Where do you think you're going?
Get over here. Get this in check. Come on, come on.
Why would you be carrying a remote like this? Watching.
Don't be a wise guy. What are you watching with a universal remote?
Namely. DVD, Blu-ray, laser disc?
Everything. Well, almost everything.
We track down nearly every single home movie format for the last 50 years.
Alongside 10 copies of one of the only films that's available across every single one of
them. Rambo First Blood. This is my knife?
Yeah. We better make our way back to the studio.
Okay. Oh, but not until we tell them about our sponsor.
We'll be going chronologically, which means we'll be starting with everyone's darling
Betamax, which doesn't look too good.
I think if we take away the anomalies aside, it looks okay.
I think it looks about on par with VHS, maybe a little better. You're right.
That does help. Yeah, that's right. Unfortunately, we ran through three different tapes, and the third one was looking really
good until the tape snapped. Oh, shoot. Yeah.
No, there's nothing there. It's just gone. That's just the reality of the situation, though.
I mean, these early formats were not designed to last forever.
They were very analog, and they've all been slowly breaking down over the last, in this
case, 40 years due to humidity, temperature changes, magnetization loss, and the three-layer
binding can apparently come undone, lube can dry up.
It's impossible to save these forever without digitization.
Fortunately, there'll be plenty of that to go around later.
As for the format, Betamax was developed by Sony and actually beat VHS to market by about
a year, but ultimately lost what we could say is the first major format war.
The footage was higher quality, but you could only fit about an hour per tape, so lower
quality long-play ones came out later to fit full movies into a single session, kind of
like Beta's subversive little brother, VHS.
We might as well move on to that at this point, because as much as Beta might have looked
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
nicer. You're not wrong. Where it looks good.
Right, it looks okay. It does look good. Yeah.
That was a pretty cool stunt, considering they did everything practically back then. I know.
It's a great movie. I've never seen it. You're about to watch it 10 times.
All right. VHS babies. Oh, you know what?
I wonder if you need different outputs. You shouldn't. Should just work out the same one.
Oh. S-Video out. Did we go get an S-Video cable for nothing, because it doesn't even support S-Video on
the VHS player side?
Is that what happened? It says DVD only. Oh, balls.
Here's the thing. We wanted to use the S-Video output on this player in order to give VHS a fair shake against
Betamax, but this is probably more realistic anyway, since most VCRs used a simple composite
hookup. Yeah. Ah, that takes me back.
And if you're over 30, it'll probably do the same for you.
That's the good sound. That's how you know the machine's working. Machines don't make noise anymore.
And there we go. Someone forgot to rewind. Classic.
See, before the advent of digital media, employees at video rental stores and unlucky younger
brothers would spend an awful lot of time waiting around to rewind the tape before a
movie could be enjoyed, or, well, at least, viewed.
I'm enjoying this. It doesn't look as good as its modern day counterparts, but I think that's something
we kind of forget a lot, is that when this was the only thing available, it looked fine,
and no one thought about it. We'd watch movies at home all the time. This has even held up reasonably recently.
Yeah. This has 240 lines of luminance resolution and only usually stereo sound, but despite
these drawbacks and the high initial cost, VHS was the clear and undisputed winner of
the first great format war, bringing movies from the big screen at your local theater
to the small, very small screen in your home.
Yeah, this is huge for CRT standards to be very clear.
Yeah. To its credit, the tape has held up pretty okay, which reminds me.
So did VHS as a format? 29 years.
That's the time from the introduction to the last Hollywood release in 2006.
It's almost as old as me. All the colors look pretty muted.
We're probably only get, I don't even know how much of like SRGB we're getting.
But for a long time, if you wanted movie at home, it was this or watch on cable with probably
worse image quality, not to mention endless commercials and often the best parts edited
out. There's not much more to say.
Like it's got a lot of grain to it. Yeah. Like I would watch this.
Yeah. Like if I went to someone's house and they had a VHS playing and this was like, I'd sit
down and watch this movie. Yeah, why not? I wouldn't complain about it.
You'd complain. No, I probably wouldn't. Really?
Yeah. Not a single complaint. No, because it's not my house.
Okay. You'd complain at your own. Oh, 100%.
Okay. Oh yeah. Okay.
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
in every measurable way. Like, look at this convenience.
Also, I can measure how much I can store on one side.
Listen, at my age, I see mid-movie bathroom breaks as an absolute win.
Oh, which side of my own? Yeah.
Damn it. We're 100% keeping that in. I think it's this one.
Does it have labels? Yeah. But I can't remember.
Oh, right. If you want the label to be up or the label to be down. Yeah.
And it actually varied from one player to another. Yeah. Yeah.
What an incredible format. We did a deeper dive a couple of years ago, but the TLDR is Laserdisc made its first
appearance in 1978 as disco vision.
And like compact discs, it uses tiny pits and lands that are etched into the surface
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
analog. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, it's a mix of technologies.
We're at that like weird threshold where it goes from being analog to digital.
It's lasers. Yeah, disks. But it's analog.
On disks. Laserdisc. It's going, it just takes a hot second.
Side B. You put some D in. Damn it.
At least it tells you before it even does anything, though. Wide screen, baby.
Yeah. Wide screen's cool and all. I never liked it back when I had a four by three display though.
No, it looks terrible on, it's, you just get, it's so much less screen space.
Yeah. Our screens were so small. Yeah.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. This is a big CRT.
Yeah. Imagine on like a tiny one. Oh yeah.
It'd be terrible. Yeah. There's definitely more resolution.
Oh yeah. There's definitely more resolution. Literally twice as much.
Yeah. But like the, the rest of the quality of the image, it doesn't look that much better than VHS.
The colors better. Colors better. Like a Laserdisc in someone's home theater and then I went home and watched the same
movie on my VCR. I don't think I'd go out and buy a Laserdisc player.
You're also not watching it on a big screen though. Sure.
And VHS falls apart on a larger display.
It really does. It really does. Even those big, uh, reproduction TVs.
And given that folks with bigger screens probably had bigger sound systems, they'd have also
gotten a benefit out of the fact that Laserdisc was the first popular home movie format to
support surround sound, including Rambo First Blood.
Okay. That's actually a pretty genuine reason to buy this over a VCR.
And there were other benefits too. Laserdisc also got arguably the best releases of many classic films thanks to their unique
edits or bonus features that can't be found elsewhere.
Unfortunately, due to high costs and being limited to about 60 minutes of content per
side, it never really caught on and took off in the West outside of, you know, your
favorite karaoke bar or maybe your rich uncle's home theater. Hear me out.
Hear me out. What if you like the quality of VHS with the inconvenience of Laserdisc?
You get the CED video disc player wrapped in one overly fragile package.
I'm trying to remember how to work it.
It's in the load and unload position. Now you just put it in.
You put, you use the caddy and you pop it in. Yeah.
Keep going. Pretty much. Okay.
Now it should be locked. Now pull the caddy out. And if we're lucky, it worked.
Hey. This format also competed head to head in the same era as VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc.
They're so cool to make a whole video on them. Too bad they suck.
Yeah. Basically, instead of pits and lands on a plastic disc being read by a laser, you know,
like all of the sensible disc media, they used a vinyl disc with a stylus that measures
the capacitance between the stylus tip and the disc as it rips around at 13 times the
RPM of a typical music vinyl record. It's an engineering marvel that it works at all.
Yeah. It's absolutely wild. All I can say for sure is it doesn't look good right now 30 years later.
To its credit, other than the horrible fringing. Yeah.
Look at the flag badges on there. The flag's a little rough.
And the color. Yeah. The color's not great.
Other than all of those things. It's operating okay right now at least.
We saw that major skip a little while ago, but it's been playing consistently for at
least a couple of minutes. I feel like you're jinxing it. Right?
The whole time I said the sentence, I was waiting for it to just start scaring.
But yeah, this is not great. I would take VHS over this. Oh yeah.
So did everyone. Yeah. So did everybody else.
In fairness, I mean on that subject, repeated playback is hard on many media formats, but
because of the physical contact between the stylus and the disc, RCA's estimated 500 plays
was probably more fantasy than the 50 or so films that were available at launch.
Unlike the rest of the formats we've looked at so far, pricing wasn't the issue at around
$500 for a player and $15 to $40 per movie.
Reasonable. Due to being trapped in development hell for over 15 years, this thing lost the race and
ultimately destroyed RCA before it even began.
Kind of did. Our next stop is video CD.
It's exactly what it sounds like, featuring a resolution of just 240 lines, but no inconvenient
rewinding and much greater durability than VHS.
What more could you ask for in 1987? I don't know, maybe more than five minutes of video per disc?
To their credit, the problem of digitizing and compressing video data was solved a few
years later and in 1993, VCD in its current form, which can fit a film on just two discs,
was born. Now, you probably think of VCD as a format for pirates, but for a short time before writable
CDs came out, Hollywood did release a handful of films on this format.
Here we go. It even said VCD on the TV and everything.
Let's go. Copyright proprietor has licensed the material.
It's all spelled right. At what point can you tell that Sylvester Stallone?
Well, yeah. Oh, it's fine. Yeah, now you can see it's live, but like.
What's his name? He looked like a completely different guy.
Yeah. The entire lake is just. Yeah.
Blown out. Yeah. Awful.
There's no action yet either. No. The drawback of VCD is the super low bit rate.
We haven't even thrown a challenging seed at it yet. He looked more like Richard Simmons at the beginning.
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.
Like I've watched this intro multiple times in like high definition and you this looks
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
looks. Motion performance and the like digital blocking artifacts around anything that moves.
Awful. Give me a VHS any day of the week.
100% over this? Yeah. No question.
This is rough. But hey, you know, the cases are smaller so you could stack more movies in the same
amount of physical space. That's true.
And it's not its only advantage. Despite kind of sucking, VCD lived a long life, allegedly still being sold in Asia as
recently as 2013 and even got a bunch of spin offs.
X VCD, for instance, uses variable bit rate to help save data in simpler scenes and then
improve image quality and more complex ones. At least I hope so. K VCD supported higher resolutions or runtime.
D VCD or double VCD was for longer movies that couldn't fit on a single disc.
That's what we've got today, which would have been nice for us.
And S VCD or super VCD offered better image quality.
Apparently almost on par with DVD, which we'll get to soon.
But first, let's take a look at yet another skeleton on VHS's road to world
domination. It's righted out cousin D VHS.
This is another format that we've already covered in a previous video,
but it's mind blowing enough that I think it merits talking about again.
I mean, high definition on tape back in 1994.
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.
And for another thing, it was really expensive back then.
And unfortunately for you, it's rare, so it's still expensive today.
Yeah, I know because the player we use that time, it started to eat the tapes as we were filming B roll.
And so we had to get a new one. We also had to get new tapes.
Hopefully this one doesn't explode before we finish, but no guarantee.
I tested it and watched it footage. I know it works, but for how long?
I can't say. Cool. Why did we change TVs?
Because this one uses firewire for the copyright protection.
And the only way we can get firewire in a modern display is with a plasma
with a receiver that accompanies it. So not only did you need to shell out some big money for the player in the tapes,
but you were also limited to a TV or receiver that supported firewire.
Yeah, like this sweet pioneer plasma.
I should press play. You should, but it looks like actually really good.
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
from crappy low resolution. Yeah, this is 1080 I looks awesome.
It really does. Like this is genuine HD. His badge isn't looking all garbage like it did mostly other formats.
You can actually see small details on things. All the bamboo shoots there.
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.
Like I was watching his pants walk across the cabinets back there. And I could actually see his pants against the cabinets.
Like it had enough range where I could differentiate the two materials.
The color. Yeah, it's pretty legit. His fist looks white like he's clenching it.
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
and that it costs as much as it did because like this is amazing.
And this is factoring in that this is still a tape based medium.
Yeah, this has probably degraded. It's really too bad that it stayed professional only for so long
because by the time it had come out in the very early 2000s, DVD had already
cemented itself as the future, even though this looks better.
Better is an understatement. Oh, yeah, we're going to do DVD next. And I bet it's going to be like a downgrade.
Major like we're on a bigger screen too. Like that's something that we really have to stop and mention is like
the size is massive compared to our CRT and it looks way more detailed.
It even had modern creature comforts like multiple audio channels and chapter stops.
Unfortunately, it's chapter stops here as we move on to
finally a new king after this parade of pretenders.
In March 1997, the DVD or digital versatile disk, not video, came to North America.
If you were ignorant of the wonders of DVHS or laser disk, so if you were almost
anyone, DVD was incredible. Not only was the quality significantly higher than regular VHS at a whopping
480p, thanks to single layer discs holding 4.7 gigabytes of data, but the discs
were tiny compared to VHS and laser disc and they wouldn't wear out over multiple plays.
Not only that, but it had cool features that were new to most people like
chapter selection and on disk extras that range from deleted scenes to bloopers
to interactive games. I remember those. Yeah, they were actually really great. I remember it was such a big deal.
Like even this, even the main menu, it was like it was so cool because you went
from renting a videotape and putting it in and just watching the movie to like
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.
Like now early players were super expensive.
Here's an ad from 1997 with ranges from $500 to $750, $90, but that cost
dropped massively as adoption ramped up and in March of 2000, the PlayStation
2 launched with DVD playback functionality at just $299.
Wait, sorry. So it's a game console and it's one of the cheapest DVD players on the market.
Hell yeah. What a move, Sony. Crushed it. Back to widescreen on the tiny TV.
Yeah. Not an upgrade. No, but 480p is technically better than what we were looking at before.
And we're using S video now, which was much more common by the time DVD rolled around.
It's like three steps forward, eight steps back.
OK, the color is a lot better, though. Skin tones way better.
Yeah, but like I can barely see the mountain in the background. It's pretty much just part of this guy.
Exactly. And like the the lake still looks like super blown out.
Yeah, and the buildings are just black. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But like you said, to most people, this was a massive upgrade.
Oh, yeah, even just not having to be so careful with them. Oh, totally.
Not being so bulky. You could fit like five DVDs in the same space.
You could fit one VHS. Yeah. Yeah, I actually remember watching the Matrix on DVD back in 2000 when my uncle got his
first like big 5.1 surround sound home theater system.
DVD was brand new. It looked and sounded absolutely incredible.
And that's like when my first introduction to hi-fi was kind of starting and when I
actually got into like things can look better than what I've been watching.
And all these years later, now you own a display. Several, in fact.
DVDs are even still being produced and sold with major releases priced at roughly
the same as their Blu-ray counterparts. Astonishing.
Really amazing that these are still being created and used today, especially when you
consider that both formats have coexisted for nearly 20 years.
It really is decent enough. 100 percent. The only reason I'm unhappy right now is because I just watched a DVD VHS.
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.
Like it was incredible going from VHS to DVD.
It really was. And it was such a big step that I felt like a lot of the people I knew
just felt like DVD was good enough to the point where when Blu-ray came out,
they were like, yeah, it's kind of funny, but that's really true.
Like it's probably why it survived for so long is because it wasn't until our
TVs got so much bigger that this mattered, that this was problematic at all.
Yeah. Because even back in 2000, like TVs were only starting to get into like 50
inch ranges commonly. And even 50 was like pretty big, unless it was rear projection.
And that was fuzzy rear projection. Generally speaking, we can't get to Blu-ray yet, though, because I promised
we'd do this chronologically. And you know what came out just a few months earlier?
Good old HD DVD. Are you actually nostalgic for it?
No, I've actually never watched an HD DVD and I thought it stood for
high definition DVD. It's actually high density DVD.
The more you know, I've never experienced this either. So I'm actually a little excited.
That's it. That's the extra standalone player.
It's the size of the Xbox.
Developed by Toshiba, high density DVD was over three times the capacity
of regular DVD at 15 gigs per layer. And like Blu-ray, it used a blue laser with a shorter wavelength.
But how was the quality? It looks pretty damn good, though.
Of course, this should still be like 1080p.
You know, the actual quality by comparison was pretty similar between
the two formats. It was really just the storage capacity was kind of the major factor.
We're also using a much more modern display here.
Yeah, we've upgraded to an OLED, which we know is not apples to apples.
But if you got HDMI, you might as well flaunt it.
Yeah. The resolution is just so much better.
But you know what I will say? It felt a little more filmic looking on DVHS.
Yeah, more organic. And this one, the mastering isn't as good, I think.
Because if, like, we might see it here, that mountain still, I can barely see it.
And this is an OLED. Better than DVD. Better than DVD, but not as good as DVHS.
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,
watching the hurricane on it. How good is DVHS? It's amazing.
Bring it back. We're bringing it back. We've got a player right there. We're going to buy more movies, right?
No. And then hang out in your theater room and watch DVHS take.
No. Even though I'm looking there again, the shadows, you can still see all the staining
from the natural moss and lichen and stuff building up on the grunginess of it.
You can tell they really lifted up the shadows a lot.
I was just thinking that on his left side, it's not nearly as dark as it was before.
And especially compared to the previous formats, where his skin tones were so red,
now they're almost sickly looking, almost green.
Obviously, you could run into the same issues with color grading on a Blu-ray,
so why did HDDVD fail? Well, failing is relative.
It got more movie releases than video discs. OK.
And it sold about three quarters of a million players,
including the Xbox 360 add-on.
But yeah, considering the development cost, it's a giant failure.
And it's not because the HDDVD was bad. This looks pretty good.
It's great. It's because the competition was better. Now, a lot of people liken the Blu-ray versus HDDVD format wars
to the older VHS and beta battle, and the rumor was that the winner
was chosen in the same way by the adult entertainment industry.
But realistically, there was more to it than that.
Development by the BDA or Blu-ray Disc Association began as far back as 2001.
And when Blu-ray launched in late June of 2006,
it did so with a vastly superior capacity to anything at the time.
Even the single layer discs made HDDVD sound more like half density DVD
with 25 gigs. And then dual layer 50 gig discs came just a few months later,
enabling even lengthy, full 1080p HD films to fit on a single piece of plastic.
And that's with high fidelity multi-channel audio and extra galore.
Wow. Now that's a menu.
Look at this. Normally, I'm the one who's over the top on camera.
By the way, was this intentional? I just I just noticed looking at the thing we're both in purple.
I love this one. I love the lilac too. Available now, lttstore.com.
This is still basically HDDVD or DVHS quality, though.
I don't see a difference. It's still 1080p instead of 1080i.
But I mean, we just watched 1080p and yeah, this looks good.
And the thing is, just because they have 25 or 50 gigs on a disc,
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.
I think that this looks slightly more detailed than HDDVD.
But dude, you'd have to pull out the magnifying glass to really be sure.
Yeah, I would still get a DVHS player.
Oh, come on.
OK, I probably wouldn't. But like, you got to admit, the DVHS player looks the best so far out of
everything we've watched. It had way more just artifacts and crap.
OK, it did. But it also it also looked more like an old film and like in a kind of comforting way.
The real kicker was that while standalone players were super expensive for both of them at the start,
Sony dusted off their old playbook and integrated Blu-ray into the PlayStation
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
and an X generation video player. That's fair.
And Blu-ray has continued to evolve.
In February of 2016, Blu-ray got what may end up being its final
glow up with the launch of Ultra HD or 4K Blu-ray.
Thanks to the even higher capacity of these discs, we now get Atmos audio with positional data baked into the soundtrack,
10 bit color and rec 2020 with HDR mandatory for 4K Blu-ray or even 12 bit with Dolby Vision,
which is optional. The question now is how does Rambo first blood look for the 10th time today?
And it's final form. Hey, the film grains back.
Yeah, they figured out in the time since the Blu-ray that people want that filmic look
to their credit, 1080p is enough for a clean image.
Totally. But it's not necessarily enough resolution to properly represent film grain.
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.
Oh, wow. The lake, dude.
It's pretty bright. You can see and you can still see all the detail.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. I hadn't even I was looking at the mountain again.
But like, yeah, you're right. Doesn't clip nearly as badly in anything else we've watched.
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,
because it's not like they can recapture that. The original film had all of that dynamic range.
We just didn't have a home format that was capable of reproducing it.
I mean, that's kind of the scary thing about analog just dying slowly.
A lot of film is just rotting in a warehouse or something somewhere.
And if we don't remaster it digitally within some time period, it's just gone.
And their faces look natural again. There's a little bit of red in them.
Yeah, you can see that they have blood flowing in them.
First blood.
But you guys didn't need us to tell you that 4K Blue Ray is the highest
fidelity movie format. So let's answer the question that no one was asking.
What's the price of a 4K Blue Ray player and where can I get one?
Wait, yeah, no, no one is asking that. Yeah, realistically, this is the last hurrah for physical media home releases.
Now that everything has gone streaming and the industry's answer to crappy
image quality appears to be adding more AI sharpening and, you know,
hey, the bright side is it means we won't have to remake this video in a few
years with one more format.
Sure, two ultra high definition content with amazing contrast on high end OLED TV.
And to our segue, to our sponsor.
If you guys liked this video, make sure to check out the one about laser disk.
You know what you wrote in the script, my personal favorite, but
do you have a new personal favorite now? It's just so good.
I forgot how good it is. Laser disk is cool because it's a big disk, but like man,
DVHS just looks so good.