Memories Of Video

Any Video 2000/V2000 takers?

Strewth that's going back a bit.

My high school had V2000 VCRs, and the cassettes were smaller than a VHS. One teacher went and tried to put a V2000 cassette into a VHS machine, and it got stuck!

https://giphy.com/gifs/xT5LMzIK1AdZJ4cYW4/html5

This is an interesting video from Techmoan, worth half an hour of anyone’s time wanting to know more about V2000:

On VHS, the length of tape was easy. E240 was 240 minutes, E180 a three hour tape. On Betamax, they were branded like L750. Was that really 750 minutes?

I think it was the length of tape.

It was the physical length of the tape reels. I think they did it to hide the fact they ran shorter than VHS tapes.

How long in terms of time was a Betamax L750 tape?

90 mins in "B1" mode.

Or 180 in B2, which was the standard speed on most machines after a few years. And that was the NTSC speed, a bit of research shows PAL/SECAM B2 was 195 minutes on a L-750 tape. In fact all the references I find only list the one speed for PAL/SECAM, so was there ever a B1 or B3 equivalent on PAL machines?

There always seemed to be a bit more tape length then stated on the box. A three hour tape seemed to have 2-3 minutes more. Waiting for the duration counter to state how much time was available could be nerve wracking.