Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️bad idea for an experiment:
take a betamax tape, and a vhs tape. open both casettes, remove the actual tape, and put the beta tape into the VHS cassette.
First of all, it won't play. obviously.
but then see if we can record to it and play it back.
where's a VHS rewinder when you need one?
why VHS beat Beta in one, oversimplified example:
The reel on the right is beta. the reel on the left is VHS. A bigger reel meets it holds more tape. More tape means it can record for more minutes.
Karl Baron@foone And to get the play time the same as VHS, they had to implement the equivalent of VHS LP, tanking the image quality, making it at best on par with VHS. Later Beta players even dropped the standard speed altogether and now there were literally no pros to going with Beta over VHS. Worse quality and worse recording time options.