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Magnetic tapes really had an awesome capacity. A few years after ArVid, in 1998, there would be the VHS successor D-VHS. Wikipedia claims that the tapes had a c
by cubefox 3y ago
Magnetic tapes really had an awesome capacity. A few years after ArVid, in 1998, there would be the VHS successor D-VHS. Wikipedia claims that the tapes had a capacity of 50 GB! Which was far ahead floppies, CD-Rs, and even read-only DVDs.
The format wasn't successful though. The DVD dominated the market. HD televisions, which could take advantage of HD movies on D-VHS, weren't really available at the time, and content producers didn't like the recording ability of (D-)VHS anyway.
Interestingly, the German Wikipedia claims (without source) that some devices could even record D-VHS on standard VHS tapes, though with a higher error rate. Which would suggest they squeezed out much more than the roughly 2 GB ArVid did a few years before, albeit with specialized hardware.
- aembleton 3y agoPerhaps they had a shorter playback time when recording in d-vhs mode. They could run the tape faster past the recording heads to get more data onto the tape.
- cubefox 3y agoApparently faster than a D-VHS tape but slower than the standard VHS speed. They claim a 240 minute VHS tape enabled a 330 minute D-VHS recording in "SD", which was 14.1 Mbit/s. This implies an effective VHS tape capacity of (14.1 / 8 * 60 * 330)/1000 ≈ 35 GB. Far ahead of ArVid, and pretty close to the 50 GB the English Wikipedia lists for D-VHS tapes. Unfortunately this relies on unverified Wikipedia information. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Home_System https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Home_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS