>That's absurd. Why then was VHS overwhelmingly chosen by customers? Because it provided better >price/performance than Betamax.
Better price and availability do not equate to technical superiority.
>I am a bit of a movie connoiseur myself, and in my extensive experience renting movies, I >have not seen a single Betamax tape in well over a decade. They no longer exist.
That's like arguing that VHS is a better format than Laserdisc because I can rent VHS tapes at any Blockbuster video.
Analog formats that evolved from BetaMax (such as BetaCam SP) rule in the professional video market. This includes TV news, comercials, and the dreaded infomercial. In a post-production facility, the only VHS decks you will find are used for duplication. You'll never see a VHS deck in a professional edit suite.
(note: I don't work in the video business, but many of my friends do)
>If the ISO had been involved in videotapes twenty years ago, we might be stuck with >the absurdly inadequate Betamax format. BetaMax was a superior format than VHS. It lost out in the market because of Sony's licensing practices. A group of vendors got together to thwart BetaMax by creating the cheaper, and lower quality, VHS format. In the professional video realm, BetaMax-evolved formats are the standard for analog work. The next time you see a TV news crew, note the "BetaCam SP" stickers on their cameras.
I notice that many comments to the librarian point out that VHS tapes are not copy protected. This is not entirely true; most commercially recorded VHS tapes use Macrovision encoding to prevent copying with consumer-grade VCRs.
Macrovision is also used by licensed DVD players. The players are required to apply Macrovision encoding to the decrypted analog video stream. This prevents copying DVDs to VHS, and may also hinder the ability to re-digitize the signal using an analog video capture card.
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>That's absurd. Why then was VHS overwhelmingly chosen by customers? Because it provided better
>price/performance than Betamax.
Better price and availability do not equate to technical superiority.
>I am a bit of a movie connoiseur myself, and in my extensive experience renting movies, I
>have not seen a single Betamax tape in well over a decade. They no longer exist.
That's like arguing that VHS is a better format than Laserdisc because I can rent VHS tapes at any Blockbuster video.
Analog formats that evolved from BetaMax (such as BetaCam SP) rule in the professional video market. This includes TV news, comercials, and the dreaded infomercial. In a post-production facility, the only VHS decks you will find are used for duplication. You'll never see a VHS deck in a professional edit suite.
(note: I don't work in the video business, but many of my friends do)
>If the ISO had been involved in videotapes twenty years ago, we might be stuck with >the absurdly inadequate Betamax format. BetaMax was a superior format than VHS. It lost out in the market because of Sony's licensing practices. A group of vendors got together to thwart BetaMax by creating the cheaper, and lower quality, VHS format. In the professional video realm, BetaMax-evolved formats are the standard for analog work. The next time you see a TV news crew, note the "BetaCam SP" stickers on their cameras.
I notice that many comments to the librarian point out that VHS tapes are not copy protected. This is not entirely true; most commercially recorded VHS tapes use Macrovision encoding to prevent copying with consumer-grade VCRs.
Macrovision is also used by licensed DVD players. The players are required to apply Macrovision encoding to the decrypted analog video stream. This prevents copying DVDs to VHS, and may also hinder the ability to re-digitize the signal using an analog video capture card.