Commercial S-VHS Godfather III release - frame grabs

[gshelley61]

I managed to find a rare S-VHS commercial release of Godfather III and thought you all would like to have a look... the movie studios only issued a handful of titles on S-VHS because there was no demand for the format.

Here's some frame grabs, captured directly to MPEG2 with my Toshiba RD-XS34 DVD recorder (input video noise reduction off). The playback deck is a JVC SR-W5U (s-video out), with it's 629 TBC/DNR turned off. Interestingly, this S-VHS commercial release has no Macrovision copy protection on it.

The picture resolution is about the same as laserdisc, without the laserdisc video noise. Definitely blows away VHS. Too bad it never caught on with the public.

[swiego]

I got this too. Some grabs from a JVC-9911U using a Theater 550 Pro card, capturing to huffyuv and using virtualdub to extract frames. I agree, the quality is pretty good, considering. Not sure if mine are quite at your level, however.........











Ouch!

[BJ_M]

want to see some GREAT video ?

get hold of some D-VHS titles http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/3065651/ref=dp_brlad_entry/103-2440238-1776609

players from JVC are under 400$ and a D-VHS tape is $7 (5 hour tape) .. the bit rate is quite high on these - mpeg2 compression at 28meg

[swiego]

Definitely. I used to own quite a bit of DVHS, there is no comparison. If you want to see even better, check out JVC's good 'ol "DigitalS" - even higher bitrates and less compression.

There are very few SVHS pre-recorded titles out there. That's what makes them a bit of a novelty versus DVHS and the rest. gshelly61, if you don't mind my asking, which one(s) other than GF3 do you have?

[gshelley61]

That's the only one I've got... and it's the first SVHS title I've run across.

I had a JVC DVHS unit for a while, too. I watched "I, Robot" and "Die Hard" in full HD on my 1280x720p Samsung DLP. Pretty darn good, for sure.

[swiego]

There were a few -

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.video/browse_thread/thread/ae25b57a8e609f02/24df3f7...df3f75febe3eba

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.video/browse_thread/thread/ba209c89ed9bdfb5/b91f85b...1f85ba733dbada

I have Godfather and Days of Thunder on SVHS.

[whitejremiah]

although not quite on par with stuff like dvd, the picture quality does still look very impressive indeed...especially seeing when these things were made (looks like early 90's?) i bet if this had caught on more, that dvd's in general would probably have taken a bit longer to catch on.....

[swiego]

I think the theory is that Laserdisc slowed down SVHS enough (as a home theater format) for DVD to step in and kill them both.