A video tape recorder is a tape recorder designed to record video on magnetic tape.
History
The first video tape recorders were reel-to-reel devices, similar to audio tape recorders like the one Dr. Emmett Brown owned in 1955.
Doc designed a video tape recorder for the 1932 Hill Valley Junior Science Fair. He claimed it worked perfectly, however, as television was in its infancy, there were no television sets around to demonstrate it.
In the 1950s, video tape recorders began to use tapes enclosed in plastic cassettes. The video tape recorders that used this format were known as video cassette recorders. VHS and Betamax were the two major competing formats that used video cassette tapes. VHS was the dominant format, and was the most used format for video recording and playback until the release of the digital video disc.
