The TRUE VHS Filter
This update is about one thing: the VHS effect got rebuilt from scratch, and it's not the kind of "VHS filter" you're used to seeing in games. Most VHS filters are just a look — scanlines painted over the image, a bit of noise, a color tint, done. It's a simple post process. This
This update is about one thing: the VHS effect got rebuilt from scratch, and it's not the kind of "VHS filter" you're used to seeing in games.
Most VHS filters are just a look — scanlines painted over the image, a bit of noise, a color tint, done. It's a simple post process. This isn't that. What's running now actually simulates the analog signal chain a real tape goes through: the image gets converted into the same color format broadcast TV used, squeezed into a single composite signal the way an old TV tuner receives it, run through the same kind of bandwidth limiting a physical tape imposes, and then decoded back out. Every flaw you see on screen is a side effect of that process actually happening, not a texture someone painted on top.
What you'll actually see
- Color bleeding and dot crawl — because color and brightness get squeezed into one signal, just like real composite video, colors smear into nearby edges and crawl slightly around high-contrast lines. That's literally what happens when you cram a color TV signal into one wire.
- Tape blur — VHS physically can't hold much detail, especially in color. The actual bandwidth cutoffs of SP/LP/EP tape speeds are simulated, so slower speeds look noticeably softer — the same tradeoff you'd have made buying tapes in the 90s.
- Blown-out highlights — a VCR hard-limits how bright the signal can get before it reaches the tape, so lamps and windows lose all their internal detail and bleed into everything around them. It's why home video always had that flat white glare.
- Head switching noise — that flickery band near the bottom of the frame is where a real VCR's two rotating video heads hand off mid-scan. It's a hardware quirk, and it happens here in the same spot for the same reason.
- Tracking noise — the wavy, noisy band that creeps in when a tape isn't perfectly aligned with the play head. Turn it up and it looks like the tape needs a tracking adjustment, because that's exactly what it's emulating.
- Snow and dropouts — tiny white specks and streaks from oxide flaking off worn tape. Every old tape has a few.
- Chroma noise and color drift — the color part of a VHS signal is the weakest and most fragile part of the recording, so it's the first thing to get noisy or shift hue slightly from line to line.
- Edge wave — tape tension isn't perfectly constant, so the image wobbles horizontally in a slow, organic way instead of a rigid animated wave.
- Real interlacing — instead of faking scanlines as a static overlay, the image is genuinely split into two half-frames and processed independently, the way a VCR actually records and plays fields. Move the camera and you'll see real motion combing on edges, not a texture sliding along with you.