Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2013 April 25

= April 25 =

Why have videotapes become smaller and smaller?
I don't really know if this should go here or on the science desk, but why have videotapes become smaller and smaller as the technology improved, instead of keeping the original-sized tapes and using them to record more and more video per tape? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty 23:34, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Who uses video tape? Seriously.  And when people did use video tape, for most of its active life (say 1970s through 1990s) there were really several common formats, though VHS dominated the market, in the early years it was used simultaneously with Betamax tape, and IIRC, Betamax was a bit smaller than VHS.  The advent of camcorders introduced smaller video tapes, but this wasn't an advent of technology so much as taking the same technology and making it smaller for convenience.  I had a camcorder that ran on VHS-C, which was just a standard VHS tape (same recording codex and everything), but in a smaller package that you would then use an adaptor to play on a standard VHS machine.  There was also 8 mm tape that many systems used, which IIRC began life as the compact version of Betamax, but outlived it as a camcorder format tape, 8mm was still common many years after Betamax died.  There was a brief time in the 1990s-early 2000s when digital tape (for both audio and video) came into being, but it didn't last long, and I don't remember the formats being significantly smaller than earlier analogue tapes.  -- Jayron  32  00:20, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Let's say you put 20 hours of video on a tape. Who wants to fast-forward or rewind through that much tape?  And why would you want to put so many, likely disparate, items on a single tape?  Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be done.  Also, there were tapes that could hold more and more video but the tapes were made thinner and thinner.  Problem was that they broke more easily.  Dismas |(talk) 01:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * tar still works great. I bet you the majority of fortune 500 companies use tape backups still. Shadowjams (talk) 13:01, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I don’t quite accept your premise. ¦ Reisio (talk) 02:20, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Why not? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty 02:53, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
 * VHS tapes are the same size they always were, and they recorded at 2 or 3 speeds. VHS technology is becoming passé, so there's no real reason to improve it, since recordable DVD's are more and more available. There are smaller tapes for use in video cameras. As I recall, those cameras once required larger tapes. But that made them clumsier to deal with. Smaller is better. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:05, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Videotape has become smaller because the technology involved in recording and playing back audio and video has improved in quality over time. The physical magnetic tracks recorded on the tape have become smaller and take less space to record the same information.  The original broadcast-quality Quadruplex videotape recorder manufactured by Ampex used tape that was two inches wide spooled onto open reels.  Over the years, the width of the tape decreased and the amount of information that could be stored increased.  As tape size decreased, it became practical to mount the reels of tape inside a plastic video cassette to eliminate the need to thread the tape manually.  Later formats were completely digital, further miniaturizing the tape and its cassette. --Thomprod (talk) 14:03, 29 April 2013 (UTC)