VHS Videotapes

The Video Home System is better known by its abbreviation VHS. more...

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It is a recording and playing standard developed by Victor Company of Japan, Limited (JVC) and launched in September 1976, with The Young Teacher being the first movie to be released.

By the 1990s, VHS became a standard format for consumer recording and viewing, after competing in a fierce format war with Sony Corporation's Betamax and, to a much lesser extent, Philips' Video 2000, MCA's Laserdisc and RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc. VHS initially offered a longer playing time than the Betamax system, and it also had the advantage of a far less complex tape transport mechanism. Although VHS and Betamax were competing formats, several of VHS' critical technologies are licensed from Sony. Early VHS machines could rewind and fast forward the tape considerably faster than a Betamax VCR since they unthreaded the tape from the playback heads before commencing any high-speed winding. Most newer VHS machines do not perform this unthreading step, as head-tape contact is no longer an impediment to fast winding, owing to improved engineering.

The week of 15 June 2003 marked the first time the DVD format (which was launched in the late 1990s) became more popular than VHS in the USA. Although still popular for home recording, the VHS tape has largely been replaced by DVD for pre-recorded home video content.

As of July 2006, most major film studios have stopped releasing new movie titles in VHS format, opting for DVD-only releases. VHS prerecorded cassettes, however, are still popular with many collectors, mainly because there are thousands of titles that are still unavailable on DVD or other newer formats.

Technical details

The VHS cassette is a 187 mm × 103 mm × 25 mm (7 ⅜" wide, 4" deep, 1" thick) plastic clamshell held together with 5 philips head screws. The flip-up cover that protects the tape has a built-in latch with a push-in toggle on the right side, as seen in the Bottom View. The VHS cassette also includes an anti-despooling mechanism as seen in the Top View, several plastic parts near front label end of the cassette between the two spools. The spool brakes are released by a push-in lever within a 6mm hole accessed from the bottom of the cassette, about 18mm in from the edge label. There is a clear tape leader at both ends of the tape to provide an optical auto-stop for the VCR transport mechanism.

The recording medium is 12.7 mm (½ inch) wide magnetic tape wound between two spools, allowing it to be slowly passed over the various playback and recording heads of the video cassette recorder. The tape speed is 3.335 cm/s for NTSC, 2.339 cm/s for PAL. A cassette holds a maximum of about 430 m of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about 3.5 hours for NTSC and 5 hours for PAL at "standard" (SP) quality. Other speeds include LP and EP/SLP which double and triple the recording time, for NTSC regions. These speed reductions cause a slight reduction in video quality (from 250 lines to 230 lines horizontal); also, tapes recorded at the lower speed often exhibit poor playback performance on recorders other than the one they were produced on. Because of this, commercial prerecorded tapes were almost always recorded in SP mode.

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