The Format Wars in retrospect.

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by Richardgr

Interesting recollections!

A format not mentioned is CX for LPs, developed by CBS and used for their recordings in the early 70's. Went on to be used for video disc noise suppression.
CBS CX noise reduction.

I did not see any mention of one annoyance with DVDs, regions. I worked in another country at the turn of the millennium, with friends who travelled to America and the Far East, so having a DVD player that could only be changed to another region 3 times was a limitation.

Also going to mention my pet gripe, and part of the unpopularity of CDs: flimsy, easily scratched jewel cases, that are no fun to operate one handed. They were meant to be an evolution from a cassette case, but are rubbish, IMO. There are superior ways to hold a CD using card and SACD type holders, so just profiteering.

Richer Sounds would supply the information to disable the region coding on the DVD players they sold.

The American Long Boxes were unusual, my Dad reckoned they were mostly introduced so record shops could keep using their LP racks.

[emeritus]

After I had bought a dvd player from Argos, I found information on how to change it to all regions using its remote control. I can't recall if it was from the internet or an item in "Television" magazine.

My son once bought what he thought was a music CD from a shop's odds and ends box, that turned out to be one of those far eastern-manufactured video cds. It played ok on his laptop, but poorer resolution than a proper DVD.

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by emeritus

After I had bought a dvd player from Argos, I found information on how to change it to all regions using its remote control. I can't recall if it was from the internet or an item in "Television" magazine.

I bought a cheap DVD player from Currys a few years ago & easily managed to look up how to unlock the region menu.

[dave walsh]

Looking back to "Phonovision" in particular around last Tuesday [22/7/25] and posts 105-114, it was interesting to see Ted Kendall's comments [re electrical cylinder recordings p97*] and Gulliver's reference to Donald Mclean [post 114*]. I'm sure this must have been the chap that I had met [perhaps at the Chalk Farm Museum in West Sussex] after the millenium. He was engaged in demonstrating JLB video material that had been recorded on to 78's. I was amazed to see this at the time, especially as I had started living in Bexhill without any knowledge of JLB's presence there [until 1946]. I remember Donald told me that his mother had enjoyed being resident at a Care Home in Bexhill until the end of her life!

Dave W

[Gulliver]

I bought my first DVD player in 2001 and in that time I don't think I've ever owned one that wasn't multi-region or very easy to make the machine multi-region. I think I had a DVD-recorder at one point where a specific combination of buttons on the remote had to be pressed to render it multi-region. Worked like a charm.

However, having also lived in the USA and until recently visited that country frequently....I found that multi-region players over there were much more difficult to come by.

In the same way, most later PAL televisions could be coaxed into playing NTSC material whereas the typical NTSC set could not be persuaded to play PAL.

I also quickly realised that the average British person was aware that there were different TV standards across the pond whereas the average American had no clue. I remember trying to get some PAL hi8 camcorder tapes converted to NTSC in America and the only company I found in the entire Pacific Northwest region that would attempt it said they'd need me to bring in my hi8 camcorder to do it. I eventually waited until I came back home to England where a plethora of companies could do the conversion to NTSC with 5-7 day turnaround including postage both ways. Now, of course, we can all do it on even a very low end PC.

Somewhere I have a modern (well, 21st century) kit model of a Baird Televisor (32 lines rather than Baird's 30) and some video recorded onto a CD-R disc. though cassette tape would be just as feasible. I really must dig that model out and see if it still works.

I wonder if we'll ever have another big "format war". With physical media low in most people's priorities and digital picture/sound standards so easily converted between each other, it seems unlikely unless someone makes a seriously good alternative operating system for computers.

[dave walsh]

That's a very good point you make there Gulliver. I think it's more likely that Computer systems will fully integrate with TV streaming services or the other way around. The Format Wars might then be just between the "streamers" [re price and quality options] rather than the layer of different Hardware devices produced in the past and re-visited in this useful thread. On the other hand some other sort of configuration might emerge that we have yet to even imagine

There's some irony in all this, ie despite the availability of giant screens now, many people seem to be viewing on mobiles and a small screen is automatically HD. Most of my VHS Archive looks good on a 14" CRT portable [or a digital equivalent]. Less perhaps on something bigger but not always! I think we have certainly begun to leave a particular Era in Media [not "error" as the Americans say] but as with a continuing demand to have something physical in your hands [eg Vinyl in particular!] the nostalgia factor still applies and certainly does on here. Maybe the ultimate "future" will be on interior walls as shown in the excelent 1966 film Farenheit 451?

Dave W

[julie_m]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

However, having also lived in the USA and until recently visited that country frequently....I found that multi-region players over there were much more difficult to come by.

Region-locking was found to be a breach of EU law. The UK was a member of the EU at the time, so benefitted from this; but while the Continent insisted for new DVD players to be multi-region capable at time of sale, our government decided that multi-region playback was a desirable premium feature for which vendors could charge extra. Meanwhile in the USA, where the movie studios were based, possession of a multi-region DVD player was an offence.

[G6Tanuki]

In the same context, gaming went through a format war in the 90s, Nintendo did their thing with the GameBoy and the GameCube, which were at one point the must-have, but apart from fighting back briefly with the Nintendo Wii they lost the game (pun intended) to the crushing pincer action of Microsoft with the XBOX and Sony's Playstation.

Of course the coming of the likes of Valve for game distribution was also a big shift.

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

I wonder if we'll ever have another big "format war".

Well there's still the ongoing tussle between MacOS, Windows and Linux as well as the tussle between IOS and Android in the mobile market.

[wd40addict]

I'm sure they'll be more. Format wars break out whenever there's a new technology and two, or more, sides can't agree or think their tech is better. One of the earliest examples was cylinder vs disc and one of the few examples where industry cooperated to avoid it was CD. The public is left baffled at having to make the choice, then annoyed if they backed the wrong horse.

Even the Philips developed compact cassette battled it out with the now forgotten DC international system.

[Sergeauckland]

One never stops learning:-
In spite of a lifetime in the audio/broadcast industry, I'd never heard of the DC International system.

I'm also reminded of the Garrard tape magazine that never caught on.
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/garrard_magazine_tape_deck.html

I wonder how many more...

S.

[TonyDuell]

The minifon cassette perhaps

[Sergeauckland]

And not forgetting the Reditune background music endless loop cartridges. Deliberately designed not to be compatible with NAB or 8 track cartridges to avoid music piracy.

https://obsoletemedia.org/reditune/

My first job after University was as a Development Engineer at Reditune, designing studio mixing desks and tape duplicating electronics.

S.

[emeritus]

In 1967 when I was a vacation student at Plessey, the staff sales shop was selling those Garrard tape magazine deck mechanisms really cheaply. One of the engineers in my lab bought one. The only other example I have seen was a couple of years later in a second-hand shop.

[Ted Kendall]

That sounds like the new owner clearing out redundant stock - the Garrard decks were introduced around 1960 and had long since flopped commercially.

There was also a much more conventional deck (three speed, 7" reels, keyboard controls) which appeared briefly in a Dynatron machine and was never heard of again. Maybe Plessey ditched that, too.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by George Cooper

I recall seeing Philips demonstrate the Videodisc as far back as 1974/75, can't recall which exactly but this was in a university and they were looking for the interactive educational market. I did hear, though I don't know if it is true that Philips did not release the Videodisc in the mid 70's because market research people told them that there was no market for people watching pre recorded programmes or films in their own homes, hence the too late to market launch when the Video cassette rental shops started appearing up everywhere.

Prototypes were even earlier. I think the main reason for the delay was reliability and life span for both the discs and the players.

[Gulliver]

I certainly recall watching a Laservision disc at the house of some friends of my parents in 1979 or 1980. We were treated to "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" and showed how it could be paused, rewound etc.

A decade or more later I bought the "Special Edition" of that film on the format, now known as Laserdisc.

I do recall Laservision had spots on the news and Tomorrow's World in the late 70s. Lovely format but it was never really going to take off at a time when people were looking to buy something they could record TV content on.

[emeritus]

The first vcr we bought, a single-speed Mitsubishi B12, cost around £600. I seem to recall that the video disc players cost considerably less, and remember the tv ad with Nelson jumping down from his column saying "How much?!" . But the prices of vcrs were dropping significantly at the time, and people clearly did not want sonething that could not record, even if it was much cheaper than a vcr.

[Reelman]

In the early 90s IBM introduced the 3363 optical WORM drive that could be attached to the then current PS/2s via an MCA expansion card. This seemed a good idea as regular backup for our development server. The server had two hard drives of 115Mb* each, only one was used for code under development for our 15+ developers so only one needed to be backed up.
The 3363 could hold 200Mb per cartridge so seemed ideal. The device was set off copying the files at 5pm. The next morning at 9am it still hadn’t finished copying the files across! Safe to say it was never ever used again and it was back to the Core tape streamer for backups.

And that’s why you have probably never heard of this format, it was impossibly slow.

*Not a typo, back then a drive of that size was capable of storing all the work of our OS/2 developers.

Peter

[Gulliver]

I remember when I moved to the USA in 1997, my wife's PC had something called a "PD Disk" drive...a CD sized optical removable disc that had a capacity of 650Mb. This would have been at a time when CD-R drives were quite expensive but they were effectively in competition with CD burners.

Then came DVD-RAM which was a similar disc in a caddy but 4.7Gb and pretty good for recording TV onto a DVD-recorder then importing it into a PC. I still occasionally do this with 20 year old DVD-RAM discs.

The 90s saw various competing formats for removable or portable media to move share large files between computers...the floptical, ZIP drive, PD-disk, finally the USB flash drives we still sometimes use today. Didn't Sony also launch a magneto-optical PC disk in the late 90s?