The Format Wars in retrospect.

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

How DIVX ever even made it to market is a bit of a mystery.

DivX was very efficient at compressing video. You could rip a DVD but commercial DVDs were dual layer. When you wanted to burn them on a single-layer DVD the files didn't fit. With DivX you could halve the size of the files so that they fitted on a single-layer DVD whilst maintaining the quality. I used DivX for a while but then double-layer DVD-Rs came along and messing about with DivX was no longer necessary.

[dave walsh]

Lots of interesting descriptions of how things were in the "Halcyon Days" eg as indicated by Gulliver [p55*]. Video shops or shops that now had a Video section, sprang up all over the place! It even happened in Coronation Street. In America Quentin Tarantino worked his way through the Video Store where he worked, viewing all the stock and educating himself in the history of cinema. Despite all this I don't recall ever renting videos. I was too busy recording BBC or the new Channel 4. No one recalls, now, that pre-VHS you might wait years for a film to turn up in the TV schedules [or not at all]. Before I could even afford a VHS recorder I had friends taping broadcast films for me in case they weren't on again [that seems so silly now of course].

I saw a Film at the local cinema in Rawtenstall made by the famous Director Peter Brook in 1979. I'd also become interested in it's subject- the Philosopher"Mystic"-Gurdjieff myself. It was called "Meetings With Remakable Men" We were the only ones in there but I thought it was remarkable. It was unavailable for a number of years after that [some sort of copyright issue] which was very frustrating! Eventually I discovered that it was on VHS but not very readily available. I rang round Video Shops all over the place and eventually got a positive response from a chap in Birmingham. I turned up at the Video shop premises only to discover that he was just around the corner from Jibbering Records Music, my son's place! I'd brought two recorders with me in order to rent and copy the tape but the shopkeeper knew Jon so it was a free loan overnight [there was only one copy].Back at Jon's house, I discovered that the scart link, to use the house TV as a monitor, didn't work. I was convinced that was the end but ran the set up anyway. To my delight, when I got home, it had copied perfectly What a performance by comparison with all the contemporary sources but at least it was mine to keep. Streaming is now Universal but whose really in control?

Dave W

[G6Tanuki]

The halcyon days of the video shop... Yes. My local one was 'Video Solent' despite being 80 miles inland from the Solent. It was in a small parade of shops which included an 'open all hours' off-licence, a pizza place, a Chinese takeaway and a curry house. And also a taxi office whose two way radios I provided!

Friday nights I would meet up at the pub with my mates, then when the pub closed (10PM back then!) we'd split into three groups, one got the drinks from the offie, one got the takeaways, the third got the videos and we then met up at the taxi office to get cabs back to someone's house for a viewing/drinking/eating session.

It was only VHS back then, Beta having faded into oblivion some time in the early 80s.

For me, VHS was almost entirely a format for playing rented content, I never could see the point of buying a tape (how many times would you possibly want to re-watch the same thing?) and the only real recorded stuff that I wanted to watch was the Rugby.

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

Laservision, anyone? It lost out at the time because people wanted to record shows to time-shift them. But later made something of a comeback as a higher quality playback format. I got a Laserdisc player in 1989 and for SD video it really was the best available. Prior to dual layer discs, DVD was inferior to Laserdisc.

It seems that it still has a following. A Laservision player sold this morning in my local auction for a hammer price of £55 (that's about £70 including commission). Had it sold within its estimate of £15-£25, I might have bid on it myself.

[Viewmaster]

Going back further there was the shortest war ever........when TV started in 1936 at Alexandra Palace, there was the Baird mechanical system coming up against Marconi's electronic system.

[dave walsh]

Yes two formats that couldn't have been more different Albert, although JLB might have come up with another one in 1946, if he had lived [p19*].

Quite a few people had the same attitude to TV as a relatively transient medium then and now Tanuki, your post p 63* [including some in the BBC, like Reith who hated it] but each to his own! My archive instinct overcame me with just the very possibilty of recording video at last. I recall a home made Telecine Machine in the Wireless World mag which was constructed from a sort of reverse projector that filmed material from a domstiv TV Set. It was very big and took up a lot of room in the lounge! WW Jan 1967 CINE FILMING TELEVISION J M Hale page 33. [from my archive] It didn't catch on!

Nowadays everyone seems to film everything continuously but I doubt much of it is kept. Another reason why I would not have been spending money in the Video Shop was probably the relatively high price of the blank VHS tapes at first that I needed. I recall the new 4 Hour tapes being scarce and up to £7 each at one point. Too much for me

Dave

[emeritus]

I think I must have read that article, or one on similar lines. You needed a projector with (I think) a modified shutter, running at 16 2/3 frames per second. The running cost would have put people off. In the 1960's, 16mm film cost around £1 per minute at 16fps including processing. 100' would last around 4 minutes, so the film for a one hour programme would cost around £60, around a month's basic wages for a working man in the 1960's.

[G6Tanuki]

Another format war I remember was the one between Video-8 and VHS-C for the little handycams that everyone had from the late 80s onwards.

VHS-C had the advantage that you could get an adapter to let you play your VHS-C video on a normal VHS player; it's downside when compared to Video-8 was that its tapes had a shorter run time.

Either way, whichever format you went for they were fun little things to play around with, and the slightly wobbly live-action style became a feature of some mainstream movies - Blair Witch Project being probably the best known of the genre.

Poor old Super-8 reel film got caught in the crossfire and was wiped out as a home movie format, of course.

[wd40addict]

There was also the Technicolour/Funai portable video system which used its own cassette. Super 8 had already started to die before portable video gained much traction. Potential customers kept their hands in their pockets knowing it was coming shortly. Large cine equipment manufacturers such as Eumig and Noris went bust and that was the beginning of the end.

[kalee20]

There was also the cylinder vs. disc, for audio - the cylinder came first but the disc massively overlapped with it.

Despite being bulkier, the cylinder did have the advantage that linear tracking was much easier to achieve, so there was no angular distortion.

I guess it was convenience that led to the supremacy of the disc, which after all is still with us over 100 years later, surely the longest-lived format of all!

[emeritus]

The cylinder did have the advantage of being able to record. Most people would not have needed it, but I have the 1904 edition of an International Correspondence Schools reference book that shows they were using Edison's phonograph to send speech exercises to students, who could then record their own efforts and send them back to their tutor.

[Soundboy]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

SACD hadn't much chance of catching on because the full quality SACD audio was only available if connected to an amplifier which maintained the copyright protection envelope. The analogue audio outputs on SACD players were fed from the standard blue book CD layer included in the SACD disc.

That is 100% incorrect.

First of all, there are two types of SACDs....single layer and hybrid. Single layer SACDs are only playable on a SACD player. Sony mandates that SACD must have a hi-res DSD stereo (or mono) mix; a separate multichannel hi-res DSD mix is optional. A hybrid SACD has a second layer that is compatible with any CD player. You can choose which layer to play with a hybrid SACD.

Any receiver, integrated amp, or pre-amp with analog inputs will accept the analog outputs of a SACD player. To access which layer of a The SACD player does the digital to analog conversion, just like a regular CD player.

SACD's DSD bitstream can not be output through coax or optical (Toslink) digital outputs. However, the DSD bitstream can be transmitted through a HDMI (version 1.2 and above) output.

Specs of CD is known as "Red Book", whereas specs for SACD is known as "Scarlet Book".

[Gulliver]

Ooh a lot to reply to here

Worth remembering that Divx the codec is not the same is DIVX, the "disposable DVD" format briefly launched in America. Truly one of the worst ideas ever and sunk several major companies that put money into it.

I am sure most of us are aware....Before the advent of home video, the vast majority of people had two ways to watch a film....at the cinema when it was on general release or on TV, which was at the whim of the schedulers and the film studios in terms of how much they'd license them for broadcast. For years, well into the late 80s, the original Star Wars films were a staple of ITV Christmas. A big TV premiere might easily have left the cinema two years before broadcast. Home video changed everything in that regard.

A few people in the 60s and 70s did buy movies on super 8 or 16mm but that was very expensive....for example an 80 minute film on super 8 would be 4x400 foot reels at 7" each and probably cost a month's wages if not more. Cut down "digests" that might run 20-30 minutes were a bit more popular.

I'm one of those fools who still shoots cine film and it's certainly not cheap...but I did document a holiday to Japan in April on B&W 8mm film developed myself at a total cost of about under £20 for the film and chemicals....for 6 minutes of run time. Taking a trip to Crete in October and will shoot colour film which I can't process at home so that'll be over £100 gone on 6-7 minutes. Which is one of the main reasons why people bought those camcorders - again with competing formats. Also the sheer novelty of seeing yourself on the telly in those days cannot be underestimated. By 1985 the cine camera market was almost dead with only a handful of low and high end cameras being sold. A camcorder was a big layout but the tapes recorded sound (super 8 sound was even more expensive and cumbersome than super 8 silent, few people bothered....of course I did). Having 30 or 45 minutes on VHS-C or 90 minutes on video 8 was great in some ways....but then you needed to edit and that meant multiple generation copies. People also quickly discovered that just as the latest electronic 35mm camera didn't turn them into David Bailey, the latest camcorder didn't transform them into Spielberg or Kubrick.

The interesting thing with camcorder formats is that they co-existed. Video 8 morphed into Hi8, with VHS-C having SVHS-C as it's counterpart. Though Digital 8 had some market presence, I don't think D-VHS-C ever caught on. But those competing formats co-existed quite happily for some years. Probably because nobody used either as their prime video source.

One could look at film formats too....from early attempts to make home movie making affordable to at least middle class folk with oddball formats like 9.5mm film with a single sprocket hole per frame down the middle to 8mm film which is actually 16mm wide with perforations on each side. You flip the small 30 foot reel over half way through (in the dark or shade) and run it through a second time rather like a magnetic tape then upon processing the film is split into two 8mm strips and spliced together. Those two formats co-existed along with 16mm for a time in the early 20th century. Then Kodak brought out Super 8 in 1966 with a convenient cartridge that didn't need threading or flipping over. And you could hot swap super 8 cartridges if you wanted to change ISO or daylight/tungsten stock. Fuji introduced Single 8, with the film having similar spec to super 8 but housed in totally incompatible cartridges. Nevertheless there were many projectors which could be configured at the touch of a couple of buttons to play super/single/standard 8. then the cine film market almost died in the years 1982-84 when video became viable.

That said, you can still today buy 16mm, super 8 and standard 8mm film factory made...and there are cottage industries which can sell you fresh 9.5mm and single 8 film as well as more varieties of 8mm film than the one factory still churning it out will supply. In fact. the situation for std 8mm film got a lot better last year with the launch of two new B&W negative films which are easily processed in the same chemicals one uses for B&W still films (if you have the correct processing tank)...and can be scanned with one of those sub-£300 scanners available everywhere. The results aren't exactly broadcast quality - mostly because of the scanners - but it has enabled me to shoot 8mm film at a jazz club and have it up on social media *the same day*.

[Radio Wrangler]

I have an example sitting in my lounge, and it's a Sony ES model.

Sound from the SACD layer of either a dual layer or single layer disc in DSD bitstream is ONLY output vie the HDMI port and only into a recipient meeting certain copyright credentials. It has analogue outputs from some quite good DACs and both XLR and pointlessly gold plated phono connectors but this output is only available from the ordinary CD layer. If you put in an SACD only layer disc, you get no DSD. You get it rendered to analogue internally, I believe, but that's all. I've never come across a disc to be able to try it with. Some early SACD machines did give DSD outputs but a copyright clampdown ended them. These machines are extremely rare in the UK. The US seemed to be the main market in those days. Partially it was a matter of average disposable income differences, but if the importers don't see them as worth carrying, you'd have to arrange a personal import, probably from the US and then have to contend with mains voltage issues. Not insuperable, but too much trouble for most consumers. On top of that, the record shops over here chose not to bother with SACD, you had to shop on-line and that put a further dampener on it. All these factors were cumulative. SACD capable players are pretty rare over here. The pre-copyright lockdown ones are extremely rare and those were almost all personal imports. This is pretty much the state of play everywhere except the US.

David

[SiriusHardware]

By the time I was financially solvent enough to buy my own VCR (Panasonic NV-F70: Still have it, still in working order...) VHS had won. I think the only format war I was ever interested in was the high definition video disc format, which eventually came down to HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. I stayed well clear until there was a clear winner but I actually preferred the 'HD-DVD' name because that sounded exactly like what it was: By comparison, 'Blu-Ray' was meaningless to most people.

[kalee20]

Originally Posted by emeritus

The cylinder did have the advantage of being able to record. Most people would not have needed it,

The disc could be recorded on, too, there were home disc cutters (I have a few, aluminum with an acetate surface). They were of course non-erasable, non-reusable, and while OK to play with an electric pickup, were a bit too soft for an acoustic soundbox.

I'm intrigued about recordable cylinders, were they record-once also?

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Beobloke

I remember reading an article that suggested one of the main things that aided Betamax's downfall was that Sony refused permission for any, shall we say "adult entertainment material" to be released in that format!

I think the downfall managed fine on its own without that since they were technically and commercially almost always one step behind VHS on the US market where the early format wars were fought. The same about adult movies was rumoured in case of V2000 but there it was even more obviously not an important factor.

Now that I come to think of it... I always state that their ambitions on the US market played one of the main roles in the downfall of Philips as a whole... Obviously this doesn't hold true for Sony since their Trinitron TV sets sold quite well in the USA, but it might hold true for Betamax as a system.

[wd40addict]

Isn't there a story that in its original form Beta didn't have a long enough playing time to record the Superbowl whilst VHS did.

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by kalee20

I'm intrigued about recordable cylinders, were they record-once also?

I seem to remember that it was possible to shave off the top layer of wax and then re-use them.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by jamesperrett

I seem to remember that it was possible to shave off the top layer of wax and then re-use them.

That would make sense.

In the late 70s as an undergraduate biologist we used chart recorders based on a rotating cylinder with a waxed paper chart that had been 'smoked' with carbon black. An arm with a scriber scored through the carbon to reveal the white paper beneath.

The papers were invariably reused, following a re-smoking. I imagine that the same re-use would have made sense for Mr Edison's phonograph cylinders.