Forget HD and 4K. YouTube now does VHS!

YouTube does VHS

You might have thought that civilisation has reached its peak with the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Cern laboratory that straddles the Swiss and French borders. This so-called "God particle" is the miniscule sub-atomic entity that gives matter mass. That's pretty important

But it fades into insignificance in comparison with the newly introduced facility in YouTube where you can make any video look like it was recorded on VHS tape. This momentous new feature can make the crispest, sharpest videos look like they were recorded on the decades-old format. So now you can see what your HD footage would have looked like if it had been committed to tape at a resolution of 240 lines, notwithstanding noise, control-track artefacts and dropouts.

Accurate

Opinion seems divided but there is a narrow consensus that this feature is genuinely quite accurate.

As for the permanence of the facility, we're not sure. It only shows up seemingly randomly at the bottom of the video where you can see an outline of a VHS tape if it is available. Not surprisingly, it does struggle to work in real-time sometimes. Taking all that quality out of the picture takes a lot of processing horse-power.

Congratulations to YouTube on this scientific and artistic triumph, and we can only hope that we'll soon see emulations of Betamax and our personal favourite, Video 2000.