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Wow, 2GB on a standard tape. For the time, that's incredibly efficient and cheap.
by ben174 4y ago
Wow, 2GB on a standard tape. For the time, that's incredibly efficient and cheap.
- anyfoo 4y agoYeah. Video, even old grainy VHS, had a pretty high bandwidth. Even much more so with S-VHS, which did not become super popular though. (I'm actually wondering whether the 2GB figure was for S-VHS, not VHS. Didn't to the math and wouldn't be surprised either way, though.)
- Dylan16807 4y agoA normal VHS encodes about 100 million scan lines over 2 hours. 20 bytes per scan line sounds feasible, since there's somewhere around 200-300 'pixels' of luma available in each scan line.
- anyfoo 4y agoThanks, that's a very reasonable back of the envelope calculation. There are many fun details about VHS, its chroma resolution, and especially some weirdness around the PAL delay line, but they all don't really matter for this. Wikipedia says there is about 3MHz of bandwidth, so ~200-300 "pixels" seems like a very good ballpark (just going by the fact that a normal PAL signal has about 6 MHz and is commonly digitized as 720x576, 3MHz about halves the horizontal resolution and taking some pixels off for various reasons makes sense).