Various Video Formats

Super 8 mm film (simply called Super 8) is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak. The film is 8 mm wide and has perforations on only one side. The dimensions of these perforations are smaller than those on older 8 mm film, which allowed the exposed area to be made larger. The Super 8 standard also specifically allocates the rebate opposite the perforations for an oxide stripe upon which sound can be magnetically recorded.

The Video Home System (better known by its abbreviation VHS) is a consumer-level video standard developed by Japanese company JVC and launched in 1976. A VHS cassette holds a maximum of about 430 m (1,410 ft.) of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about 3.5 hours for NTSC and 5 hours for PAL at "standard" (SP) quality. Other speeds include LP and EP/SLP which double and triple the recording time, for NTSC regions.

VHS-C is the compact VHS format introduced in 1982 and used primarily for consumer-grade compact camcorders. The format is based on the same videotape as is used in VHS, and can be played back in a standard VHS VCR with an adapter. Though quite inexpensive, the format is largely obsolete even as a consumer standard and has been replaced in the marketplace by digital video formats, which have smaller form factors.

16mm film was introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1923 as an inexpensive amateur alternative to the conventional 35mm film format. During the 1920s the format was often referred to as sub-standard film by the professional industry. Initially directed toward the amateur market, Kodak hired Willard Beech Cook from his 28 mm Pathescope of America company to create the new 16mm Kodascope Library. In addition to making home movies, one could buy or rent films from the library, one of the key selling aspects of the format. 16mm refers to the width of the film. Other common film gauges include 8mm and 35mm.

Betamax (sometimes called Beta) is a home videocassette tape recording format developed by Sony, released on May 10, 1975. The cassettes contain 1/2-inch (12.7mm)-wide videotape in a design similar to the earlier, professional 3/4-inch (19.05mm) U-matic format. The format is generally considered obsolete, though it is still used in specialist applications by a small minority of people. Two piece camera/VCR systems rapidly displaced Super 8 mm film as the medium of choice for shooting home movies and amateur films. These units included a portable VCR, which the photographer would carry by a shoulder strap, and a separate camera, which was connected to the VCR by a special cable. At this point, Beta had several advantages over VHS systems. The smaller Beta cassette made for smaller and lighter VCRs. Beta's superior picture was important for home movies, whereas the longer recording times of VHS were seen as superfluous. Betamax lost market to VHS Cassettes

Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a compact audio cassette, using 4 mm magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. Like most formats of videocassette, a DAT cassette may only be recorded on one side, unlike an analog compact audio cassette. As Sony has ceased production of new recorders, it will become more difficult to play archived recordings in this format unless they are copied to other formats or hard drives.

The 8mm video format refers informally to three related videocassette formats for the NTSC and PAL/SECAM television systems. These are the original Video8 (analog) format and its improved successor Hi8, as well as a more recent digital format known as Digital8. Their user base consisted mainly of amateur camcorder users, although they also saw important use in the professional field. In 1985, Sony of Japan introduced the Handycam, one of the first Video8 cameras with commercial success. Much smaller than the competition's VHS and Betamax video cameras, Video8 became very popular in the consumer camcorder market. The three formats (Video8, Hi8, and Digital8) are physically very similar, featuring both the same tape width and near-identical cassette shells, measuring 95 × 62.5 × 15 mm. This gives a measure of backward compatibility in some cases. One difference between them is in the quality of the tape itself, but the main differences lie in the encoding of the video when it is recorded onto the tape.

DV is a format for recording and playing back digital video. It was launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading producers of video camera recorders. DV is an intraframe compression scheme, which uses the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to compress video on a frame-by-frame basis. Audio is stored uncompressed. DV was originally designed for recording onto magnetic tape. Tape is enclosed into cassettes of four different sizes: small, medium, large and extra-large. All DV cassettes use tape that is ¼ inch (6.35 mm) wide. Small cassettes, also known as S-size or MiniDV cassettes, had been intended for amateur use, but have become accepted in professional productions as well. MiniDV cassettes are used for recording baseline DV, DVCAM as well as HDV.

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