2016-10-08, 02:27
This has been making the rounds today and does a great job at explaining one of the more irritating FPS standards, and the history behind it:
(2016-10-09, 23:23)Ned Scott Wrote: It's a pretty impressive hack. There were so many existing BW TVs that it would have killed the market in the US to not have backwards compatibility with them, so they found what the old TVs would tolerate. The slightly altered framerate was the best they could come up with and worked really well, all things considered.
hackaday.com had some interesting comments about the video, too. Apparently Europe's situation was an even bigger mess before PAL became a true standard. So many different TV set standards that backwards compatibility simply wasn't practical. Hence, a much cleaner and forward looking standard resulted. It also happened later in history, so I wonder if the costs involved to change both TVs and broadcasting equipment was not as bad.