We Bought HD Movies on Cassette Tape and They're AMAZING! - D-VHS and D-Theater

high definition VHS tape you ever seen one of these me neither but for a short period of time in the early 2000s you could actually build out a high definition home theater using digital VHS or dvhs cassette tapes now it's only 1080i rather than 1080p but come on this was too 2002 all right and besides that's still well over four times the resolution of regular VHS and over double DVD it's actually even on par with some early Blu-ray discs so we spent the last two years and over a thousand US Dollars going back in time to see what life would have been like if our dads had been both rich and geeky enough to go D theater this was an adventure and a half guys did you know that some plasma TVs have firewire input well I sure didn't which is why we had to buy two of them when we bought the wrong one this whole thing was a nightmare honestly but we finally got everything working and we can tell you once and for all is it any good and why did it fail oh and who's our sponsor origin PC origin PC is offering Black Friday deals on their award-winning systems get 500 off a Corsair Voyager origin Edition or an exclusive peripherals bundle when purchasing a custom desktop top using the link down below our first challenge was finding a movie that was available across every format we wanted to compare all of them having identical 2 hour and 26 minute runtimes the biggest difference between these versions of the hurricane starring Denzel Washington is of course the resolution that they play back you like the hurricane right it's like your favorite movie of all time I have the biggest collection of the hurricane films other anyone I know yeah we've got VHS which outputs at 240i DVD which outputs at 480p widescreen dvhs which outputs at 1080i with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and of course Blu-ray which does full HD 1080p I have to confess until this was brought up in a writer's meeting two years ago I had no idea that this format ever existed I didn't know it existed either but it's really impressive it'll do up to 28.2 megabit per second which is over double the bit rate of DVD and because it uses the exact same form factor as traditional VHS the players are actually backwards compatible so they can play both dvhs tapes and regular VHS tapes of course the tapes are not quite exactly the same Gothic yeah this thing looks pretty similar it's the back so it's just these tiny little holes aside from being like one is digital and one is analog that's pretty much the only difference right I guess that's probably worth explaining how you can put Digital Data onto a magnetic tape if you think about it it's not that different from how you can record data to a Spinning Disk in either an analog or digital format so a record is a spinning piece of plastic with little analog bumps in it while a CD still has the exact same bumps but they're digitally encoded data which makes it much more efficient and in fact tape is still very widely in use today in the data center which is real slow do you know if the film itself like the tape film is different it looks thinner maybe yeah just pull it out right what's the worst that could happen in the dvhs tape there's more film it might be thinner I don't know but there's definitely more tape in there this is probably a nice VCR I would think this thing is like top of the line for when it came out look at this remote iPod eat your heart out the original touch wheel this bad boy outputs a maximum resolution of 1080i features active Cooling and most importantly got the D theater logo that's very important that means it can play D theater tapes and in defeater mode it actually runs at high speed instead of standard play it's more data and it has to get through it faster to actually read it properly that's sick the most important thing though is that it has ilink firewire output we will explain more about that later first we need to talk about our TV it might be a flat panel but this 1280 by 768 plasma weighs over a hundred pounds and its notable features include it's gigantic 50 inch panel it's integrated carrying handles and its support for i-link firewire input again more on that later first we watch okay when I first set up dvhs and put it I was like oh this doesn't look that good but then I put the VHS in and oh my God I forgot how bad it looks it's it's not great I mean I don't remember having a problem with it but then again I spent most of my VHS watching years watching on a screen that was literally 12 inches oh wow I had one of those little uh ones in my room that had the built-in vhr yeah exactly what you're talking about wow this [Laughter] I thought you had to go farther back to find problematic elements of film technology yeah but people with dark skin in this movie they do not get captured properly no the contrast looks terrible even the color here it's all like just really washed out and Bland it should be noted that this might not be properly representative of the experience of playing back this VHS tape when it was brand new the rated lifespan of a tape that's being stored correctly is 10 to 25 years assuming it made it the full 25 years we should be in good shape but it could have degraded in that time yeah but then when we paused and it's not moving you can see how bad like the stair stepping and stuff is on everything I can barely read that signed cash only but like I can understand what I'm watching oh yeah but there's a ton of detail that's just not here but is present when we watch content on like a 4K Blu-ray or you know even just like a Netflix stream or something like that oh yeah it's time to go HD whoa whoa I link now let me check oh it's definitely an island ploof you can't tell no no I'm not sure it's not going over RCA just to just double it's not just to have a seat it's not wow it's pretty crazy huh the dynamic range is like wild the contrast differences this would have made my eyes fall out of my sockets in 2002 right on a lot of these they even had something similar to a chapter select wow yeah with like a menu and everything so you could like Tecmo and showed it off in their video from like six years ago but I couldn't get it to work on this this so good I know I know there are problems though if I hit pause for example because it's moving at such a high speed but then play okay that play takes a second to kick back and the problem is it's still counting up give it a sec it'll go okay but see we're completely gone from that one scene so pausing and playing was not but look how clear that text was tilting past it I know the only thing that really tripped me up when watching this was the amount of film grain you can see yeah well that's the thing any HD movie back then was shot on film right it's not like we had Red digital cinema cameras okay my family didn't have money right so like in the in the early 2000s I didn't even know anybody who had a TV like no we were stoked to get flat screen CRTs you know not uh oh a little spicy if you told me that this was just a modern setup not HDR sure like obviously I can tell it's not HDR I'd be like okay yeah for a short period there plasma TVs were super in demand when you get anything with good blacks oh yeah now I haven't seen a DVD in a while it actually looks a lot better than I expected and that's when I originally discovered that this was not 1080i that this was 720. I can already tell this is a noticeably softer image it does look worse yeah it looks way worse it looks way better than VHS that's the thing you don't get that obvious stair stepping all over the image I don't think it looks way everything from the top of his hair to the bottom of the frame is completely crushed you entirely lose the detail in his face he might be acting but we have no idea because the color depth is not good enough and the contrast is not good enough that's what double the bit rate gets you it's not all about resolution and you see the blocking in the sky as well okay pause is not fair but let's put it in motion sure it's not as not as bad in motion but that contrast that dynamic range yeah it sucks that's pretty terrible any surface with texture oh yeah it disappears a blocky smeary yes it's a blur going from VHS to DVD was already such a step up for people for the additional cost of the theater you had already bought a DVD player to get 480p you want to Shell out even more to get a d theater player to go back to VHS back when dvhs first came out before D theater The Players actually started at around 2 000 US dollars we'll put in the Blu-ray on the same player we got our fancy Panasonic yeah this is the one we used for 4K Blu-ray yeah so this is better know that this looks better than the dvhs it might not be as good of a master there is so much film grain totally I don't know if it looks better at all no no I don't think it does no then the DVD yeah then the VHS yeah but then the dvhs no maybe if we had more degradation on our dvhs we'd think that it looks better but I mean the reality is not a lot of people were buying those so we don't have to rewind anything yeah fast forward chapter select scene skipping in general can just happen we don't have to sit there and wait for it to go actually read the text in the book yeah oh look how blown out the whole Sky oh god let's go back to D theater for a sec I don't know which Master copy of this film was used to create the Blu-ray but whatever it was actually could have also degraded perhaps even to a greater degree than our d-theater tape it is possible for a superior format of the movie like a Blu-ray to look worse in some ways than an inferior format of the same movie Sometimes when they're upscaling an older film they'll actually process it in a way that film enthusiasts feel degrades The Experience rewind one thing I like is that there's no rewind lines so it's going let me grab this Frame let me grab this Frame rather than let me read this stream that is coming past me see this is too far back I think oh listen to this thing go wow she rips oh absolutely you can totally read the text on the book yeah a little sharper on the Blu-ray I think I like this grade better I think so too I think the color pops more look how much more detail you can see in his face and on that jacket this is the best copy of the hurricane what the did you see how much better he looked even even when the books uh right there fall down off the forklift or whatever they're so vibrant all of them again it's not HDR but this is a really good SDR grade see even though he's supposed to be naturally lit so you have that that that that shadow cast on the side of his face you can see the detail you can see his expression you can see the actors acting this is actually a better movie you are capturing more of what's happening this is a big difference this is not the result I was expecting to really you thought you were gonna like crap all over dvhs no I thought the Blu-ray would be obviously better though mastering matters more than resolution at a certain point I feel the same rage that I've read on Forum post so many times over the years when a new grade a new master of a movie comes out like a treasured movie and it's like why so what end you already had a good one I want a dvhs collection now oh my God the first dvhs player we bought which cost us over 350 dollars two years ago when we first started down this Rabbit Hole has a big problem while it does support recording and Playback of HDD VHS tapes and it can output over firewire it cannot play back D theater tapes and this is for good reason remember guys this was 20 years ago which means that Technologies we take for granted today didn't exist yet like HDMI and like it or not one of hdmi's biggest Innovations was hdcp the copy protect action encryption that convinced major film studios to release their content for home viewing I know I know hdcp ain't exactly a popular technology but let me explain old school analog interfaces like component video could absolutely carry an HD signal the issue was that there was no way to prevent people from capturing that signal and recording it to their own tapes and for this reason recording and sharing bootleg VHS tapes was extremely common back in the 90s great for consumers bad for movie studios having gone through that experience the film industry resolved to never repeat it they had failed in their attempts to Outlaw media copying devices so far but they had some other ideas they believed that even if people could watch standard deaf bootleg movies on their couch for next to free they could use Innovations like high definition picture and surround sound to motivate viewers to go to the movie theater instead which is of course where they got the majority of their revenue when early generation dvhs players rolled out in 1998 they could be used for recording and playing back TV broadcasts in high definition and they could be used for watching movies but only standard VHS movies were supported because the major film studios refused to release their films on dvhs I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been for enthusiasts at the time okay which raises some questions what on Earth were people doing with these things we've got some idea there was a VHS tape actually inside this player when we bought it let's take a look shall we this looks good though looks really good the quality is impressive something to note is that even though HD broadcasts were not particularly common in the us at the time that doesn't mean that there was no use for these things in other regions particularly in Japan they were wait what is this it's the Victoria's Secret catalog from 2008 oh what were people doing with this regarding whatever they could and not the highest definition possible recording softcore porn on cable wasn't the only use for it though there were a lot of HD broadcasts back then so one guy would actually follow a local station that would do IMax releases they'd broadcast them he'd record them on his dbhs flare and then play them back corrected for inflation early dvhs players cost over 2 000 today dollars the only people buying into this ecosystem were obviously willing to go to Great Lengths to get the most out of their home theater setup here's the label for that tape by the way you can have it back if you want I I really don't need it d-theater uses the same media as dvhs but this time with support for encryption and that's to appease the anti-copying film industry Executives that is why it uses the super unusual IEEE 1394 or firewire connector our dvhs player came out before HDMI and HTTP so the only option is to help put SD so standard definition or to Output HD over that encrypted firewire output and you might think well no problem you could just convert that to HDMI right but you can't because only about 90 films ever made it to D theater the last was iRobot released in 2004 there's been very little demand for products that can convert these weird firewire boxes to Modern standards and while there are firewire capture cards again due to the obscurity of the tech I'm not aware of any that can defeat the encryption that was used by d-theater there are apparently d-theater players that do support HDMI but by the time those came out dvhs was on its way out the door so I suspect that the owners of those units are probably holding on to them until The Bitter End and who can blame them especially knowing what we know now about how good the theater releases were so with that in mind why did it fail first of all the movie execs got one big big thing wrong people didn't care about high definition nearly as much as they thought certainly not enough to overcome the cost space durability and convenience advantages that DVD had over D theater would you rather have a slightly sharper picture or a movie you don't have to rewind factoring in that this one has a player that costs over a thousand dollars another major problem for d-theater is that HD DVD and Blu-ray the ultimate winner of the high def format were were just around the corner promising even more better image quality with all the same advantages of DVD and then when Sony aggressively pushed Blu-ray to dominance by including playback capabilities with the PlayStation 3 in 2006 nothing else ever stood a chance just like you don't stand a chance 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,298,034

Keywords: DVHS, D Theater, VHS, Cassette Tape, VCR, 1080i, 1080p, Plasma TV, Blu-Ray, DVD, HD, Full HD, Home Theater, Retro Tech

Id: papQ8xQxizA

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2022