Nooo, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know! (Actually I looked at a few seconds of the video, so obviously it wasn’t hoaxed for this post, not that I actually thought it was.)
Though I also like the idea that the original prank was real, but now people are expending effort to make it seem like a more recent hoax about a prank that never happened. Except it did.
It’s funny that they think VHS tapes ALWAYS flipped around and had static all over them, like we watched everything despite all that shit.
At least now with the vinyl resurgence they understand that not EVERY record had hissing and popping throughout!
Ok that’s clearly the same guy, and he probably just looked “old” in 1996 so that’s why he doesn’t look ancient today (plus hair dye)
I really doubt anyone would be able to get KOMO to do a fake story on a fake prank. Just seems like too much work to do, and the news piece clearly has the real KOMO people there.
I came here to point this out as well.
I happily watch VHS tapes today and have never seen a tape this bad. Especially for a tape recorded at home and probably watched back 5 times in its lifetime.
Yeah- the whole v-hold problem on a 16:9 HDTV looks suspicious to me. And filmed in landscape on a phone etc etc. The narrative on the website is also kind of awkward creative-writing style that seems to neither describe realistic events nor have the inherent authenticity of first-hand untrained reporting: real life doesn’t sound like that.
You really ground that one into the…
The thing is, I’ve seen similar effects - lack of proper vsync, loss of colour, display blanking - from playing poorly recorded VHSes (or rotted LaserDiscs) on modern TVs, where the video plays just fine on an older TV (I suspect the analog video frontends on some modern TVs are nowhere near as tolerant of out-of-spec signals as the older ones).
The widescreen could simply be the modern TV being set to stretch or crop the picture - which is unfortunately the factory default sometimes.
In addition, the PCWeek screengrab predates (both in terms of claimed date, and in terms of design) anything on web.archive.org; so where that’s come from, I don’t know. It could be totally fabricated.
Searching on web.archive.org and on google with a date restriction comes up with nothing (apart from a police forensics tool from the mid 2000’s). If this is fake, it’s quite well done. If it’s real, then PR did a very good job covering it up, and the perpetrators did a very good job of keeping their mouths shut.
A cinch bet that he read this book when he was younger:
It looks godawful stretched to me!
Looks like the artifacts you get from crappy analog-video to USB adaptors.
People seem to shy away from the crispness of black bars as a solution. It’s either linebacker shoulders, or filling the void with a lowpassed version of the original video.
You know, I think you’re right about the aspect. This “filming a screen at a downward angle” business I think caused me to over-compensate in my head, when picturing what it should really look like.
I did some perspective correction, and 4:3 indeed looks like the right bet for the original source:
I had OTA HD set up for a while, and it fact it looks much better than anything else. Cable and satellite providers broadcast in 720 and everything is compressed aggressively. OTA HD was broadcast in 1080 and looked absolutely incredible. I don’t know if OTA HD still exists anywhere. Where I live, it had a brief run around 2002-2004. You needed a special bow tie antenna and aftermarket receiver to get it, but it was free. You needed perfect line of sight to the transmitter, which most people didn’t have, and I had to rotate the antenna between two of the stations. It was a lot of trouble, but amazing when it worked.
OTA HD still exists in some areas; that’s my choice, as I don’t watch TV enough to pay for cable. I’m in a major market, and with an amplified antenna, I get a nice run of channels and subchannels, with almost as much selection as a basic cable subscription. (I’ve got no dedicated sports channels, but I don’t watch sports, so that’s fine.)
I tried OTA a few years ago. I don’t have cable and was hoping to have friends over for the Oscars, Super Bowl, or some live event. After researching antennas and looking online for proper placement for the signals in my area I couldn’t get much of any signal because the valley I was in wasn’t line-of-sight enough. Over the years I’ve been aghast at how compressed cable signals are for HD so I was looking forward to OTA, but it was way too finicky for wide adoption (or maybe the appeal didn’t warrant investing in broadcast). Now, I’m not sure I could go back to dealing with all of the commercials.
unless they used muliplexing. My public TV stations were running 3 additional channels, and the 1080i signal was only dramatically clear when showing still images. As soon as things started to move, the bandwidth limitations kicked in hard. Plus, I never really had a good pair of antennas, so loss of signal was a persistent problem.
At one point, the stations were running NTSC on VHF, and ATSC on UHF, so the digital signals were accessible using a bow tie, rather than a set of rabbit ears. Many broadcasters have since switched back to using VHF.
judging by the snippet, KOMO did not broadcast in HD until 1997.
540p implies 960 pixels across, not 1920.
The kicker, of course, is that at the time 1080i and 720p were state of the art, the most commonly available display devices were 16:9 CRTs (which disn’t have a discrete horizontal pixel and 1366x768 pixel LCDs (which had to resize the video anyway).
I have a DVD player that displays both 1080i and 540p. Both are upsamples from a DVD (480p), so I’m not sure that it makes much of difference.
1080p on amazon prime though–that looks dramatically superior to the “HD” offering. But that’s probably due to amazon starving the HD stream of bits-- or a mislabeled 480p stream.
It’s polishing a turd either way. You can’t cleanly multiply the pixels so you have to use digital trickery to scale it, and it all comes down to the quality of the TV and/or scalers involved. Cheap TVs often have shitty scalers so you may get a better picture with a good upscaling DVD player. For a good TV it won’t make any difference and an upscaling player might even be worse than letting the TV handle it natively.
Definitely. Unlike analog TV which can bounce around and degrades gracefully (all of which make it very forgiving reception-wise) OTA digital is strict about the transmitter, and it’s all or nothing. Perfect picture or a black screen. During those years I had one apartment that got three channels perfectly, a second apartment nearby that got one channel, and my third place in the same neighbourhood got bupkis. I went and got DirecTV and was disappointed with the picture. 1080 OTA spoils you. I got used to it. 
Only every city in the US.
When I was allowed to have an omni antenna on my condo building, which was 35 miles from the city center (probably 15-20 from some of the transmitters), I could get ~60ish channels. It rawked. As you say, the picture was beautiful.
The sad thing is, there was very little to watch. WTTW was good most times of day, and I love me some Svengoolie but that was about it.
Near as I can tell, this is true. I had plenty of ATSC options in NC while I was living there as well.
