• SonicDeathTaco@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      My family was pretty poor growing up, but we had cable. Back in the day there would occasionally be free weekends of Disney Channel, HBO and the like. Whenever there was one of those free weekends, my parents would buy a super long blank VHS tape and record hours of random movies. So for years every movie that I watched had an 800 number that would pop up every few minutes asking you to call and subscribe.

      • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        My dad would rent movies from blockbuster then set up the camcorder on a tripod to film the movie off the TV. It was always a big to-do since we all had to be quiet so we didn’t ruin the recording…

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          Tape speed / recording quality. Frames on VHS are diagonal stripes from one edge to the other. At lower tape speeds, those stripes get shorter and closer together. The horizontal resolution is unavoidably reduced. Color information gets muddy, because that’s some deep magic in a black-and-white signal. Adjacent frames can bleed into one another. Worst of all, you’re more likely to get tracking problems, where the ridiculous wheels-in-wheels of the diagonal / helical read mechanism get misaligned with the stripes, and the whole picture can drop out.

          • zedgeist@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            You wrote a really long and interesting response that completely failed to answer the question. What’s SP in this context?

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              Nope. The tape travels a shorter distance in each 60th of a second, so there’s a steeper diagonal between the start and end of each frame. The whole magnetic pattern gets scrunched.

                  • tyler@programming.dev
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                    3 months ago

                    I think I don’t understand the stripes thing. so it’s a diagonal stripe. are the edges of the tape the sides of the screen or the top and bottom of the screen? what do you mean by steeper? is there a a gap between frames? how is the gap created? why would putting less information onto the tape (standard play vs long play) cause less readable data and lower quality? usually packing more into a given space makes quality worse.