[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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.