People always said that Betamax was better quality than VHS. What never gets mentioned is that regular consumer TVs at the time weren't capable of displaying the difference in quality. To the average person they were the same.

There's a lot of archival video that is just terrible. Digital video compression issues have damaged a lot of old footage that's gotten shared over the years, especially YouTube's encoders. They will just straight up murder videos to save bandwidth. There's also a lot of stuff that just doesn't look great when it's being upscaled from magnetic media that's 240x320 at best.

However, there's also a lot of stuff that was bad to begin with and just took advantage of things like scanlines and dithering to make up for poor video quality. Take old games for example. There's a lot of developers who took advantage of CRT TVs to create shading, smoothing, and the illusion of a higher resolution that a console just wasn't capable of. There's a lot of contention in the retro gaming community over whether games looked better with scanlines or if they look better now without them.

For example.

Personally, I prefer them without. I like the crisp pixelly edges, but I was also lucky enough to play most of my games on a high quality monitor instead of a TV back then. Then emulators, upscaling, and pixel smoothing became a thing...

It was filmed with poor quality and the films can degrade overtime. It was archived that way because the source was 💩

I watch a lot of hockey. Just watching hockey games from the 2000s are full on potato. I don't remember them looking that bad back then.

pure potato

Lol

I noticed when watching Good Omens on Amazon Prime that they offer a language option "Original + Dialogue Boost".

It works wonders. Almost feels like back in the days again when TV shows wanted dialogue to be understood.

I think most people have given up and use subtitles on all the time.

This is actually because our microphones became better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8

Does anyone actually randomly send you nude girls? Genuinely curious

You mean 4k vs HD, right?

That's a big problem for stuff that was originally shot on video. Old stuff shot on film can look pretty good when digitized.

Especially in action scenes. I used to watch Hawaii five O the 2010 version and sometimes a chanal showed the old version with the same name, the are so incredibly different in pacing and the amount of violence. I really liked the old one in that regard, much less shooting and blood.

I sometimes watch old movies and it gets infuriating how long they talk around the same fact that everyone already agrees on. Yes, he was killed with a knife because it's still stuck in his head, now move on!

It's not so much what they got away with but working with the tools they had. It is the same for pixel art in the early gen consoles.

They still make 2D cartoons