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
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 avoiding this message from our
sponsor War Thunder if you're looking for a comprehensive vehicle combat game
try a war Thunder it's free to play on PC PS4 PS5 Xbox One and series X with
crossplay with over 2000 Vehicles including tanks planes helicopters and
ships there's something for everyone to Pilot vehicles are modeled down to the
individual components offering an immersive combat experience there are
over a hundred years worth of historically accurate Vehicles ranging
from the 1920s to present day so whether you want a fast pace and action-focused
or tactical and realistic game War Thunder offers intense PVP battles for
all play Styles rather than a traditional hit point system War Thunder
uses the damage x-ray system showing actual damage on the vehicles plus
there's no extra components needed so you can fly an aircraft with a keyboard
and mouse the focus on visible damage as a layer of immersion you just don't get
from free to play games so click the link below and start playing War Thunder
for free with some premium vehicles and boosts if you guys enjoyed this video
you might also enjoy the one where we took an in-depth retrospective look at
3D home TVs and why they failed