I get that TVs have faster refresh rates now but even if you play a dvd on an old tv it doesn’t tear when you pause it. What was so different about vhs tapes that made them freeze mid transition? Cause from what I understand, unlike actual film, which would have mid frame pauses, tape is encoded the exact same way as a disk or even a stream, so why do they buffer instead of tear?
In: Technology
The difference is a physical/analog medium versus a digital one. One medium requires reading like the previous answer said. The other is simply a digital file. When you pause a tape, you pause on whatever frame on the tape it has. And maybe caught between two frames. This image is displayed back to the tv… as it read… including all ‘noise’ on the head which shows up as lines and tearing. Digital media doesn’t have that fault. The file is either there or not, and displayed as such. Digital media doesn’t require being read by a a head like in a VCR. In digital media there’s no third party that needs to read the media as it is displayed. It’s just a file, fully digital.
You have to understand tape literally is frame by frame action. Like taking a photo 30 or 60 times in a second and strewing them together to make it look like it’s moving. If you were to flip through those photos and stop mid way. You’d probably catch a piece of the previous photo or frame. Causing your lines and tearing to be seen.
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