Last Major Supplier Calls It Quits For VHS 308
thefickler writes "The last major supplier of VHS videotapes is ditching the format in favor of DVD, effectively killing the format for good. This uncharitable commentator has this to say: 'Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly. But they ushered in a new era that was important to get to where we are today. And for that reason, the death of VHS is rather sad. Almost as sad as the people still using it.'" At least my dad's got the blank-tape market cornered.
DVD = VHS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for TiVo there still remains no replacement for VHS's ease of use. Pop in a tape, hit record. I know that there are DVD recorders that can do this but at least a year ago you still had to worry about DVD type, ending a track, etc.
A large portion of the populace does not have a TiVo or a DVD recorder - meaning they lost functionality.
And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah yes, never. In a related point, Sony lays off thousands. That's some great plan you got there, Lou.
Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently had the challenge of trying to find a VHS player in a retail store. I couldn't find one, so in that sense the format has been dead a long time. Now that no major manufacturer is producing new media, I wonder in how many years the last playable VHS cassette will wear out. 20? 50? Will there even be an operable player at that time, that can output video into a then-standard format?
Probably not, although there will probably still be paid services available than can convert them to digital media. Anyone with a VHS collection who still has a working VCR had best get a good framegrabber board and start digitizing them before it's too late. I have a couple of VCRs (although I haven't used them for a long time) and for a mere $100 per tape hour I'll be happy to put them on DVD for you.
... but wait a few years. People will be paying big money to have little Tommy's graduation video converted.
Sure, that's ridiculous
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:1, Interesting)
The *real* question is, who cares? Do you want to watch your parents' 30 year old home movies? How about your grandparents' 60 year old home movies? And what about your great-grandparents' 90 year old home movies? At some point, nobody is going to care; nothing lasts forever, nor should it. I call this the irrelevance factor. For the majority of us, after enough time passes our lives are pretty much irrelevant. The world marches on without even knowing you ever existed. How well do you know your great-grandparents? Someday, that's going to be us; relics of the past, long forgotten.
Re:No players on the market (Score:1, Interesting)
I recently had the challenge of trying to find a VHS player in a retail store. I couldn't find one, so in that sense the format has been dead a long time.
I work for a web-based virtual retailer and we still sell *reconditioned* units for around £13 (UK). Although the success of lines outside the core "DVDs/CDs and printer ink" is patchy at best, we've sold quite a few of those. Quite surprising to be honest, probably just because we're so damn cheap. (I wonder if the margins are worth it when you take returns into account).
They could get a six-head NICAM/HiFi stereo model for just a few quid extra, but everyone goes for the very cheapest mono model. Bit crap if you want to transfer anything that's in stereo, but it shows you how little VHS is worth to the remaining market.
Honestly, there are likely plenty of people with one or two spare video recorders that they don't use and would give away for even less.
Anyway, even almost five years ago when I replaced my VCR, I got a six-head HiFi stereo model from Amazon for £50. Granted, that was very cheap (and it makes a horrible whining noise), but that's still *nothing*. Now VHS is old tech and they're about to switch off the analogue signal here. (That- as someone else observed- is what will finally kill VHS among the holdouts. You *can* record digital TV using an external tuner, but it's more of a PITA than it's worth to do both timers. Especially as digital PVRs with user-friendly guides are available for way lower than VCRs used to cost).
One thing I don't get; people buying stupid combo units for the purpose of transferring videos to DVD, cassettes to computers. You've probably already got a damn VCR/tape deck, and you're not going to use *that* either once you've finished transferring crap.
Even more stupid, one of those USB cassette player was a double-deck model. WTF?! You're not likely to be dubbing tapes, are you? Who the heck wants *another* massive unit to join the junk in the attic?!
Much better to buy a really user-friendly unit that takes an existing audio/video source as input, detects correct input levels and so on, and digitises it in hardware before passing it to the computer. Who the hell wants more crap? The last remaining producers of these mechanisms must be selling them for next to nothing.
No unskippable ads (Score:4, Interesting)
While I mostly like DVD's, there is one thing about them that have always angered me. With VHS, you could pop in the tape, hit Fast Forward, and cruise by the 10 minutes of crap at the front of the tape (Copyright Warning, obsolete trailers, etc). I sure wish some DVD maker would produce a unit that would let me skip right to the main menu on a DVD, instead of forcing me to sit through that first 5-10 minutes of filler. I just want to watch the movie, already, and it seems to me that if it's *my* DVD player, it ought to obey *me*, not the disc producer.
Re:No players on the market (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to run a multinode BBS, and we backed up the file server every night onto an HP Sure-Stor DAT drive. I still have all the tapes, but the drive died years ago. I think I could still find one (EBay, whatever) but eventually that won't be possible. And like you said, it's not all that important anyway. Twenty year old Fidonet messages and thousands upon thousands of old DOS shareware apps. Not exactly stuff anyone really needs or wants. I just couldn't make myself throw them away. Packrat instinct, I suppose. Still
After that experience, I back up all my truly critical data (if we really think about what's critical most of us don't have that much
Like you said, though, you have to stay on top of it. It's all too easy to find yourself suddenly unable to read your old media. I understand that NASA is losing enormous quantities of 9-track tape data from the sixties because they can't find equipment to read them, and the tapes are reaching the end of their lifespan. Not good.
Re:Security systems (Score:4, Interesting)
There was also a time that cassette tapes were used for [b]primary[/b] data storage. ;)
Re:No players on the market (Score:4, Interesting)
With €10 DVDs and now €5 or less DVDs, even the VHS tapes in my collection that I wasn't actively looking to replace are now getting replaced. There are a handful of films I can't get hold of on DVD yet, but even this year has seen old films released cheaply on DVD - so chances are I'll replace them all. Hopefully the one or two only out on Region 1 DVD will be out on Region 2 eventually - I'm not interested in the lower resolution NTSC DVDs rather than PAL.
Even the good VHS recordings are distracting to watch nowadays, with the blurring and grain, and sub-par sound. I think I have one or two "Super VHS" recordings made from a perfect TV signal, and these are OK (again, only one or two left now that haven't been picked up on sub-€10 DVD).
With the £/€ exchange rate, I'm hoping to fill out the cheap DVD collection a bit more in the New Year thanks to Amazon.co.uk.
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Note - hello Slashdot, 2009 marks 10 years since the introduction of the euro. How about supporting the symbol properly in posting?
Re:betamax ftw (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the Betamax cassette DID win. There are still thousands and thousands of TV newsrooms that use Digital Betacam for one application or another -- usually for ENG camcorders. And because of this, the tapes won't go away that quickly.
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:2, Interesting)
I would *love* to watch some of my grandparents' or even great grand parents' home movies. You know, when they were my age, and my parents or grandparents were children. Most of them are no longer alive, which would be another reason I'd like to re-visit them on film if it were possible.
Would I watch hundreds of hours of birthday parties over and over? No, viewing highlights once or twice in my life would be enough. Why not watch something that actually has something to do with your life instead of the new Josh Whedon show for one night?
You know, I'd even love to see footage from great-great-great-grandparents... Mine or yours. You genuinely don't find the idea of footage of daily lives from a hundred or more years ago interesting? I mean from a sociological standpoint, just to see how they dress, and how they interact in a much different time?
But then, I happen to love my family, and actually take an interest in how they lived their lives before I knew them... I'm not the cynical misanthrope you seem to be. And Merry Christmas.
Re:Song of the South (Score:3, Interesting)
"Song of the South," at least, is widely, and only semi-clandestinely, available on DVD from online sellers. The quality of the copy I bought is certainly not up to Disney standards wrt quality of transfer, but it does include a bonus that Disney's almost certainly won't, if they ever do release it: a parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves performed by the SotS's black cast members called "Coal Black an' De Seben Dwarfs." (Cue David Brent dismissal: "Racist.")
I guess Disney just fears a negative public reaction too much to release the movie, which would be no issue if they hadn't buckled under to protests against it in the first place. It now looks like Disney agrees -- or close -- that the film itself was in some way particularly racist. (More than other films of the time, say, portrayin a similar era.) I was unsurprised that they didn't choose to make their first big Blue Ray film Song of the South ;)
timothy
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean the Microsoft Office document format is almost undocumentable
You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.
what hope do we have reverse engineering it from 1000 years from now, especially if there was a civilisation collapse, and the one doing the recovering doesn't have much continuity to ours.
If they get back to anything like our level, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Possibly with a bit of work, but they'll probably do it.
Not the obscure weird-ass formats, perhaps, but the dead common ones like those based around MPEG-2, JPEG, etc. Yeah, I think they'll manage.
Human beings are incredibly ingenious. Did you know that they recently retrieved the colour from a black-and-white copy of UK TV series Dad's Army?
It was originally shot on colour, but the BBC (as they used to do a lot) wiped it, and only a black and white telecine copy remained.
The engineers noted that "chroma dots" (v. minor interference caused by the colour signal not having been filtered out of the signal before the mono copy was made) remained on many such films. (The engineers at the time "should" have turned this off, but it wasn't a big deal).
They managed to use this pattern of tiny dots to figure out what the original colour information had been. Now, that's clever.
Anyone as clever as us with the desire to retrieve metric assloads of information from rotting media will be able to manage it, I'm sure.
If they remain very primitive for a long time, I'm worried about more than some hard drives; I'm sure that there will still be a number of human-viewable hard copies anyway. Probably way more than there were of the middle ages as well.
Re:THINKGEEK has converters (Score:3, Interesting)
i guess it all depends on how resilient VHS is as a storage medium. the format has been used for over three decades. billions of VHS cassettes have been manufactured and sold. there have been millions of video titles released to VHS only. many documentaries, cult films, instructional videos, etc. were never re-released on DVD.
i imagine it will take quite a while for all those VHS titles to be ripped/converted to digital format before they're lost forever. we'll probably continue to see new VHS-rips popping up on BitTorrent sites for another decade or so if the cassettes themselves hold out for that long.
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:3, Interesting)
Fast forward a 1000 years. Will anyone be able to reverse engineer the media and formats, especially given that the media will mostly be highly degraded.
The joy with exponential growths of storage space is that it can not only hold all the stuff you need today, but also *all* that stuff you used to store in the past. Today I can have all stuff ever released on the Atari2600, C64, Amiga, early PC and a bunch of other devices on a SD card, i.e. 20 years of computer history in the size of my fingernail and of course I can store all the emulators and source code along with it. You likely won't be able to read it in 1000 years, since then the storage might be completly degraded, but given how computers are all networked and stuff gets copied around all the time, you likely will find a copy of it somewhere on whatever that Internet is called then. Storing the whole Library of Congress today takes storage space that costs less then $1000, just for reference.
I think the biggest danger for long term storage has nothing to do with the storage device or the format, but simply copyright. Copyright forbids to build a public archive of newer stuff, so very few are doing it. You still find most stuff out there if you search long enough, but there is little or no quality control, so you get quite frequently digital degeneration (i.e. video recoded multiple times, bit flips, etc.). Add to that, that many of the original media might be degraded beyond recovery when copyright allows it to enter public domain, you might end up with quite troublesome mess in 100 years down the road.
Re:Security systems (Score:4, Interesting)
The NTSC television standard itself is quite the marvel when it comes to compressing information to fit into limited bandwidth, especially considering that it was created about 60 years ago. Such concepts as the encoding of color information in a subcarrier at a lower frequency than the luminance signal, interlaced instead of progressive video, etc, were invented for one reason: to get as much information as possible through the limited bandwidth that they able to use. The guys that came up with this stuff were just as clever and innovative as whoever came up with DCT compression.
Re:No players on the market (Score:3, Interesting)
Advantages of VHS (Score:3, Interesting)
DVDs are a scratchfest. It's somewhat sad.
Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Interesting)
... Like you said, though, you have to stay on top of it. It's all too easy to find yourself suddenly unable to read your old media. I understand that NASA is losing enormous quantities of 9-track tape data from the sixties because they can't find equipment to read them, and the tapes are reaching the end of their lifespan. Not good.
Really sad about NASA -- that information should be preserved and made publically available. The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to recover it. We've lost all the details on building the Saturn V rocket, and we lost that a long time ago. Lots of technical hurdles had to be overcome, and it would also be good to have that information preserved for future rocket engineers.
Then again, the history of mankind on this planet is puncuated with massive loss of information throughout the ages. Libraries are allowed to fall into decay or are destroyed by conquering nations, languages are lost to time, and the like.
But if there's one thing us humans love doing is creating volumes and volumes of information -- just visit any library.
And now we have the totality of the Internet, with who knows how many websites, blogs, and what not. Torrents of stuff that comes and goes. More stuff than any one person could read in a million lifetimes -- nor probably would not want to.
Ahh, humans. A fascinating species, if I may say so myself. It will be fun to watch its progress over the next few decades.
Re:So which format is next DVD or BlueRay? (Score:1, Interesting)
I just tried to buy "The Usual Suspects" on DVD but found that it is already out of print. It is now available on Blu-ray only. Rather than "upgrade", I simply bought used.
killing the format? A somewhat US centric concept (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:THINKGEEK has converters (Score:1, Interesting)
This is what originally put me off DRM. This was my first run-in with it and the reason I won't have anything to do with it ever again.
I got my first DVD player as a Christmas gift. At the time, I had an old TV and the only possible way to connect the DVD player to it was to run it through my VCR. Guess what happened when I popped in the first movie...
It didn't take long before I googled an explanation for the shitty video. I was so friggin pissed off I wanted to mail that thing back to Sony as a bag full of smashed plastic and silicon along with a lawsuit for sabotaging my private property.
Steam-coming-right-out-of-my-ears pissed off. The whole neighborhood got an earful.
I finally calmed down enough to find that there is a converter box that lets you connect to an old TV without using a VCR at all. I was hugely offended that I would have to buy another device to circumvent goddamn DRM so I could watch MY movies on MY DVD player. But it was cheap and I already had the player and some movies, so I bought it.
I wanted to send Sony an invoice, demanding reimbursement for having to buy that damn converter thing. Wish I'd done it now just to see how it would have turned out.
That was all years ago and I'm still pissed about it. I can't stand DRM to this day and refuse to buy anything that includes it. I wanted HD-DVD to win the format war, because it mandated that one copy could be made. I haven't bought a blu-ray and probably never will.
I also haven't bought Fallout 3 or GTA 4 either for the same reason and those were tough decisions. I really wanted both of those, but I refuse to support any company that uses that crap, so I just kept the credit card in the wallet.
If this trend keeps up, there won't be any form of entertainment I can buy. Nice to be saving money during the financiapocalypse, but it's really aggravating.
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:4, Interesting)
And don't forget, when the world changes, things that we consider now to be too tedious to be worth documenting can suddenly become interesting.
F'rinstance, I think they used to do guided tours of the World Trade Centre. Did anyone think to record one of those tours? Perhaps nobody did. Perhaps the tour guides didn't see any point (after all, the building wasn't going anywhere), and perhaps the people taking the tour didn't record it, because it would have seemed like such a geeky thing to do, spending the entire tour with a camera in front fo your face, to record a "personal" version of something that's exactly the same as the tour that thousands of other people have taken. And yet, if someone found that hypothetical home movie footage now, how many of us would be interested in watching it?
There are still things that nobody thinks of recording officially, where the only record ends up being on some piece of retrieved amateur movie footage.