Talk:VHS/Archive 5

Hifi VHS specs
There might be an error regarding dynamic range and signal/noise ratio. According to my informations, Dynamic range can never exceed SNR as any signal lower than the noise floor would be covered... by noise itself. Measuring DR is like measuring SNR with a 1 kHz signal. So DR cannot outrange SNR, at best it would be equal to it. So it is unlikely that DR is 90 dB if SNR is only 70 dB. I suggest it to be corrected, unless someone has a better explanation. TriasNT (talk) 17:23, 21 March 2013 (UTC)


 * DR is simply the ratio between the lowest level discernible signal and the highest level that can be output without distortion. The noise floor, however, can be above the lowest level discernible signal. It is flatly not true that the noise will necessarily cover (that is, make un-descernible) signals below the noise floor. The noise simply becomes an increasing proportion of the output. Jeh (talk) 20:25, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, understood.TriasNT (talk) 21:16, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Disposal...
There should be a section on disposal of VHS cassettes/tapes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.247.80.105 (talk) 20:38, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not a tutorial. How to dispose tapes isn't encyclopedic. You can consider the other projects within the Wikimedia Foundation. Check out http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects . Groink (talk) 01:04, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

VCR tape?
VCR_Tape redirects to VHS, but according to, there was actually a format called VCR, made by phillips, with coplaner reels. I'd never heard of it before, went to the wikipedia to find out more about it, but apparently the wikipedia doesn't know it exists? Sounds like a small-production-run thing, apparently only in the U.K., but as the first cartridge format in the U.K. seems like it ought to be notable enough to at least get a footnote on the page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.140.235 (talk) 00:00, 23 April 2013 (UTC) might be a more useful link from that page - 24.18.140.235 (talk) 00:02, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Other than the re-direct (with which this article has nothing to do,) I don't understand why this article would need to mention about an obscure format. We write about some other tape formats here, but that's because those other formats were involved somehow to the development of VHS. You really should be writing to User:Emmette Hernandez Coleman, as this editor created the VCR tape redirect back in January 2013. IMO, that redirect shouldn't be pointing to VHS. Groink (talk) 08:24, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I know, my suggestion was that VCR_Tape should maybe be more than just a redirect. But as far as I know, there's no talk pages for redirects. I'll try leaving a note on that user's talk page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.140.235 (talk) 15:18, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * In further research, VCR was the first consumer cartridge format, ever, and thusly definitely deserves documentation. It very slightly predated U-matic (according to - it was pretty much doomed because of the mechanical limits of coplaner reels, but (in one of those amusing coincidences) after knowing what it looks like, I saw a VCR tape in a episode of Columbo today. They look a lot like 8 tracks.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.140.235 (talk) 01:59, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I get that this is in no way relevant to VHS, but I'm not really sure where to put it since as I said VCR Tape is a redirect. Should I start a new article called Phillips VCR format, and link it off video tape? I'm not a wikipedia maven, I mostly just read the thing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.140.235 (talk) 02:06, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * A few words of advice when introducing a whole brand new item to Wikipedia. You need more than just the few sources you currently have. Otherwise, it is going to fail the notability tests. Also, you will need more technical information about the VCR format. I'm not even sure if the tape was even called "VCR". Other than the link you mentioned earlier, the Philips models of the early 1970s mention "VCR" more along the line of the unit itself and not the tape. I'm not really confident that the tape was actually called "VCR". Before VHS, the general term used for the unit is "VTR", so maybe Philips came up with "VCR" to distinguish it from other containers used in VTRs of its competitors. You'll need some sources that can rectify the definitions. Also, none of the sources I've seen so far mention anything technical about the format of this tape, such as whether it is U-matic or m-loading based, if it used helical scan, the number of lines it supports - stuff like that. Once you have that all put together, then you'll have yourself a good article. Again, do more homework before starting the article. Groink (talk) 06:40, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Turns out there's already a quite good article at Video_Cassette_Recording - just hard to find. ;-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.140.235 (talk) 19:16, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Awesome! I've went ahead and changed the VCR tape redirect to point to Video Cassette Recording. Pretty weak article in comparison to VHS. It only has two references. I'd tag it asking for additional references. Groink (talk) 20:46, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

About re-writing...
When re-writing sentences, make sure that you retain the context of the sentences. The last few edits totally changed the overall context, thereby going against the context of the original sources. For example, Matsushita didn't believe that VHS was better than Betamax. According to the original source, Matsushita did not want Sony to become number-one in the VCR industry. That is why Matsushita sided with JVC over Sony. Groink (talk) 02:17, 28 November 2013 (UTC)


 * And so you restored this sentence to its previous form:

Matsushita also didn't like the fact that Betamax could only record one hour of video.


 * ??? Your position makes no sense. Anyway, no company ever wants another company to become number one in anything; it's not a salient point. Please cite the specific page number(s) of the original source(s) that support your claim. Jeh (talk) 14:56, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

How much did a blank VHS tape cost at retail in the early years of consumer availability?
How much did a blank VHS tape cost at retail in the early years of consumer availability?

This question should be discussed in the main article, if verifiable information is available, and should extended to the costs of Hollywood movie releases on VHS. This is historically relevant information, and delves deeper into the - at the time - great resistance by movie studios to see this technology released to the general public, for fear of widespread piracy.

The same can be said of the record industry and their resistance to cassette tape recorders and blank and pre-recorded tapes. Initially these were very expensive as well.

2620:0:1000:2300:450E:8512:310F:CA89 (talk) 22:24, 15 January 2014 (UTC) Jeff


 * The problem is that costs could vary considerably across different markets depending on local factors and tape lengths. And then when pre-recorded material began to be released there was even further variation, not least because some releases were priced astronomically for wholesale to rental and different lines, companies and markets introduced sell-through prices at different stages. Timrollpickering (talk) 10:23, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Recent edits / reverts
Yesterday I tightened up the intro and removed a parochial reference to the U.S. in accordance with WP:BIAS. (Panasonic is an international brand.) These improvements were immediately reverted. I see from the edit history that changes to this article by IP editors are reverted as a matter of course, in violation of WP:HUMAN. 217.39.11.110 (talk) 12:54, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * First, thank you for following the WP:BRD guideline rather than simply un-reverting your edits.


 * The U.S. reference is not "parochial". Panasonic is a worldwide brand, and furthermore the name of the parent company, now. But during the subject time period, the parent company was called Matsushita; their products were marketed worldwide under the "National" name... except in North America, because we already had "National Radio Company" (makers of the famous-in-its-field HRO receiver). So M. used the name "Panasonic", only in the U.S. I believe all of this information is in the Panasonic article, but I feel the subject text here is necessary to explain to U.S. readers why, even though Matsushita was the foremost maker of VHS VCRs, they cannot recall ever seeing that brand on U.S. shelves. Perhaps it could be worded differently, but this bit of historical context should not be removed. Not every mention of the U.S. is a violation of WP:BIAS!


 * As for your stylistic changes: one, you left no edit summaries; and two, I simply disagree that they were an improvement. Not everything benefits from being sweated down to a minimum word-count, and "came down to" in particular is more informal than WP usually gets. Anyway, please see WP:BRD. Want to discuss your ideas further? Please continue here. Again, thank you for starting discussion.


 * Regarding previous reverts of IPs, if you'll actually inspect the changes you'll find that a series of IP vandals have been persistently trying to delete the "Decline" section. Yes, undiscussed deletions of entire sections are reverted as a matter of course. If you'll look at the history again you'll find that a registered editor tried the same thing, and that edit was also reverted. This is not a pattern of violations (ooohh, big scary word) of WP:HUMAN. It's just reverting vandalism. Jeh (talk) 20:48, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * All good (except perhaps for "ooohh, big scary word"). 217.39.11.110 (talk) 23:44, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * You're supposed to assume good faith on the part of other editors. Use of words like "violation" in your first contact is not exactly indicative of that. It sounds more like a WP:BATTLEGROUND attitude, to be soon followed by a report to AN/I. Jeh (talk) 23:56, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I've amended the brandname bit to cover both National and Panasonic. It isn't mentioning the U.S. that violates WP:BIAS; it is mentioning the U.S. and no one else. 109.144.240.112 (talk) 08:38, 12 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I just saw your edit re the brand names. Looks fine! Jeh (talk) 08:34, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Tape lengths table
Some questions I'm left with looking at the tape lengths table:


 * 1) Why does T-210 say “unknown” next to it?  All the entries are filled in.
 * 2) T-200 is missing entries that can be easily determined.  Or are they missing because reliable sources have not been found? (Except that the entire table is currently lacking citations.)
 * 3) Why is a D-VHS cassette format included in this table, when the article is about VHS? (I found the clue in the section just above the table's section—I missed it initially because I expected it to be explained near the table.)

Travis Evans (talk) 04:02, 24 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Additionally, what's with all the E-lengths above 300 (up to 480)? I thought 300 was the longest allowed within the physical standards, similar to C120 audio cassette, and whilst I've had examples of both of those, I've never previously heard tell of VHS tapes longer than 5 hours. Do these live in the same category as the mythical C150 and C180 audio tapes, ie made up by someone who got a bit overexcited about 90 and 99 minute CDRs and assumed there MUST therefore have been olde-worlde equivalents? Google turns up nothing relevant for "E480 cassette" - same as it did waybackwhen I heard some random mention 2.5 and 3 hour audio tapes and went looking for them.


 * All I can think of is that they may have been confused by CCTV systems that record up to 24 hours on one tape, which would be accounted for by a putative E480 in EP mode; as far as I know, however, such systems achieve this simply by recording onto a regular 3- or 4-hour tape (depending on locale) in LP at a much reduced framerate (about 7 or 8fps, depending - worse if they're multiplexing more than four (or nine...) camera views), hence their characteristically jerky (and blurry...) playback quality. 193.63.174.211 (talk) 08:40, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Chroma bandwidth
Is it really that poor, for both systems? I've got a lot of PAL tapes here whose boxes have diagrams on that seem to suggest a 600kHz chroma frequency, and although NTSC VHS seems to be pretty notorious for rubbish colour reproduction (especially in the EP mode that manufacturers look to have aggressively promoted, unlike LP in Europe), I've never really noticed that with any but the oldest and most worn out PAL cassettes, even in LP, and certainly not professionally mastered SP tapes played on a decent (but certainly not super expensive) 6-head deck. 40 colour clocks on each line is akin to what an Atari VCS could produce for its super-blocky background graphics, and would render any but the largest coloured text (8 to 10 characters per line max) practically unreadable.

Is that possibly the minimum allowed to qualify for VHS logo certification or the like, but not the actual general case? I could believe it for a cheap 2-head NTSC deck in EP mode on a budget-grade tape, but I've recorded Windows desktop screen captures onto VHS before and the result has come out quite good. I'm even wondering whether it might be worth brewing up some test cards on DVD (even though MPG itself downsamples chroma, that does manage 350-360 clocks per line...) and recording them back to VHS to see what the results are like.

(600kHz divided by 15.625 / 15.734 line frequency itself only = 38.4/38.1 clocks ... with a typical 15% overscan and Hblank, that's only ~32 visible ... presumably you get two "pixel" equivalents (or line transitions) per clock, so that's a still-minimal 64 lines (vs 42 at 400kHz) ... might be able to pull 12 recognisable text characters out of that, but I've seen smaller coloured text rendered in readable fashion... Maybe a fuller, if informal, implementation of VHS HQ ended up more widespread than the official account suggests? There's certainly a logo for it on the front of a lot of different decks. Or does PAL exchange lower vertical chroma rez for improved horizontal? Certainly, 128 lines would be believable, the colour's definitely worse than half the luma rez, but not one sixth...)

Having read over this I do now realise why a lot of Americans have such a poor opinion of VHS though - the common practice seems to be to err on the side of techniques and usage cases that produce really nasty results. I think the TV standard has to shoulder some of the blame (the inefficient AM encoding and poorer colour stability of NTSC vs the FM and inherently more reliable colour of PAL) for requiring a higher tape speed and thus encouraging use of LP and particularly EP mode ... which most likely produces much worse results than PAL in LP, even with the allegedly higher vertical colour resolution. (Therefore also legitimising the use of reduced-resolution LP modes on DVD, and the dubbing of quarter-D1 (typically "EP" or "SLP" mode) as "VHS quality" when it can't hold a candle to short-play PAL...) 193.63.174.211 (talk) 14:52, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

21st century use
That section of the article currently deals primarily with the United States and parts of it might be outdated. I am under the impression that no video cassette recorder has a digital tuner so they would not be able to record channels other than what the viewer is watching after digital television transitions. I got that idea from the media and retailers in the United Kingdom in 2007 which encouraged the idea to promote sales of digital equipment ahead of digital switchover. According to one poll many Britons expected to get rid of their video recorders after the switchover. This might also be because the major studios stopped releasing films on VHS in the late 2000s and most viewers already had DVD players by then. However services such as timeshift channels and online catchup services such as BBC iPlayer also played their part in the decline in the use of recording equipment. As for immigrants using VHS to source content from their home countries, that is only possible for content that was ever released on VHS. I think this is the case throughout the developed world and the digital television transition in the United States was completed in September 2015. Tk420 (talk) 12:10, 3 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your suggested edit. But... One, although over-the-air digital TV cannot be recorded with an analog VCR's tuner, the analog VCR is still usable for timeshifting with a cable or satellite box that has composite or S-video output, which they all do IME. Two, there are lots of other uses for analog VCRs besides timeshifting. In any case we don't edit WP articles based on what we think is the case. That's called original research. And generalizing from what you see in one country to "I think this is the case throughout the developed world" is more of the same. If you can find references where someone else came to those conclusions, that'll be different. Jeh (talk) 03:43, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Video Home?
What's a Video Home? I always thought VHS stood for Vertical Helical Scan????????????? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.65.91.78 (talk) 04:57, 25 May 2015 (UTC)


 * There's a section in the big mustard-yellow box at the top of this page that addresses that. JVC called it "Video Home System". Furthermore the name "Vertical Helical Scan" makes no sense; there is nothing "vertical" about "helical scan". Jeh (talk) 03:46, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Time for article protection again?
Many of the unsourced and vandalism edits during the past six months by an IPv6 address are showing up as being from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, and many of those edits also refer to locations or items found in Pennsylvania. So it's very likely that it's the same person making all of those edits. The page had been protected for one week, but it only took two weeks after the protection expired for that person to resume their disruptive/false editing. It might be time to protect the page again for a longer period of time. —RRabbit42 (talk) 02:11, 1 May 2016 (UTC)


 * After correcting today's bogosities I made the request and asked for "a month or longer". Jeh (talk) 02:50, 15 May 2016 (UTC)


 * And we got it for a month, and as you detected and fixed, the IPv6 switched to putting similar bogosities into the JVC article. And who knows what else. :( Jeh (talk) 03:40, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I would like to request that the article be article protected, I just removed the following unsourced edit: Bernie Sanders and Bill Clinton love VHS! 75.130.217.101 (talk) 01:57, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

VHS Video Recorder Production Ends This Month In Japan
Here's a link for someone to use. • Sbmeirow  •  Talk  •

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-07-14/japan-last-vhs-video-tape-recorder-maker-ends-production-this-month/.104283

https://web.archive.org/web/20160720210725/http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-07-14/japan-last-vhs-video-tape-recorder-maker-ends-production-this-month/.104283


 * Thanks, but per WP:NOTCRYSTAL, we don't generally report on planned future events. Even reporting that a company has said they'll do something is problematic. It's best to wait until there's a WP:RS that says - pretty much exactly - that "production has actually ceased." (Oh, and please sign your posts!) Jeh (talk) 22:34, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Tape length table - much detail about nothing
Do we really need to document every "strange" length that someone put into a videocassette and labeled for sale? I don't think so. The most common lengths in NTSC were 120, 160, and a little bit of 180. And what information does the reader glean from knowing the physical length down to a tenth of a meter, or the running time to the minute - sometimes a tenth of a minute! - when these actually varied slightly? Most of the columns here are just exercises in arithmetic. "Look, ma, I'm contributing to the encyclopedia!" (punches more keys on the calculator) Jeh (talk) 15:43, 14 October 2016 (UTC)