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It became a standard format for consumer recording and viewing in the 1980s after competing in a fierce format war with Sony's Betamax and, to a lesser extent, Philips's Video 2000.

A VHS cassette contains a 12.65 mm (1/2- inch aprox.) wide magnetic tape which is wound from one of two spools to the other, allowing it to slowly pass by the reader head of the video cassette recorder. VHS initially offered a longer playing time than the Betamax system, and it also had the advantage of having a far less complex tape transport mechanism than the Sony offering. A VHS machine can rewind and fast forward the tape considerably faster than a Betamax VCR since it unthreads the tape from the playback heads before commencing any high-speed winding. On the other hand, Betamax offers a superior picture quality to VHS.

Several improved versions of VHS exist, most notably S-VHS, an improved analog standard, and D-VHS , which records digital video onto a VHS form factor tape. Devices have also been invented which directly connect a personal computer to VHS tape recorders for use as a data backup device.

VHS-C tapes (C for compact) are used in some camcorderA camcorder is a portable electronic device (generally a digital camera) for recording images and audio onto a storage device. The camcorder contains both cam''era and re''corder in one unit, hence the name. This compares to previous technology where theys, and can be played back in standard VHS players with an adapter. Its development hampered the sales of the Betamax system somewhat, because the Betamax cassette geometry prevented a similar development.

VHS tapes have approximately 3 MHz of bandwidthAnalog Bandwidth is the width, usually measured in hertz, of a frequency band f f. It can also be used to describe a signal, in which case the meaning is the width of the smallest frequency band within which the signal can fit. It is usually notated B, W,, and a horizontal resolutionThe display resolution of a digital television or computer display is the number of pixels (or maximal image resolution) that can be displayed on the screen, usually given as a product of the number of columns (horizontal, "X") and lines (vertical, "Y"). of about 240 lines per picture height (about 320 lines in total). [1] The vertical resolution of VHS (and all analog video systems) is determined by the TV standard—about 480 lines are visible in NTSCNTSC is the analog television system in use in the United States and many other countries, including most of the Americas and some parts of East Asia. It is named for the National Television System(s) Committee the industry-wide standardization body that and about 576 lines in PALFor other meanings of "PAL" see PAL (disambiguation). PAL short for Phase Alternating Line Phase Alternation by Line or for Phase Alternation Line is a colour encoding used in broadcast television systems, used throughout the world except in most of the A.

Although VHS officially stands for Video Home System, it initially stood for Vertical Helical Scan, after the relative head/tape scan technique. Some early reports claimed that the initials originally stood for Victor Helical ScanHelical Scan or striping is a method of recording higher bandwidth signals onto magnetic tape than would otherwise be possible at the same tape speed with fixed heads. It is used in video recorders, digital audio tape recorders, and numerous computer seco system.

VCRs were taken to court and found to have substantial legitimate uses other than copyright infringing uses in the case of Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios. However, Senator Orrin Hatch has proposed the Induce Act [2], which, if made law, would effectively reverse this ruling.

In November 2004 the British retail group Dixons announced that it would begin phasing out VHS machines in favour of recordable DVD ( DVD-R and DVD plus R) and personal video recorders, leading many observers to predict the imminent demise of the VHS system.