The Format Wars: VHS

VHS (Video Home System) was developed by JVC in 1976, and beat out Sony’s Betamax, which had a higher quality of playback, presumably because VHS recorded a longer amount of time and cost less. VHS emerged in the 1980s as the standard for home viewing and recording and reigned until it was superseded by the DVD, which was introduced in 1997. Many studios stopped releasing VHS tapes by 2006, opting instead for DVDs. However, VHS tapes are still popular for recording television shows. VHS cassettes house ½ inch wide magnetic tape with a recording time of between two and six hours (Wikipedia: VHS, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS).

Wikipedia goes into more of the technical information on VHS:

“VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of video bandwidth, which is achieved at a relatively low tape speed by the use of helical scan recording of a frequency modulated luminance (black and white) signal, with a down-converted "color under" chroma (color) signal recorded directly at the baseband. Because VHS is an analog system, VHS tapes represent video as a continuous stream of waves, in a manner similar to analog TV broadcasts.”


VHS tapes suffer from degradation of quality whenever they are copied. According to the EAI site on preservation of video (http://resourceguide.eai.org/preservation/singlechannel/basicquestions.html) there is no universal preservation format for videotapes. They state that DigiBeta is currently the archival standard.

Some similar formats to VHS cassettes are the VHS-C, which was used for home camcorders, and Super VHS (S-VHS), which was a more high quality version of VHS aimed at professionals. (Video Preservation Web site from Stanford: http://videopreservation.stanford.edu/vid_id/vhs.html).

This is a pretty cute video made about the current format war between VHS and DVDs:



The virtual museum of vintage VCRs includes some information about VHS formats, besides other video formats:

http://www.totalrewind.org/mainhall.htm

And the following includes some information about the very important 'Betamax' case, which deals with copyright law related to consumers rights to record video of material under copyright, for in home use:

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/betamaxcase/betamaxcase.htm