NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] 1978 Video: TV and Video Formats Madness - A Twisted Path to YouTube!
1978 Video: TV and Video Formats Madness - A Twisted Path to YouTube!
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000789.html
Greetings. It's been a while since the last posting of archival video
from my Betamax Extraction Project ( http://bit.ly/bnARSi
[Lauren's Blog] ), but today's installment is very special, and should
be of particular interest to anyone who works with video.
The 21st century digital video world is a veritable alphabet soup of
competing and often incompatible formats, codecs, and aspect ratios.
MPEG, Flash, H.264, WebM, the list of buzzwords seems almost endless.
The casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that this
complexity is new to computer-based video processing, but in reality
"format wars" related to video -- and television broadcasting -- date
back many decades, and the incompatibilities that come with them can
even impact politics, free speech, privacy, and other critical aspects
of society.
Today's video consists mainly of recovered clips I've assembled from a
wonderful 1978 television program called "Fast Forward." From
incompatible color and TV broadcasting standards (and their sometimes
complex relationship with national politics), to the bizarre world of
differing videotape formats, this is a wonderful trip down memory lane
by a program that tried quite successfully to make geeky subjects
interesting to mass audiences.
It's amazing to see how far we've come in some respects, and how
aspects of confusion present in 1978 technologies are still with us
today as we've traveled the long path from NTSC to YouTube. And the
cost factors are also fascinating to consider -- note the awe with
which one speaker explains how you can now buy videocassette recorders
for only around $1000! And remember, that's 1978 dollars. Believe
me, he's not kidding either. Back then, home videotaping seemed
magical at any price (and the tapes were damned expensive too,
by the way).
The clips also feature appearances by esteemed television engineer,
consultant, and global speaker Joe Roizen, who unfortunately passed
away suddenly in 1989. In these segments, including ones where he
explains the "NIH" (Not Invented Here) engineering principle, his
tongue-in-cheek universal TV color system "Nutseqamir," test patterns,
and other topics, you can see the joy -- and humor -- with which he
could explain these highly technical topics. His children have a very
nice site dedicated to Joe that is very much worth visiting
( http://bit.ly/jr0uty3 [Joseph Roizen] ).
Finally, as usual, I have included some other video goodies
successfully extracted from the Vortex Videotape Archive (not
necessarily from the same year as the main material), and have slotted
them in at the beginning and end of the full video compilation. Note
in particular how a lottery rehearsal came very close to invoking
Satan -- or at least a permissive Unix/Linux protection mode!
Enjoy.
1978 Video: TV and Video Formats Madness - A Twisted Path to YouTube!
http://bit.ly/fTppEb (YouTube - 15 minutes)
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz