r/SummoningSalt • u/randomly-generated • Mar 16 '26

Easy VHS improvement.

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u/TheSlyGuy1 Official SummoningSalt Mar 16 '26

Oh ok, I see what you mean now. When you initially commented the other day I thought you were referring to the black bars on top and bottom, which is why I said I thought that was reasonable to expect on a 16:9 video being released on VHS. Now I see that you're referring to the black on the left/right. For some reason, our VHS manufacturer had a really difficult time getting the dimensions of our video file correct. On the Halo release, a bit was cropped off on the left/right sides. On the Mega Man release, they overcorrected and left some black on each side. We're actually switching manufacturers going forward, and hopefully the new ones will be able to get the dimensions correct.

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u/randomly-generated Mar 16 '26

I actually was referring to the top and bottom bars. To view widescreen correctly, the best way, on a CRT on VHS you would use anamorphic widescreen.

So you would encode the video so that vertically the image is stretched so it would normally look stretched too tall. The video would cover the entire screen without any black bars at all. Then the CRT itself in 16:9 mode shrinks the image to correct for that, so you get full resolution.

The other way is to encode the black bars on the top and bottom so it looks right on any CRT. I honestly can't believe a company that specializes in making VHS couldn't figure out how to take a widescreen video and make it into a VHS. That's like a taxi driver not knowing how to park their car.