The Video Home System, better known by its acronym VHS, is a
recording and playing standard for video cassette
recorders (VCRs), developed by JVC (ironically, with some of its critical technology
under lucrative licensing agreements with Sony) and launched in 1976. VHS officially stands
for Video Home System, but it initially stood for Vertical Helical Scan, after the relative head/tape scan technique. Some early reports claim the name originally stood for Victor Helical Scan system.
VHS became a standard format for consumer recording and viewing in the 1980s after
competing in a fierce format war with Sony's Betamax and, to a lesser extent, Philips' Video 2000. 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. 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 don't do this any more, as improved engineering has stopped
head-tape contact from being an impediment for fast winding). On the other hand, Betamax offers superior picture quality. See
VCR for more details.
A VHS cassette contains a 12.70 mm (approx 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 430m 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. Most cassettes have lower recording times because they use
thicker tape, which helps avoiding jams; careful users generally avoid the thinnest tapes. More recent machines usually allow the
selection of longer recording times by lowering the tape speed even further: LP mode (for PAL) halves the tape speed and doubles
the recording time, while EP mode (for NTSC) drops the tape speed to one-third, for triple the recording time. Of course these
speed reductions cause corresponding reductions in video quality, also tapes recorded at the lower speed often don't play well on
another recoder than the one they were produced on. Because of this, commercial prerecorded tapes were almost always recorded in
SP mode. An unofficial LP mode with one of half the standard speed exists on some NTSC machines but is not part of the VHS
standard.
VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of video bandwidth, and a horizontal resolution of about
240 discernible lines per scanline [1] (http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_6_3/essay-video-resolution-july-99.html). The frequency
modulation of the luminance signal makes higher resolutions impossible within the VHS standard, no matter how advanced the
recoder's technology. The vertical resolution of VHS (and all other analog recording methods) is determined by the TV standard
— a maximum of 486 lines are visible in NTSC and a maximum of 576 lines in PAL.
The video bandwidth is achieved with a relatively low tape speed by the use of helical scan recording of a frequency
modulated luminance (black and white) signal, to which a frequency-reduced
"color under" chroma (hue and
saturation) signal is added. In the original VHS format, audio was recorded unmodulated in a single (monaural) linear track at
the upper edge of the tape, which was limited in frequency response by the tape speed. More recent hi-fi VCRs add higher-quality
stereo audio tracks which are read and written by heads located on the same spinning drum that carries the video heads, frequency
modulated to the unused frequency range in between the chroma and luma signals. These audio tracks take advantage of depth
multiplexing: since they use lower frequencies than the video, their magnetization signals penetrate deeper into the tape.
When the video signal is written by the following video head, it erases and overwrites the audio signal at the surface of the
tape, but leaves the deeper portion of the signal undisturbed.
Of course, for backward compatibility, hi-fi VCRs still write the linear audio track during recording, and can automatically
read it during playback if the hi-fi audio is not present.
Another linear control track, at the tape's lower edge, holds pulses that mark the beginning of every frame of video;
these are used to fine-tune the tape speed during playback and to get the rotating heads exactly on their helical tracks rather
than having them end up somewhere between two adjacent tracks (a feature called tracking). Since good tracking depends on
the exact distance between the rotating drum and the fixed control/audio head reading the linear tracks, which usually varies by
a couple of micrometers between machines due to manufacturing tolerances, most VCRs offer tracking adjustment, either manual or
automatic, to correct such mismatches.
The control track can aditionally hold index marks. These are normally written at the start of each recording session,
and can be found using the VCR's index search function: this will fast-wind forward or backward to the nth
specified index mark, and resume playback from there. There was a time when higher-end VCRs provided functions for manually
removing and adding these index marks--so that, for example, they coincide with the actual start of the program--but this feature
has become hard to find. A sign, perhaps, of the obsolescence of the VHS format.
Several improved versions of VHS exist, most notably S-VHS, an improved analog
standard, and D-VHS, which records digital video onto a VHS form factor tape. Devices have also been invented which directly connect a personal computer to VHS tape recorders for use as a data backup device. W-VHS caters for high
definition video.
Another variant is VHS-C (C for compact), used in some camcorders.
Since VHS-C tapes are based on the same magnetic tape as full size tapes, they can be played back in standard VHS players using a
mechanical adapter, without the need of any kind of signal conversion. The magnetic tape on VHS-C cassettes is wound on one main
spool and used a sort of a gear wheel which moves the tape forward. It can also be moved by hand and so is the spool. This
development hampered the sales of the Betamax system somewhat, because the Betamax cassette geometry prevented a similar
development.
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