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
VHS tapes were never meant to be able to display an image while paused. That’s because in order to display an image the read head inside the VCR needs to be scanning over the tape and displaying the signal to the TV.
When you pause your VCR there isn’t any tape moving past the read head anymore. Most VCRs hacked together a method of having at least some image on screen by just scanning and rescanning the bit of tape that happened to be under the read head when you paused the video. But, this method is imperfect and leads to the image quality problems that you described.
DVDs store video digitally and there is a concept of an individual frame of video that can be paused and displayed.
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