" that has only ever made digital video worse and is somehow part of most broadcast standards. Aaarrgh!
"If I had to choose I would go with my 300 pound Pioneer LaserDisc player. It was expensive as hell, and I did not have to flip the discs. The quality though was just shy of DVD and still analog video. That meant no artifacts and no degradation (well a heck of lot less without laser rot). It was a nicer looking picture to me."
Laserdisc was composite video. It had ENORMOUS degradation in the form of bandwidth limiting. Digital compression, with all its flaws, is far, far better at preserving information than Laserdisc's crude, sledgehammer approach. The only people who think that Laserdisc was good by today's standards are ignorant.
"Not to mention the audio was in many cases digital and the Elite players had optical connectors to your stereo system."
The audio of Laserdisc wasn't stereo, high bandwidth, or even digital!!! HiFi audio was bandaid'ed on after the fact. Pathetic. Then there was the crappy CAV/CLV choice where you got either good usability features at 30 minutes per side (rare) or got 60 minutes of video with poor usability. Embarrassing. Laserdisc sucked.
"I know it may sound crazy, but it really pisses me off when I see a $20+ Bluray title, with super high resolution compared to the LD, and yet still have bullshit encoding artifacts in high speed motion scenes. LD did not have that."
It's easy to produce a high quality image when there is no resolution. If a DVD were encoded using the Laserdisc's source signal you wouldn't see artifacting either, nor would you see a good picture. DVD's luma resolution is superior to LD but it's chroma resolution destroys LD due to the composite encoding. Then there's HD...
"LD is too much of a pain in the ass though, not to mention new titles are not exactly being sold either. Never did see a burner or blank ones around either....."
Wow, ridiculous. No one is making wax cylinders for Edison's phonograph either.