nesdev.org

http://www.hifi-writer.com/he/vhstobd/index.htm

I was looking around for VHS/DVD comparisons and I found this page. I'm thinking what the hell is wrong with this guys VHS tapes? I can swear 90% of the video tapes I used to have didn't look like that. It looks like the movies that guy had were recorded off an antennae 20 years ago in Extended Super Long Play, left in a dusty addict without the box, been screwed around with by ADHD kids repeatedly hitting the fast forward and rewind buttons on a 30 year old VHS player, hooked up with RF cables that are hanging over an air conditioner to a screen capture device that just doesn't work good for older analog machines.

Why didn't they have multiple full sized images to compare them, like as in 1080p? that would have been a much better comparison than zooming up x30 on some minute detail. Anyway though, it probably does look about that bad, but when I'm watching a movie, I don't have my face pressed up against the TV screen.

psycopathicteen:
Perhaps you're looking through nostalgic rose-colored glasses at your memories of the era when VHS was all we had, and you didn't notice the artifacts. VHS has only enough chroma (color) bandwidth for 40 chroma samples per scanline. This means any feature narrower than 7 NES pixels will have its colors blurred. It's the analog counterpart to the MSX attribute clash seen in this conversion.

VHS is really that bad.

Wikipedia says "VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of video bandwidth and 400 kHz of chroma bandwidth. [...] In modern-day digital terminology, NTSC VHS is roughly equivalent to 333×480 pixels luma and 40×480 chroma resolutions".

Here's his screen shot from ID4, just filtered to the above-mentioned constraints, cropped to the same as what he demonstrates:. This particular example doesn't even really show the abysmal chroma resolution, although the red lights in the scene would.

... that said, his comparing his badly deinterlaced versions is really quite unfair; you wouldn't see this awful weave deinterlacing on a CRT SDTV.

psycopathicteen wrote:I can swear 90% of the video tapes I used to have didn't look like that.

You have to consider that nearly all the VHS captures in that page are zoomed in, and you're viewing them on an HD monitor. At the normal size, viewed on an SD CRT TV, it would probably look more like what you remember. Aside from that, yeah, I guess VHS did look that bad.

My biggest complaints about VHS are not about the quality of the video though (the SD CRT TVs of the time did a good job of hiding the flaws of decent SP recordings), but about how flimsy the media is. Quality would degrade with each use, VCRs would often chew up the tapes, completely ruining parts of the video, and if you kept the tapes stored for a long time they'd often get moldy. VHS is just a terrible storage technology.

It might have to do with the fact that TV's have 60 fps so any noise would be less noticeable.

What is exactly wrong with the deinterlacing? I know that there can be time based errors, so do CRTs do a better job at adjusting to uneven scanlines than modern equipment?

psycopathicteen wrote:What is exactly wrong with the deinterlacing? I know that there can be time based errors, so do CRTs do a better job at adjusting to uneven scanlines than modern equipment?

If you looked at 480i content on a CRT SDTV, you'd never even see the interlacing—there is no deinterlacing. The scanlines go in the right place, you get ≈450 different visible vertical locations on screen where things can be, and (thanks to the flicker fusion threshold, the phi phenomenon, and beta movement) your brain stitches together the perceived pictures. But only 240 scanlines happen in each 1/60th of a second.

"But aren't there 480 scanlines of data? Where did the other data go?" It was thrown away when it was converted to NTSC in the first place. It is gone. You can guess what it was (by interpolating vertically, a "bob" deinterlacer; by assuming there's no motion and "weave"ing the fields together, or by doing some really clever things and estimating motion like mplayer's mcdeint does)

By using a weaving deinterlacer, he's blending content from other frames into the current one, so of course it looks bad, every bit as much as if you motion blurred two or three frames of the HD video. Even just doublescanning("bob") would be less misleading, given the number of words he spends on complaining about the bad deinterlacing. Every time that he complains about (de-)interlacing, comb lines, or fields at all (such as the motorcycle) it's nothing more than lots of (virtual) ink spilled saying that whatever he used to deinterlace the content did a bad job of it—not an intrinsic flaw of VHS.

It'd be nice if he'd been able to compare, say, VHS to (Laserdisc or DVD over composite), both via his capture card. It'd actually let you decouple the effects of NTSC and deinterlacing from the actual constraints of VHS.

My reaction is more "is DVD really that bad?!", and this is from somebody who watched DVDs in a PC.

He also said that he digitally compressed the VHS tapes using MPEG.

Yeah but VHS doesn't look that far from it still.

Something to take into account is that it's likely a lot of the issues get hidden in motion. Comparing still images is a bad idea when you consider that.

I suppose I could start a thread "Is the NES's video really that bad?"

On a flat-screen display, the stock composite signal is really that bad, if it displays at all.

On a CRT, I would argue that it isn't so bad. Dot crawl is a lot harder to notice when you are sitting six feet from the screen. A Famicom AV will show no jailbars with real cartridges. The jagged lines are not as prominent as they are in screen or video captures. The only way to experience the native composite signal justly is to look at a TV screen displaying it.

For a VHS tape, they look much nicer on a tube TV. I find this especially so for stuff shot on video camera, like old-school Doctor Who. A DVD will look better, but the VHS won't look bad.

Great Hierophant wrote:For a VHS tape, they look much nicer on a tube TV.

Of course. The format was designed to be good enough for the quality bandwidth of its contemporary CRT TVs. If it had been any better than that, it would have been wasteful. On that kind of TV a VHS and a blu-ray would look just as good.

Great Hierophant wrote:On a CRT, I would argue that [NES video] isn't so bad. Dot crawl is a lot harder to notice when you are sitting six feet from the screen. A Famicom AV will show no jailbars with real cartridges. The jagged lines are not as prominent as they are in screen or video captures.

The jagged lines were so prominent in Super Mario Bros. that they caused the Mario Paint player's guide to have wrong shapes for the bricks. This is the same effect as the stripes in the Solstice and Dr. Mario title screens.

rainwarrior wrote:On that kind of TV a VHS and a blu-ray would look just as good.

Having acquired a Blu-ray player a couple of years before an HDTV, I can say that DVD and Blu-ray look exactly the same on a CRT SDTV, except maybe for the occasional high-motion scene that might result in visible compression artifacts in DVDs but not in Blu-rays. I'm absolute certain VHS looks worse, though (even though I haven't used a VCR in over a decade!)... It's noticeably blurrier and shaky.

tokumaru wrote:I'm absolute certain VHS looks worse, though (even though I haven't used a VCR in over a decade!)... It's noticeably blurrier and shaky.

I think a good quality VHS would look the same, more or less? They tend to degrade a little every time you watch them, though. Most VHS tapes have seen a lot of use and are far from peak quality.

Does anyone remember laserdisc? Basically a non-degrading equivalent to VHS, served up on a giant platter.