Before the days of TVOs & DVRs many already went to time shifting just to dodge commercials. The standard VHS t-120 tapes only offered 2 hours of video at the high quality speed (which actually looked good with a good tape on a good machine & TV), so one had to remember to change the tape if you recorded a lot & wanted any decent quality, & keep lots of spare tapes. Not all machines were created equal though, some had much better video quality than others.
Soon they came out with t-180 tapes offering 2.5 hours at the high quality speed. If you didn't mind sacrificing quality, there was also the mid-speed, & slow speed recording offering 8 hours of video on a t-180 tape. The 8 hour speed quality was pretty bad, but not as bad as those YCDTOTV videos unless it was a real cheap VHS machine, & well overused cheap tapes. In the caps of all of the YCDTOTV videos, we're looking at a VHS tape at the slowest speed, copied & edited to remove the commercials to another VHS tape, then copied to VCD mpg video in the 1990s, then converted to WMV, FLV, or MP4. But it's still the same copy of a tape, copied onto another tape, then to mpg, & later reprocessed to the other formats.
By the late 1990s before there was recordable DVDs, they came out Super-VHS machines. DVD quality on tape & professionally editable. They also contained a small memory chip. So when you freeze fame at 400i (interlaced), instead of it being 120p on normal VHS (half the field of the a normal VHS frame), a freeze on S-VHS was a full 400p. Many local news TV used Super-VHS or Super-Beta.
Even on t-180 tapes, on the slow 8 hour speeds, the quality of the slow speed super-VHS video was still much better than normal VHS on the high speed. They were unaffordable at $500-$700, during the first year they came out, except for local TV stations. But after a year, one could find sales on them for $179-$199. Regular VHS was going for under $100 back then (crappy ones for $49). But to get DVD quality or still better than VHS quality on the 8 hour speed I was sold on them. By 2000 I had 3 of them. I was lucky to get well built ones too. 2 of the 3 still run great. The 3rd one was wrecked through abuse when I loaned it out to a nightclub.
I had a WEBTV-PLUS unit that essentially had TVO/DVR programming & scheduling in it before they invented TVOs & DVRs. With it's IR transmitter, you can choose what you wanted to record, it would set the channel on the cable box or VCR, set the desired recording speed, & record whatever I wanted. With up to 8 hours quality super-VHS recording, in many respects it was better than TVO & DVRs because I can remove the tape to save the stuff, & put in a fresh tape, rather than have a DVR erase old stuff as it ran out of space.
Then after they came out with stand-alone DVD recorders I got a couple of those too. Because they also recorded on DVD RW, I could record over old shows if I wanted to, so I wouldn't be wasting disks. I had a DVR by then, but they don't have a way to save stuff permanently or externally. Indeed, if you don't pay your cable or satellite bill, or discontinue their service, you'll find many of those DVRs won't even run or play stuff you already have on them.
Topic: YCDTOTV Gallery revisited. (Read 75496 times)
