Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Impossible Feat inside Your VCR" video.

6:53 That’s mono audio. The hi-fi stereo audio is recorded (I think) by extra heads also on the spinning drum, along the same tracks as the video. How do they keep from interfering? Through a magical feature known as “depth multiplexing”. The audio is recorded first, and because its frequencies are lower, the magnetization penetrates deeper into the tape. Then the video is recorded, which erases the audio close to the surface, but leaves the deeper part alone. During playback, each layer can be picked up by heads attuned to its particular range of frequencies. Yes, it all really is insanely clever...
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14:59 Conversely, Sony’s Video-8 format for camcorders decisively wiped the floor with its VHS-C competitor. The latter was a kind of hacky adaptation of VHS to a smaller cassette, with consequently shorter recording time, while the former was designed specifically to maintaining a higher time/quality tradeoff in the smaller format. Even the much-hyped ability of VHS-C tapes to be played in a VHS VCR (by putting them in a kind of adapter that mimicked the larger standard VHS case) failed to tip the balance.
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11:17 That was in the NTSC world. In the PAL world, we just had SP and LP. Tape speeds were slower on PAL VHS tapes, for some reason, so EP wasn’t considered necessary. We had 2- and 3-hour tapes, which could record double that in LP mode.
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12:11 Ah, the good old flashing “12:00” from folks who didn’t know how to set up their VCRs. ;)
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