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Where do you think you're going?

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Get over here. Get this in check. Come on, come on.

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Why would you be carrying a remote like this? Watching.

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Don't be a wise guy. What are you watching with a universal remote?

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Namely. DVD, Blu-ray, laser disc?

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Everything. Well, almost everything.

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We track down nearly every single home movie format for the last 50 years.

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Alongside 10 copies of one of the only films that's available across every single one of

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them. Rambo First Blood. This is my knife?

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Yeah. We better make our way back to the studio.

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Okay. Oh, but not until we tell them about our sponsor.

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We'll be going chronologically, which means we'll be starting with everyone's darling

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Betamax, which doesn't look too good.

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I think if we take away the anomalies aside, it looks okay.

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I think it looks about on par with VHS, maybe a little better. You're right.

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That does help. Yeah, that's right. Unfortunately, we ran through three different tapes, and the third one was looking really

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good until the tape snapped. Oh, shoot. Yeah.

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No, there's nothing there. It's just gone. That's just the reality of the situation, though.

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I mean, these early formats were not designed to last forever.

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They were very analog, and they've all been slowly breaking down over the last, in this

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case, 40 years due to humidity, temperature changes, magnetization loss, and the three-layer

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binding can apparently come undone, lube can dry up.

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It's impossible to save these forever without digitization.

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Fortunately, there'll be plenty of that to go around later.

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As for the format, Betamax was developed by Sony and actually beat VHS to market by about

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a year, but ultimately lost what we could say is the first major format war.

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The footage was higher quality, but you could only fit about an hour per tape, so lower

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quality long-play ones came out later to fit full movies into a single session, kind of

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like Beta's subversive little brother, VHS.

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We might as well move on to that at this point, because as much as Beta might have looked

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better back then, it sure doesn't today. Well, I'll tell you this, overall, I actually think it's on par with VHS, maybe a little

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nicer. You're not wrong. Where it looks good.

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Right, it looks okay. It does look good. Yeah.

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That was a pretty cool stunt, considering they did everything practically back then. I know.

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It's a great movie. I've never seen it. You're about to watch it 10 times.

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All right. VHS babies. Oh, you know what?

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I wonder if you need different outputs. You shouldn't. Should just work out the same one.

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Oh. S-Video out. Did we go get an S-Video cable for nothing, because it doesn't even support S-Video on

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the VHS player side?

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Is that what happened? It says DVD only. Oh, balls.

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Here's the thing. We wanted to use the S-Video output on this player in order to give VHS a fair shake against

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Betamax, but this is probably more realistic anyway, since most VCRs used a simple composite

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hookup. Yeah. Ah, that takes me back.

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And if you're over 30, it'll probably do the same for you.

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That's the good sound. That's how you know the machine's working. Machines don't make noise anymore.

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And there we go. Someone forgot to rewind. Classic.

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See, before the advent of digital media, employees at video rental stores and unlucky younger

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brothers would spend an awful lot of time waiting around to rewind the tape before a

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movie could be enjoyed, or, well, at least, viewed.

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I'm enjoying this. It doesn't look as good as its modern day counterparts, but I think that's something

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we kind of forget a lot, is that when this was the only thing available, it looked fine,

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and no one thought about it. We'd watch movies at home all the time. This has even held up reasonably recently.

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Yeah. This has 240 lines of luminance resolution and only usually stereo sound, but despite

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these drawbacks and the high initial cost, VHS was the clear and undisputed winner of

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the first great format war, bringing movies from the big screen at your local theater

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to the small, very small screen in your home.

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Yeah, this is huge for CRT standards to be very clear.

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Yeah. To its credit, the tape has held up pretty okay, which reminds me.

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So did VHS as a format? 29 years.

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That's the time from the introduction to the last Hollywood release in 2006.

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It's almost as old as me. All the colors look pretty muted.

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We're probably only get, I don't even know how much of like SRGB we're getting.

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But for a long time, if you wanted movie at home, it was this or watch on cable with probably

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worse image quality, not to mention endless commercials and often the best parts edited

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out. There's not much more to say.

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Like it's got a lot of grain to it. Yeah. Like I would watch this.

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Yeah. Like if I went to someone's house and they had a VHS playing and this was like, I'd sit

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down and watch this movie. Yeah, why not? I wouldn't complain about it.

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You'd complain. No, I probably wouldn't. Really?

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Yeah. Not a single complaint. No, because it's not my house.

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Okay. You'd complain at your own. Oh, 100%.

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Okay. Oh yeah. Okay.

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Oh yeah. Making sure I understood where you're at. Side spread popularity in the West, but Laserdisc existed alongside VHS and arguably was superior

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in every measurable way. Like, look at this convenience.

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Also, I can measure how much I can store on one side.

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Listen, at my age, I see mid-movie bathroom breaks as an absolute win.

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Oh, which side of my own? Yeah.

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Damn it. We're 100% keeping that in. I think it's this one.

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Does it have labels? Yeah. But I can't remember.

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Oh, right. If you want the label to be up or the label to be down. Yeah.

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And it actually varied from one player to another. Yeah. Yeah.

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What an incredible format. We did a deeper dive a couple of years ago, but the TLDR is Laserdisc made its first

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appearance in 1978 as disco vision.

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And like compact discs, it uses tiny pits and lands that are etched into the surface

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to store media and a laser to read the pattern. Unlike CDs and future disc based formats, however, the encoding of the movie was actually

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analog. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, it's a mix of technologies.

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We're at that like weird threshold where it goes from being analog to digital.

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It's lasers. Yeah, disks. But it's analog.

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On disks. Laserdisc. It's going, it just takes a hot second.

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Side B. You put some D in. Damn it.

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At least it tells you before it even does anything, though. Wide screen, baby.

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Yeah. Wide screen's cool and all. I never liked it back when I had a four by three display though.

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No, it looks terrible on, it's, you just get, it's so much less screen space.

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Yeah. Our screens were so small. Yeah.

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Oh yeah. Oh yeah. This is a big CRT.

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Yeah. Imagine on like a tiny one. Oh yeah.

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It'd be terrible. Yeah. There's definitely more resolution.

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Oh yeah. There's definitely more resolution. Literally twice as much.

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Yeah. But like the, the rest of the quality of the image, it doesn't look that much better than VHS.

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The colors better. Colors better. Like a Laserdisc in someone's home theater and then I went home and watched the same

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movie on my VCR. I don't think I'd go out and buy a Laserdisc player.

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You're also not watching it on a big screen though. Sure.

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And VHS falls apart on a larger display.

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It really does. It really does. Even those big, uh, reproduction TVs.

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And given that folks with bigger screens probably had bigger sound systems, they'd have also

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gotten a benefit out of the fact that Laserdisc was the first popular home movie format to

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support surround sound, including Rambo First Blood.

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Okay. That's actually a pretty genuine reason to buy this over a VCR.

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And there were other benefits too. Laserdisc also got arguably the best releases of many classic films thanks to their unique

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edits or bonus features that can't be found elsewhere.

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Unfortunately, due to high costs and being limited to about 60 minutes of content per

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side, it never really caught on and took off in the West outside of, you know, your

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favorite karaoke bar or maybe your rich uncle's home theater. Hear me out.

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Hear me out. What if you like the quality of VHS with the inconvenience of Laserdisc?

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You get the CED video disc player wrapped in one overly fragile package.

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I'm trying to remember how to work it.

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It's in the load and unload position. Now you just put it in.

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You put, you use the caddy and you pop it in. Yeah.

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Keep going. Pretty much. Okay.

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Now it should be locked. Now pull the caddy out. And if we're lucky, it worked.

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Hey. This format also competed head to head in the same era as VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc.

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They're so cool to make a whole video on them. Too bad they suck.

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Yeah. Basically, instead of pits and lands on a plastic disc being read by a laser, you know,

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like all of the sensible disc media, they used a vinyl disc with a stylus that measures

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the capacitance between the stylus tip and the disc as it rips around at 13 times the

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RPM of a typical music vinyl record. It's an engineering marvel that it works at all.

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Yeah. It's absolutely wild. All I can say for sure is it doesn't look good right now 30 years later.

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To its credit, other than the horrible fringing. Yeah.

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Look at the flag badges on there. The flag's a little rough.

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And the color. Yeah. The color's not great.

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Other than all of those things. It's operating okay right now at least.

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We saw that major skip a little while ago, but it's been playing consistently for at

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least a couple of minutes. I feel like you're jinxing it. Right?

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The whole time I said the sentence, I was waiting for it to just start scaring.

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But yeah, this is not great. I would take VHS over this. Oh yeah.

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So did everyone. Yeah. So did everybody else.

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In fairness, I mean on that subject, repeated playback is hard on many media formats, but

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because of the physical contact between the stylus and the disc, RCA's estimated 500 plays

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was probably more fantasy than the 50 or so films that were available at launch.

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Unlike the rest of the formats we've looked at so far, pricing wasn't the issue at around

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$500 for a player and $15 to $40 per movie.

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Reasonable. Due to being trapped in development hell for over 15 years, this thing lost the race and

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ultimately destroyed RCA before it even began.

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Kind of did. Our next stop is video CD.

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It's exactly what it sounds like, featuring a resolution of just 240 lines, but no inconvenient

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rewinding and much greater durability than VHS.

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What more could you ask for in 1987? I don't know, maybe more than five minutes of video per disc?

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To their credit, the problem of digitizing and compressing video data was solved a few

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years later and in 1993, VCD in its current form, which can fit a film on just two discs,

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was born. Now, you probably think of VCD as a format for pirates, but for a short time before writable

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CDs came out, Hollywood did release a handful of films on this format.

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Here we go. It even said VCD on the TV and everything.

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Let's go. Copyright proprietor has licensed the material.

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It's all spelled right. At what point can you tell that Sylvester Stallone?

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Well, yeah. Oh, it's fine. Yeah, now you can see it's live, but like.

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What's his name? He looked like a completely different guy.

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Yeah. The entire lake is just. Yeah.

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Blown out. Yeah. Awful.

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There's no action yet either. No. The drawback of VCD is the super low bit rate.

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We haven't even thrown a challenging seed at it yet. He looked more like Richard Simmons at the beginning.

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Oh, it kind of did. That's what I was looking for. Yeah, I could see this because of the hair, but this doesn't just look awful.

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Like I've watched this intro multiple times in like high definition and you this looks

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fine normally. I'm not saying it looks amazing. It's definitely a film filmed 40 years ago or whatever, but like, look at how bad this

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looks. Motion performance and the like digital blocking artifacts around anything that moves.

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Awful. Give me a VHS any day of the week.

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100% over this? Yeah. No question.

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This is rough. But hey, you know, the cases are smaller so you could stack more movies in the same

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amount of physical space. That's true.

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And it's not its only advantage. Despite kind of sucking, VCD lived a long life, allegedly still being sold in Asia as

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recently as 2013 and even got a bunch of spin offs.

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X VCD, for instance, uses variable bit rate to help save data in simpler scenes and then

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improve image quality and more complex ones. At least I hope so. K VCD supported higher resolutions or runtime.

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D VCD or double VCD was for longer movies that couldn't fit on a single disc.

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That's what we've got today, which would have been nice for us.

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And S VCD or super VCD offered better image quality.

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Apparently almost on par with DVD, which we'll get to soon.

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But first, let's take a look at yet another skeleton on VHS's road to world

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domination. It's righted out cousin D VHS.

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This is another format that we've already covered in a previous video,

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but it's mind blowing enough that I think it merits talking about again.

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I mean, high definition on tape back in 1994.

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How did I not know about this when I was a freaking kid? Well, for starters, it wasn't commercially available until quite a bit later.

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And for another thing, it was really expensive back then.

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And unfortunately for you, it's rare, so it's still expensive today.

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Yeah, I know because the player we use that time, it started to eat the tapes as we were filming B roll.

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And so we had to get a new one. We also had to get new tapes.

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Hopefully this one doesn't explode before we finish, but no guarantee.

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I tested it and watched it footage. I know it works, but for how long?

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I can't say. Cool. Why did we change TVs?

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Because this one uses firewire for the copyright protection.

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And the only way we can get firewire in a modern display is with a plasma

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with a receiver that accompanies it. So not only did you need to shell out some big money for the player in the tapes,

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but you were also limited to a TV or receiver that supported firewire.

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Yeah, like this sweet pioneer plasma.

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I should press play. You should, but it looks like actually really good.

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Yeah, like there's a bit of noise in the image still. It's fine. But this is the first format where I can distinguish film grain

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from crappy low resolution. Yeah, this is 1080 I looks awesome.

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It really does. Like this is genuine HD. His badge isn't looking all garbage like it did mostly other formats.

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You can actually see small details on things. All the bamboo shoots there.

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Yeah, like this actually looks really good. Really fast motion. You can catch that it's interlaced and even just in tone on the blacks.

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Like I was watching his pants walk across the cabinets back there. And I could actually see his pants against the cabinets.

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Like it had enough range where I could differentiate the two materials.

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The color. Yeah, it's pretty legit. His fist looks white like he's clenching it.

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You know, his face is all red because he's all angry and stuff. It's really upsetting that this came out as late as it did to homes

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and that it costs as much as it did because like this is amazing.

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And this is factoring in that this is still a tape based medium.

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Yeah, this has probably degraded. It's really too bad that it stayed professional only for so long

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because by the time it had come out in the very early 2000s, DVD had already

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cemented itself as the future, even though this looks better.

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Better is an understatement. Oh, yeah, we're going to do DVD next. And I bet it's going to be like a downgrade.

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Major like we're on a bigger screen too. Like that's something that we really have to stop and mention is like

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the size is massive compared to our CRT and it looks way more detailed.

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It even had modern creature comforts like multiple audio channels and chapter stops.

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Unfortunately, it's chapter stops here as we move on to

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finally a new king after this parade of pretenders.

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In March 1997, the DVD or digital versatile disk, not video, came to North America.

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If you were ignorant of the wonders of DVHS or laser disk, so if you were almost

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anyone, DVD was incredible. Not only was the quality significantly higher than regular VHS at a whopping

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480p, thanks to single layer discs holding 4.7 gigabytes of data, but the discs

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were tiny compared to VHS and laser disc and they wouldn't wear out over multiple plays.

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Not only that, but it had cool features that were new to most people like

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chapter selection and on disk extras that range from deleted scenes to bloopers

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to interactive games. I remember those. Yeah, they were actually really great. I remember it was such a big deal.

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Like even this, even the main menu, it was like it was so cool because you went

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from renting a videotape and putting it in and just watching the movie to like

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all of a sudden, you know, you and your family watch the movie and then you check out the deleted scenes after you check out the bonus features.

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Like now early players were super expensive.

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Here's an ad from 1997 with ranges from $500 to $750, $90, but that cost

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dropped massively as adoption ramped up and in March of 2000, the PlayStation

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2 launched with DVD playback functionality at just $299.

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Wait, sorry. So it's a game console and it's one of the cheapest DVD players on the market.

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Hell yeah. What a move, Sony. Crushed it. Back to widescreen on the tiny TV.

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Yeah. Not an upgrade. No, but 480p is technically better than what we were looking at before.

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And we're using S video now, which was much more common by the time DVD rolled around.

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It's like three steps forward, eight steps back.

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OK, the color is a lot better, though. Skin tones way better.

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Yeah, but like I can barely see the mountain in the background. It's pretty much just part of this guy.

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Exactly. And like the the lake still looks like super blown out.

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Yeah, and the buildings are just black. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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But like you said, to most people, this was a massive upgrade.

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Oh, yeah, even just not having to be so careful with them. Oh, totally.

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Not being so bulky. You could fit like five DVDs in the same space.

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You could fit one VHS. Yeah. Yeah, I actually remember watching the Matrix on DVD back in 2000 when my uncle got his

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first like big 5.1 surround sound home theater system.

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DVD was brand new. It looked and sounded absolutely incredible.

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And that's like when my first introduction to hi-fi was kind of starting and when I

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actually got into like things can look better than what I've been watching.

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And all these years later, now you own a display. Several, in fact.

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DVDs are even still being produced and sold with major releases priced at roughly

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the same as their Blu-ray counterparts. Astonishing.

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Really amazing that these are still being created and used today, especially when you

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consider that both formats have coexisted for nearly 20 years.

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It really is decent enough. 100 percent. The only reason I'm unhappy right now is because I just watched a DVD VHS.

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We know what's better and we've seen what's better. Whereas like for most people, this massive upgrade, we just can't say it enough.

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Like it was incredible going from VHS to DVD.

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It really was. And it was such a big step that I felt like a lot of the people I knew

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just felt like DVD was good enough to the point where when Blu-ray came out,

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they were like, yeah, it's kind of funny, but that's really true.

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Like it's probably why it survived for so long is because it wasn't until our

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TVs got so much bigger that this mattered, that this was problematic at all.

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Yeah. Because even back in 2000, like TVs were only starting to get into like 50

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inch ranges commonly. And even 50 was like pretty big, unless it was rear projection.

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And that was fuzzy rear projection. Generally speaking, we can't get to Blu-ray yet, though, because I promised

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we'd do this chronologically. And you know what came out just a few months earlier?

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Good old HD DVD. Are you actually nostalgic for it?

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No, I've actually never watched an HD DVD and I thought it stood for

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high definition DVD. It's actually high density DVD.

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The more you know, I've never experienced this either. So I'm actually a little excited.

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That's it. That's the extra standalone player.

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It's the size of the Xbox.

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Developed by Toshiba, high density DVD was over three times the capacity

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of regular DVD at 15 gigs per layer. And like Blu-ray, it used a blue laser with a shorter wavelength.

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But how was the quality? It looks pretty damn good, though.

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Of course, this should still be like 1080p.

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You know, the actual quality by comparison was pretty similar between

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the two formats. It was really just the storage capacity was kind of the major factor.

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We're also using a much more modern display here.

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Yeah, we've upgraded to an OLED, which we know is not apples to apples.

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But if you got HDMI, you might as well flaunt it.

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Yeah. The resolution is just so much better.

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But you know what I will say? It felt a little more filmic looking on DVHS.

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Yeah, more organic. And this one, the mastering isn't as good, I think.

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Because if, like, we might see it here, that mountain still, I can barely see it.

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And this is an OLED. Better than DVD. Better than DVD, but not as good as DVHS.

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I think the DVHS was mastered a little better again. It's kind of crazy, because we said the same things when we did the video on it,

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watching the hurricane on it. How good is DVHS? It's amazing.

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Bring it back. We're bringing it back. We've got a player right there. We're going to buy more movies, right?

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No. And then hang out in your theater room and watch DVHS take.

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No. Even though I'm looking there again, the shadows, you can still see all the staining

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from the natural moss and lichen and stuff building up on the grunginess of it.

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You can tell they really lifted up the shadows a lot.

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I was just thinking that on his left side, it's not nearly as dark as it was before.

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And especially compared to the previous formats, where his skin tones were so red,

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now they're almost sickly looking, almost green.

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Obviously, you could run into the same issues with color grading on a Blu-ray,

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so why did HDDVD fail? Well, failing is relative.

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It got more movie releases than video discs. OK.

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And it sold about three quarters of a million players,

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including the Xbox 360 add-on.

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But yeah, considering the development cost, it's a giant failure.

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And it's not because the HDDVD was bad. This looks pretty good.

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It's great. It's because the competition was better. Now, a lot of people liken the Blu-ray versus HDDVD format wars

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to the older VHS and beta battle, and the rumor was that the winner

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was chosen in the same way by the adult entertainment industry.

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But realistically, there was more to it than that.

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Development by the BDA or Blu-ray Disc Association began as far back as 2001.

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And when Blu-ray launched in late June of 2006,

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it did so with a vastly superior capacity to anything at the time.

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Even the single layer discs made HDDVD sound more like half density DVD

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with 25 gigs. And then dual layer 50 gig discs came just a few months later,

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enabling even lengthy, full 1080p HD films to fit on a single piece of plastic.

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And that's with high fidelity multi-channel audio and extra galore.

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Wow. Now that's a menu.

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Look at this. Normally, I'm the one who's over the top on camera.

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By the way, was this intentional? I just I just noticed looking at the thing we're both in purple.

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I love this one. I love the lilac too. Available now, lttstore.com.

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This is still basically HDDVD or DVHS quality, though.

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I don't see a difference. It's still 1080p instead of 1080i.

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But I mean, we just watched 1080p and yeah, this looks good.

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And the thing is, just because they have 25 or 50 gigs on a disc,

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doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to use all of it. Yeah. Different blue rays will often run at dramatically different bit rates.

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I think that this looks slightly more detailed than HDDVD.

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But dude, you'd have to pull out the magnifying glass to really be sure.

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Yeah, I would still get a DVHS player.

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Oh, come on.

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OK, I probably wouldn't. But like, you got to admit, the DVHS player looks the best so far out of

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everything we've watched. It had way more just artifacts and crap.

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OK, it did. But it also it also looked more like an old film and like in a kind of comforting way.

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The real kicker was that while standalone players were super expensive for both of them at the start,

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Sony dusted off their old playbook and integrated Blu-ray into the PlayStation

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three for the starting price of 499, which was a lot at the time, but it's still a lot less than buying an Xbox

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and an X generation video player. That's fair.

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And Blu-ray has continued to evolve.

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In February of 2016, Blu-ray got what may end up being its final

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glow up with the launch of Ultra HD or 4K Blu-ray.

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Thanks to the even higher capacity of these discs, we now get Atmos audio with positional data baked into the soundtrack,

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10 bit color and rec 2020 with HDR mandatory for 4K Blu-ray or even 12 bit with Dolby Vision,

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which is optional. The question now is how does Rambo first blood look for the 10th time today?

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And it's final form. Hey, the film grains back.

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Yeah, they figured out in the time since the Blu-ray that people want that filmic look

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to their credit, 1080p is enough for a clean image.

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Totally. But it's not necessarily enough resolution to properly represent film grain.

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Like it can end up just looking like digital noise. Whereas when you have more resolution, you can have some of that original film grain.

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Oh, wow. The lake, dude.

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It's pretty bright. You can see and you can still see all the detail.

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Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. I hadn't even I was looking at the mountain again.

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But like, yeah, you're right. Doesn't clip nearly as badly in anything else we've watched.

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I can actually see all the rippling and stuff going on in the lake. It's kind of incredible to think that the original film,

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because it's not like they can recapture that. The original film had all of that dynamic range.

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We just didn't have a home format that was capable of reproducing it.

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I mean, that's kind of the scary thing about analog just dying slowly.

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A lot of film is just rotting in a warehouse or something somewhere.

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And if we don't remaster it digitally within some time period, it's just gone.

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And their faces look natural again. There's a little bit of red in them.

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Yeah, you can see that they have blood flowing in them.

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First blood.

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But you guys didn't need us to tell you that 4K Blue Ray is the highest

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fidelity movie format. So let's answer the question that no one was asking.

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What's the price of a 4K Blue Ray player and where can I get one?

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Wait, yeah, no, no one is asking that. Yeah, realistically, this is the last hurrah for physical media home releases.

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Now that everything has gone streaming and the industry's answer to crappy

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image quality appears to be adding more AI sharpening and, you know,

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hey, the bright side is it means we won't have to remake this video in a few

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years with one more format.

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Sure, two ultra high definition content with amazing contrast on high end OLED TV.

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And to our segue, to our sponsor.

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If you guys liked this video, make sure to check out the one about laser disk.

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You know what you wrote in the script, my personal favorite, but

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do you have a new personal favorite now? It's just so good.

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I forgot how good it is. Laser disk is cool because it's a big disk, but like man,

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DVHS just looks so good.