What is the VHS Standard?

[0rder]

I've been burning some old vhs tapes of shows that I made to cd. I've encoded them at 480x360 resolution because I think that's the optimum quality. I have a friend who insists that the tapes only hold a maximum resolution of 320x240 to begin with, and that it's a waste of time to encode higher than 320x240. I think the picture quality is better at 480x360, but apparantly according to him, it doesn't get better than 320x240. The tapes were dubbed using svhs, but are just standard vhs tapes.

So is it better to just encode at 320x240 and use a higher bitrate?

 

[Workin']

If it was broadcast TV in North America (NTSC standard) then the "native" resolution would be 320 scan lines from top to bottom. 4:3 aspect ratio would yield a capture window of 430x320 (width x height)as "optimum". If using PAL standard it is probably something slightly different, 480x360 could very well be right, or else there could be some slop for overscanning.