Video recording
Video Home System, better known by the abbreviation VHS, is a video tape recording standard developed during the 1970s. It was released to the public during the latter half of the decade.
One of the main properties of the Video Home System is the increment of playing time, faster rewinding and fast-forwarding, and its tape mechanism transport is less complex. The open standard used for VHS technology allowed mass production without paying anything for licenses. VHS became eventually the winning video tape format, surpassing other home tape formats by the 1990s.
Nowadays, optical disc formats began to offer better quality than video tape. The earliest of these formats is the Laserdisc, but the most common tape format at home is the DVD format. By 2006, the United States had stopped releasing new movie titles in VHS format.
A VHS cassette holds a maximum of about 430 meters of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about 3.5 hours.
Audio recording
In the original VHS format, audio was recorded as baseband in a single linear track, at the upper edge of the tape, similar to how an audio compact cassette operates.
More expensive decks offered stereo audio recording and playback. Linear stereo, as it was called, fit two independent channels in the same space as the original mono audiotrack.
High-end consumer recorders took advantage of the linear nature of the audio track, as the audio track could be erased and recorded without disturbing the video portion of the recorded signal.
The main sucessors of the VHS are the DVD and the Blue-ray Disc which are very common nowadays because of the quantity of sells that films produce in the market.
References:
Google, The Free Enciclopedia, Monografias.com, Wikipedia.
Created:17/12/2009
Created by: Cristina Bachiller Madroño. NIA:100275602. Grupo 69. Grupo A.