Convert your old
home movies

Developed by JVC in the early 1970s, VHS or Video Home System was the standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes. S-VHS (Super-VHS) was a higher-quality version released in 1987.

Betamax, or Beta, was developed by Sony in the mid 1970s to compete with JVC’s VHS format. Although its resolution and sound quality were higher than those of VHS, Beta’s shorter recording time capacity and machine’s higher price lost it the videotape format war of the 1970s and ’80s.

VHS-C is the compact VHS videocassette format, introduced in the early 1980s and used primarily in compact analog recording camcorders. S-VHS-C is the higher-quality version, based on S-VHS. These formats could be played back in a standard VHS VCR with an adapter.

Video8, Hi-8, and Digital8 are three related 8 mm videocassette formats developed in the 1980s. Video8 was the earliest and entirely analog. Hi-8 came next – also analog – with a provision for digital audio. Digital8 wasn’t introduced until 1999 and is an entirely digital, DV format – very different from Video8 and Hi-8.

Launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading video camera recorder producers, DV is a digital video format which would become the foundation of the MiniDV format. Sony launched a professional version of DV called DVCAM in 1996.

Small DV cassettes, known as S-size or MiniDV, were originally designed for recording onto magnetic tape and released in 1995. Intended for amateur use, MiniDV has become accepted for professional use and is used for recording baseline DV, DVCAM, and HDV.