The big day for fans and collectors will be December 3rd. The latest Alien will move from theaters to physical media and will surprisingly be released in a limited edition on VHS in addition to the expected Blu-ray and DVD.
The last big film on VHS (if we don’t count small projects) was released in 2006. Back then it was a picture A History of Violence the director Davida Croneberga. In the same year, movies began to be released on Blu-ray, DVD was already king by then, and Netflix existed only as a video rental (it started streaming a year later).
Physical media has been in decline for many years, and Blu-ray has no successor. However, streaming services such as Netflix do not guarantee that the content will last on them, and not only because of licenses, sometimes some films or series disappear. It’s happening in games as well, so it’s possible that physical media will experience a partial renaissance.
VHS usually holds four hours of footage at a resolution corresponding to 335 × 576 px (even though it’s not pixels, it’s an analog format). Today’s TVs will have quite a job with upscaling.
Source: YouTube.com
How does VHS work? (ok, boomer) Inside a VHS tape, the tape is covered with a thin layer of material sensitive to magnetic fields (usually iron oxide). This tape is stretched around two spools. The VCR contains heads for reading and writing to magnetic tape. When a video signal comes into the machine, it converts that signal into magnetic changes on the tape. The key technology of VHS is the rotating recording head. The recording head records the video signal as changes in magnetization on the tape.
Source: www.cnews.cz
