Which is your favourite? I think mine is sixth gen.

  • mindbleach
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    1 year ago

    I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.

    Huh, fifth and sixth generation have some intense color errors, which I thought PAL would… yeah, seventh and thereafter are greyscale. PAL encodes color in opposite phases on alternating scanlines, specifically so they cancel out if the signal is too noisy or low-bandwidth. It’s supposed to be a graceful degradation. That is… not what happened here. (Ah, a pinned comment blames the digitization process. The uploader says it looks sensible on a real TV.)

    I’m also surprised the audio sounds like shit so quickly. Yes, it’s an analog-to-analog transfer, but AFAIK the audio is simply linear across the full width of the tape. Home video limited the physical speed and length of the plastic tape by swiping the read head diagonally. Each stripe is a frame. It’s called helical scan, and it’s why VCRs are hideously complex, while cassette players just drag the tape across a little metal sensor.

    The uploader could’ve cut to a still image of a well and made certain millenials shit themselves.

    • canOPM
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      1 year ago

      This is a great comment, thank you. So if I wanted to get that 6th gen look I’d need a PAL VCR?

      • mindbleach
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        1 year ago

        Apparently you’d need a dodgy PC converter card, if you wanted to get that neon pink-and-yellow look. Proper analog PAL hardware is supposed to desaturate. That is the opposite of desaturation.

        • canOPM
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          1 year ago

          I guess that’s attainable, thanks.