Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 13:47:25 -0800 From: "David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> To: <crh@outpost.co.nz> Cc: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Video Stupidity (was RE: Judge: "Gates Was Main Culprit") Message-ID: <000201bf3145$56474900$021d85d1@youwant.to> In-Reply-To: <19991117060702.DEB511527A@hub.freebsd.org>
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> David Schwartz wrote: > > > Both VHS and Beta exceed broadcast quality. > > Ha ha. I can cite references, but it seems I'm just wasting my time. Let me ask you a common sense version of this -- why does everyone turn the quality all the way down on their VCRs? If we're so concerned about picture quality and recoding time doesn't matter as much, you would have to explain it by us all being under some sort of mind control. > A piece of advice David - don't utter such mindbogglingly stupid > statements in the midst of an argument you're trying to win. People > who actually know about broadcast video (ie me) might start to judge > the veracity of everything you're saying on the appalling ignorance > of the comment above. Then you tell me, why do we all set our VCRs to the fastest possible setting that provides the lowest possible quality? Are we just all mistaken? > PS I don't have the technical specs of Betamax and VHS to hand to > compare them, so I'm not going to argue on technical performance, > but everything I've read suggests VHS won because of (relatively) > free and open licensing vs Sony's desire to control and own > everything that was Betamax. Unfortunately Sony's tactics have been > much more successful in the broadcast arena. If you're saying that open standards have market advantages over closed standards, then I would agree with you. But that is not a case of lock in. For what it's worth, the evidence I have suggests that the marketing and distribution efforts for both standards were more or less equivalent. The 'closing in' of Beta to Sony simply happened as more and more companies jumped ship and realized that VHS was inevitable. > PPS In my experience, SVHS lost the consumer war because the small > increase in quality (can anyone here say chroma noise?) wasn't > sufficient to justify the vast increase in cost, when people who > wanted quality could obtain much more of it for a similar price from > laserdisc. In other words, VHS provides as much quality as consumers want. At least, it did at the time. DS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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