Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Samsung DVDHD841

Yes - very informative Bren. My Panasonic displays an "I", a "P" or a "B" in the display when paused on a particular frame. I always liked the "I" frames when doing pause-stepping in slow motion to get a clear picture, but never knew why it was better than the other two, or even how it was different.

You should run a seminar. Again. Thanks and very informative.

OT - I had a beta-max when I was a kid. We'd go to Erols (Blockbuster of 12 years ago) and half the store would be in VHS boxes (colored red, with the foam "vampire fang" insert thingy) and the other half was blue, with the smaller beta tapes. There was more selection, I remember, in VHS, and I remember often being upset when I foudn a movie available in VHS that was not available on our precious little outsider - the betamax....

By the way, Bren, what made Beta-max so much better than VHS - and why didn't it catch on....let's see how you handle this one.

One word: Marketing.

WhatFurrer

Marketing sucks.

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Do/Did you have a Betamax player at home?

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No, but we did use one for the security/liability camera at the arena until just recently - it's been replaced by a VHS machine. We did, however own a CED Player when I was a kid.

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By the way, Bren, what made Beta-max so much better than VHS - and why didn't it catch on....let's see how you handle this one.

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I honestly don't know... besides loading them and watching them, I've had no contact with them. I'm not much of a researcher type, I learn by using, and since I haven't really used them at all, I can't say. I have used Sony's U-Matic, the broadcast format it was derived from - the production company I used to work at had older footage on U-Matic (and 2" quad for that matter).

Sony did shoot themselves in the foot by not allowing others to license the technology, similar to the problem they continue to face (memory stick vs mmc, Atrac3Plus vs WMA vs MP3, etc).

Bren R.

I believe Sony actually developed or help developed the VHS format, and then they developed the Betamax format. The felt the Betamax was better and kept it for themselves.

More manufacturers made VHS, so it ended up with market share, and bye bye Betamax.

JVC takes the credit (blame?) for VHS publically, but maybe Sony had a hand in it?

Bren R.

my girlfriend works for a TV/Movie Production company in Winnipeg and they still use the Beta broadcast quality formats - Beta SP/SX and Digital Betacam (which I think isn't all that uncommon). It's slightly better quality than VHS because it is a wider tape, but more expensive also (at least that's how she explained it in layman's terms).

Well, there's nothing to replace the pro Betacam (consumer was Betamax) stuff (SP/SX, Digi)... that's a completely different animal - all ENG is shot on one of the flavours of it, and even the grandpappy analog Betacam is FAR better than VHS or DVD, lemme tell you. That I have a lot of experience with.

Bren R.

Bren, you said that the dvds we are stuck with now are single sided, single layer discs. Actually most retail DVDs these days are single sided, Double layer discs.

Also, I've read that DVDs now use MPEG4 compression.

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Bren, you said that the dvds we are stuck with now are single sided, single layer discs. Actually most retail DVDs these days are single sided, Double layer discs.

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Most of the new blockbusters are dual-layers, I just looked through my collection and ones like X-Men 1.5/Spiderman/Final Fantasy are SSDL, but other older movies (released on DVD) are SSSL. That's almost worse, really... bitrates for the movie itself seem nearly identical, they just pack the 4000 extra minutes of bonus footage/animated menus/easter eggs onto the other half of the capacity and compress at the same bitrate. I admit, some are better than others (tossing the schlock onto a different disc for instance).

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Also, I've read that DVDs now use MPEG4 compression.

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There are DVD players that play back MPEG4 videos and DiVX encoded video, but consumer DVDs, since they have to be backwards compatible with all players, still carry all video as MPEG2.

Bren R.