Videocassette recorder

"VCR" redirects here. This article is about videocassette recorders in general. For other uses of "VCR", including the Philips VCR ('N1500') video format, see VCR (disambiguation).

The videocassette recorder (or VCR, more commonly known in the British Isles as the video recorder), is a type of video tape recorder that uses removable videotape cassettes containing magnetic tape to record audio and video from a television broadcast so it can be played back later. Many VCRs have their own tuner (for direct TV reception) and a programmable timer (for unattended recording of a certain channel at a particular time).

History

Early machines and formats

The history of the videocassette recorder follows the history of videotape recording in general. Ampex introduced the first commercially successful videotape recorder in 1956. It was referred to as the 2" Quadruplex format, using two-inch (5.1 cm) tape. Due to its ^*]50,000 price, 2" Quadruplex could be afforded only by the television networks and the largest individual stations. Sony marketed in 1963 the first reel-to-reel VTR intended for business, medical, airline, and educational use. The Sony model CV-2000 in 1964 was the world's first VTR intended for home use. Ampex and RCA followed in 1965 with their own reel-to-reel monochrome VTRs priced under US$1,000 for the home consumer market.

Sony U-matic

The development of the videocassette followed the replacement by cassette of other open reel systems in consumer items: the compact audio cassette and Instamatic film cartridge in 1963, and the Super 8 home movie cartridge in 1966. Sony demonstrated a videocassette prototype in October 1969, then set it aside to work out an industry standard by March 1970 with seven fellow manufacturers. The result, the Sony U-matic system, introduced in Tokyo in September 1971, was the world's first commercial videocassette format. Its cartridges, resembling larger versions of the later VHS cassettes, used 3/4-inch (1.9 cm) tape and had a maximum playing time of 90 minutes. Sony also introduced two machines (the VP-1100 videocassette player and the VO-1700 videocassette recorder) to use the new tapes. U-matic, with its ease of use, quickly made other consumer videotape systems obsolete in Japan and North America, where U-matic VCRs were widely used by television stations, schools, and businesses.

Philips "VCR" format

In 1970 the Dutch electronics company Philips developed a home videocassette format. Confusingly, Philips named this format "VCR" (although it is also referred to as "N1500", after the first recorder's model number). The format was also supported by Grundig and LOEWE. It used square cassettes and half-inch (1.3 cm) tape, giving a recording time of one hour. The first model, available in the United Kingdom in 1972, was equipped with a crude timer that used rotary dials. At nearly £600, it was expensive and the format barely caught on for home use. However, a later (and incompatible) long-play version ("VCR-LP") or N1700, which could use the same tapes, sold quite well to schools and colleges.

Avco Cartrivision

The Avco Cartrivision system, a combination television set and VCR from Cartridge Television Inc. that sold for US$1,600, was the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies available for rent. Like Philips' VCR format, the square Cartrivision cassette had the two reels of half-inch tape mounted on top of each other, but could record up to 114 minutes. It did so using a crude form of video compression that recorded only every third video field and played it back three times. Cassettes of major movies such as The Bridge on the River Kwai and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner were ordered via catalog at a retailer, delivered by parcel mail, and then returned to the retailer after viewing. Other cassettes on sports, travel, art, and how-to topics were available for purchase. An optional monochrome camera could be bought to make home videos. Cartrivision was first sold in June 1972, mainly through Sears and Montgomery Ward department stores in the United States. It was abandoned thirteen months later after poor sales. Later, it was found that Cartivision tapes that had been stored in a warehouse had disintegrated.

The late 1970s: Mass-market success

It was not until the late 1970s, when European and Japanese companies developed more technically advanced machines with more accurate electronic timers and greater tape duration, that the VCR started to become a mass market consumer product. By 1980 there were three competing technical standards, with different, physically incompatible tape cassettes.

VHS vs. Betamax: The format war

The two major standards were Sony's Betamax (also known as Betacord or just Beta), and JVC's VHS, which battled for sales in what has become known as the original and definitive format war.

Betamax was first to market in November 1975, and was argued by many to be technically more sophisticated. The first machines required an external timer, and could only record one hour. (A "Betastacker" was later introduced to load up to four more tapes automatically.) The timer was later incorporated within the machine as a standard feature.

However, the rival VHS format (introduced in the United States in September 1976 by RCA) boasted a longer two-hour recording time. Sony halved the tape speed to allow two hours; RCA copied the change to allow four hours. Sony made thinner tape and still slower speed to allow over five hours, while RCA, which now had licenced the VHS format to many other manufacturers, copied the move and enabled six-hour recording time. Ultimately, VHS offered nine-hour recording with T-180 tapes, but never had any kind of automatic tape-changing technology, although some would argue that for VHS this was never truly needed.

In addition, the manufacturers changed from conventional channel selection knobs (VHF and UHF) to random access that allowed the timer mechanism to be programmed to change the channel automatically. This was particularly important since customers probably would not want to record the same TV station for several hours. All machines were originally top-loading, but front-loading is now standard.

Beta was arguably superior in picture quality, but VHS, because of wide licensing, was easier to get hold of, particularly in the rental market. One feature still not seen today on VHS VCRs, or DVD players, was Beta's "speed play", which allowed the viewing of programs at twice normal, but with clipped rather than "chipmunk" voices.

After competing head-to-head for several years, VHS began to pull ahead, and as more VHS recorders came into use, and more VHS films became available, network effects eventually squeezed Betamax out of the consumer market. Beta machines continued to be made for a niche market of videophiles, and the Beta format was also used for one format of micro-cassettes for hand-held home video cameras, surviving in the market for longer than the VCR version.In the late 1980s VCRs started to be made with the 'SP/LP' switch. This feature allowed a three hour tape to record six hours of video.

(A related system called Betacam still remains in use for high quality professional recording equipment, though that itself is now being replaced by digital Betacam tape formats.)

Various reasons are given for the failure of the Beta consumer format:

Some accounts claim that VHS won because it initially allowed for twice the recording time — the original Beta format was limited to one hour, but this was soon replaced by the two-hour Beta II version. Beta I was obsolete by the time Betamax reached Europe, in 1978

Others attribute the success of VHS to the greater availability of pornography on that medium, reflecting the long standing tradition of pornography being the driving force for the takeup of new media (the Internet being another obvious example).

JVC and Sony used different marketing models for their technology: JVC licensed their VHS technology to consumer electronics companies like Zenith and RCA, which then produced low-cost VCRs, enriching JVC through royalties paid under its license. Fewer companies were licensed to produce Beta machines.

The VHS camp had access to high-street TV rental chains (in the UK) like DER and MultiBroadcast. With a VCR costing about a month's wages, two competing standards, and a reputation for expensive repair bills, rental was considered the more attractive option at the time.

Philips Video 2000: No prize for third place

A third format, Video 2000, or V2000 (also marketed as "Video Compact Cassette") was introduced by Philips in 1978, and was sold only in Europe. It featured piezoelectric head positioning to dynamically adjust the tape tracking. V2000 cassettes had two sides, and like the audio cassette had to be flipped over halfway through their recording time. The half-inch tape used contained two parallel quarter-inch tracks, one for each side. It had a recording time of 4 hours per side. V2000 hit the market after its two rivals, and its limited features and a reputation for unreliability ensured only limited sales before it was cancelled in 1985.

The court battle

In the early 1980s, the film companies in the USA fought to suppress the device in the consumer market, citing concerns about copyright violations. In the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the device was allowable for private use, thereby guarenteeing market acceptance. In the years following, the film companies found that videorecordings of their products had become a major income source. However, television networks found the widespread use of this device was threatening their advertising business model because viewers then have the ability to either fast forward through television commercials, or pause recording when they are broadcast.

The beginning of the end?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DVD gradually overtook VHS as the most popular format for playback of prerecorded video. DVD Recorders and other Digital video recorders such as TiVo have recently begun to drop in price in developed countries, which some consider to be the writing on the wall for VCRs in those markets. DVD rentals in the United States first exceeded those of VHS in June 2003, and in 2006 the president of the Video Software Dealers Association predicted it would be the last year for major releases on VHS. Most electronics stores in North America only carry one or two VCRs, and they generally cost more than low-end DVD players. Many electronics makers have stopped producing VCRs.

Copy protection

Introduced in 1983, Macrovision is a system that reduces the quality of recordings made from commercial video tapes, DVDs and pay-per-view broadcasts by adding random peaks of luminance to the video signal during vertical blanking. These confuse the automatic level adjustment of the recording VCR which causes the brightness of the picture to constantly change, rendering the recording unwatchable.

When creating a copy-protected videocassette, the Macrovision-distorted signal is stored on the tape itself by special recording equipment. By contrast, on DVDs there is just a marker asking the player to produce such a distortion during playback. All standard DVD players include this protection and obey the marker, though unofficially many models can be modified or adjusted to disable it.

Also, the Macrovision protection system may fail to work on older VCR's, usually due to the lack of an AGC system. Only VHS and S-VHS machines (and DVD recorders) are susceptible to this signal, generally machines of other tape formats are unaffected. VCR's dubbed for "professional" usage typically have an adjustable AGC system, a specific "Macrovision removing" circuit, or Digital Timebase Corrector and can thus copy protected tapes with or without preserving the protection. Such VCRs are usually overpriced and sold exclusively to certified professionals (video editors, TV stations etc.) via controlled distribution channels in order to prevent their being used by the general public.

Variants

In addition to the standard home VCR, a number of variants have been produced over the years. These include combined "all-in-one" devices such as the televideo (a TV and VCR in one unit) and DVD/VCR units.

Dual-deck VCRs (marketed as "double-decker") have also been sold, albeit with less success.

Camcorders also feature an integrated VCR. Most of these use smaller format videocassettes, such as 8 mm, VHS-C, or MiniDV, although some early models supported full-size VHS and Betamax. Generally, they include neither a timer nor a TV tuner.

New media

The S-VHS format was introduced in an attempt to breathe new life into the aging VCR technology, but it did not gain sufficient momentum in the consumer market due to its higher initial cost for both machines and video tape. By the time JVC had lowered prices on S-VHS machines and video tape, the arrival of the new digital video formats spelled the end of analogue tape development.

For home video recording, both Digital Video Recorders (such as TiVo, Mythtv, Sky+ and ReplayTV) and DVD recorders are becoming popular, although they are only slowly replacing the VCR. In fact, Tivo cooperates well with VCRs which can be used to archive PVR recordings. However, the introduction of recordable DVDs with sufficient recording capacity on to the regular market with their advantage of random access could spell the doom of the VCR now that prices are falling.

The main drawback with recordable DVD is not the technology itself, but of the disc formats. At present, no less than three different types of DVD recordable disc exist. These are DVD + (plus), DVD - (dash) (both in record once and rewritable versions) and DVD-RAM (which is always rewritable and invariably bundled with DVD-). All three are backed by different consumer electronics manufacturers, and none shows any sign (as of 2006) of gaining "critical mass" in the marketplace. Consumers wary of another format war (similar to the Betamax versus VHS debacle of the early 1980s), has meant that sales of consumer DVD recorders have been slow to take off, although almost all modern recorders are now able to record onto both DVD+ and DVD- media.

Another important drawback of DVD recording is that one DVD is limited to around two hours of recording if the quality is not to be significantly reduced, while VHS tapes are readily available up to 210 minutes (standard play) in NTSC areas and even 300 minutes in PAL areas. Wider availability of recordable dual-layer DVDs reduce this disadvantage, but the cost of this media is still prohibitively high compared to standard single-layer discs.

A new format war will soon be thrust upon the public with the High Definition incompatible recordable HD-DVD and BluRay formats. These two formats record and play back video in HD. Although the Sony BluRay format stores more data per disc and is supported by more movie studios, HD-DVD was released before Blueray. It is unclear which format (if any) will ultimately "win". Both HD-DVD and BluRay have released first-generation players, as well as several select high-def discs.

External links

The Videotape Recorder Turns 50
Total Rewind – the Virtual Museum of Vintage VCRs
Fixer Corp. VCR Self-Repair Instruction Website for about 60 models

Consumer electronics | Film and video technology

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