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.
No players on the market (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just bought a combo DVD/VHS a few weeks ago.
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Agreed. It's impossible to find a brand new standalone VHS machine, but combos are aplenty.
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Here in the U.S. you can walk into your nearest Best Buy, and they likely have 3 different models on the shelf. Lots and lots of other stores have them as well.
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Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Informative)
I have an old, high end mitsubishi VHS I need to get fixed (tape transport mech)
From "tape transport mech" I'm going to assume you're saying that the tape doesn't go all the way into the unit when you insert it? If this is the case it is often caused by one of the belts that drive the gears, that operate the transport system, being worn so it's not gripping tightly.
This happened to me on my VCR a while back, and still did until my niece decided to spill juice in it. ;-)
If you haven't done it yet, take the cover off, plug it back in, and then insert a tape you don't care about. Watch how the gears, levers, and belts move. One of them will look like it's slipping. Probably the one that drives the equipment that pulls the tape in, lowering the cage. If the tape gets stuck, pulling the plug and then plugging it back in will usually cause the sensor to read a tape halfway in and eject it.
Try it a few more times until you can spot what is loose or stuck. Once you spot the location, if it's easily reached, put the tape in and then at the same time use your finger to turn the cylinder / gear / gizmo that the belt is trying to turn. This extra push from you *should* be enough to finish lowering the cage. Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible. Use your common judgment and determine for yourself if it's safe.
I was able to use my old VCR for an extra 4 years, until the aforementioned niece decided it would be fun to spill a drink in there. ;-)
Of course, if this doesn't work it probably won't be fixable with the "turning gizmo with finger" method. In this case you'll want to look for a local "mom and pop" electronics store that does home electronics repairs. Or you could just look online for another high-end VCR, I do believe they still make them, although I haven't looked.
Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible.
Be aware that the psu is inside the VCR(well end stuff it is anyway) so there will be some transformers with high current/voltage lying about in there.
Re:No players on the market (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Funny)
There's a lot here in Australia. Not that I'd buy one.
Kind of feels like being a caveman using VHS.
Now BetaMAX, that's a standard you can be proud of.
Re:No players on the market (Score:4, Insightful)
What's wrong with ripping DVDs?
Throughput isn't that bad, given how much free time everyone seems to have these days; you get to choose the rip quality; and best of all, no (or, very very few) MPAA worries.
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There's nothing wrong with ripping DVDs except when they are rentals and you don't delete the rip when you return the disc. It seems to me that would actually be called "theft of services".
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No, it isn't, as long as you return the DVD. It's copyright infringement; neither more nor less.
It was also clear that we were talking about the practical aspects of the procedure.
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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
Song of the South (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably not, although there will probably still be paid services available than can convert them to digital media.
Unless it's a major-studio pre-recorded VHS tape that hasn't been rereleased on DVD, such as the PAL release of Disney's Song of the South. These paid services will likely refuse such a transfer request on copyright grounds unless perhaps your name is Bob Iger.
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Probably not, although there will probably still be paid services available than can convert them to digital media.
Unless it's a major-studio pre-recorded VHS tape that hasn't been rereleased on DVD, such as the PAL release of Disney's Song of the South. These paid services will likely refuse such a transfer request on copyright grounds unless perhaps your name is Bob Iger.
Yeah, or Jack Valenti. Oh, I know he's technically deceased but I always figured he wasn't, you know, all the way dead. Seriously though, you're right, at least here in the U.S. and probably most of Europe.
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Though i'm sure the pirate networks will make sure it remains availible :/
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"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
Re:Song of the South (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, tho.....I was just recently at Disney World, and all those characters are still prominately displayed on the log ride there.
I really think it is a shame, that our society is so fucking "PC" now, that we won't still show programs that might have something not politically correct. I mean, c'mon...this IS a piece of history of the US. Media of the past should be available so that people can see what people thought and how much was acceptable in the past. Not making things like this available are almost like re-writing history. Do we not learn from the past both good and bad?
This almost seems, in the US, to be the commercial version of censorship that many European states do with regard to Nazi symbolism and historical content or artifacts. Geez people...it happened....don't run away from the past, view it....learn from it....move on.
Hell...I think it actually would be healthy for people today to know where society has come from...show them that cartoons often had characters blowing up into "black face"...and let people see for themselves how society has changed over the years.
THINKGEEK has converters (Score:2)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/digital-conversion/ [thinkgeek.com]
There are lots of services and gadgets around to do VHS to Digital. These guys sell something like that, I think.
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http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/digital-conversion/ [thinkgeek.com]
There are lots of services and gadgets around to do VHS to Digital. These guys sell something like that, I think.
Yes indeed, but the question is ... what happens in ten years or so? With nobody selling blanks and nobody selling recorders, and nobody selling pre-recorded tapes, the market is going to consist solely of people that want to convert older recordings. Is there enough money in that, to make it worth manufacturing consumer-level equipment that will basically only get used once?
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I bought an AIW card a few years back with every intent of converting a lot of my vhs to digital format(s) and found at the first sign of macrovision or such the image would get DELIBERATELY garbled.
Will these converters 'honor' macrovision, or will they actually work?
If they don't ignore such crap they're useless, and If I bought one I'd send it back as not working as advertised.
Mycroft
Re:THINKGEEK has converters (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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Now with Blu Ray out and getting cheaper and cheaper, we will probably see the gradual diss
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.
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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 ... no, your House, M.D. .AVIs don't count)
What about my porn, xxx .AVIs?
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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 ... no, your House, M.D. .AVIs don't count)
What about my porn, xxx .AVIs?
Definitely in the "critical" category, I'd say.
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.
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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.
Yes, like the Library at Alexandria, and others along the way, probably many we don't even know about today. At least that's one good thing about the global network, in general (and through large-scale copyright infringement in particular) information is being replicated around the planet on a scale never seen before. If our current civilization falls, hopefull there will be enough information in different places to shorten the next Dark Ages by a few centuries.
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Honestly, I haven't seen much of a problem since we started using normal file systems, where the files can be arbitrarily transferred to another file system. Every so often, simply copy it over to a new and bigger medium and you're done. I can still open files from the 80s that way and there's no reason to belive formats will become less persistant. Already there's plenty emulation and with virtualization I see even less reason I should ever have to worry even if I may have to run a C64 emulator inside a Wi
Re:No players on the market (Score:5, Insightful)
With all due respect to antrophologists, we don't need 24/7 records of the boring everyday life of everyone. People lost things before in fires and leakages and break-ins and whatnot before too, it's nothing new.
That boring everyday life you refer to forms the basis of our historical knowledge. Consider, for example, the letters and diaries written during the Civil War with electronic forms of communications related to the recent war in Iraq. The former is housed in museums and is repeatedly poured over by writers and scholars of every sort, while the latter is stored unceremoniously in Outlook and Yahoo inboxes, on transient blogs, and similarly transient backup tapes of White House email servers.
Your guess is as good as mine as to how history will be written (or re-written) if those records aren't archived, and in a format that can be read for posterity.
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...
So if you can't be bothered to find them to preserve them (and presumably index a little better), would you ever do it even if they had eternal shelf life? Or is it just some nice-to-have that you think should be left for your descendants and posterity, as if they're going to dig through hundreds of hours of boring stuff looking for the gold? We lose some information, big deal. With all due respect to anthropologists, we don't need 24/7 records of the boring everyday life of everyone.
You may think me totally insane, but...
Wouldn't it be cool if we COULD have 24/7 info on the lives of everybody since the dawn of time? Think of how it would change our view of history! Anthropologists would definitely have a wet dream, but more importantly, "history" gets written by the victors, by those who are in a position of power and authority, and they of course write from their own perspectives.
Meanwhile, many things that happen among the "commoners" are completely lost to time. And yet quite
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.
----
Note - hello Slashdot, 2009 marks 10 years since the introduction of the euro. How about supporting the symbol properly in posting?
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Now that no major manufacturer is producing new media,
This is certainly not the case on a global scale.
It seems that the US centric view is striking again as the only news article I could find on VHS production closure was for a Sony plant in France.
Not to mention that the article in question doesn't even mention a manufacturer, it's talking about a distributor.
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Ummm just bought a DVD/VHS combo this summer. See them all the time at the local electronic super store ( even walmart ).
Dunno where you live but something is wrong.
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GoVIDEO always will be producing VHS, methinks.
I shudder to think of the end of SVHS. It's a novel format by todays standards, but it has a LOT of archived footage.
To answer your questions, the BEST place to try to find a geek to be able to open ANY format, is your local news station.
The last one I visited could open ANYTHING, they had Reel to Reel, 16 track, you name it. Audio, Video, they could open it all.
--Toll_Free
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.
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I absolutely agree. I do not have a TIVO because in my household tapes get recorded in 2 different places and are never watched at the taping location. Besides, why should I pay someone a monthly fee when I can set up VHS recorders for nothing.
DVD recording is not very easy (yes I have one) but the VHS tapes are transportable from room to room so you can be watching and recording at the same time. Besides, VHS tapes will last for many many recordings whereas DVDs do not (cheaply, at least).
And in th
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There are DVD recorders out there that are as easy to use as a VTR. Or you could just record on a hard-drive recorder in the room that you want to watch the results in - it's not that hard to run a little cabling. PVRs don't have to come with a montly fee, you know.
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.
Define 'affordable' (Score:3, Informative)
A very cursory search shows me players starting at around $115. Define 'affordable'? They've come down a HUGE amount in price already.
Security systems (Score:4, Informative)
Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?
If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.
Re:Security systems (Score:5, Informative)
Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?
If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.
Nah ... they'll just go on hard disk. They just put in a bunch of security cameras at work (all IP-based) and I'm sure the feeds are going to some hard drive array somewhere.
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and I'm sure the feeds are going to some hard drive array somewhere.
Nah, they go to my house. You should really be more careful where your pick your nose, btw ;)
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Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?
If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.
Many (most?) record to hard drive nowadays. In fact, many of the cameras are designed for use with standard PCs.
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This conversation makes me wonder what the storage capacity of a VHS tape is. An hour's worth of video is a non-trivial amount of data.
On the other hand, VHS used a very low resolution.
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Hmmm... This conversation makes me wonder what the storage capacity of a VHS tape is. An hour's worth of video is a non-trivial amount of data. On the other hand, VHS used a very low resolution.
There was a time where the VHS format was used as a "poor man's" data backup, as was done at one place I worked at back in the 80's. Damned unreliable and always have drop-outs. I forget how much data was storable in that format, but it was dinky compared to what we can do today.
Then again, there was also a time casette tapes (remember those?) were used for data backup. But now I am really dating myself. :-)
Re:Security systems (Score:4, Interesting)
There was also a time that cassette tapes were used for [b]primary[/b] data storage. ;)
Re:Security systems (Score:5, Funny)
There was a time that notebooks where the only way you could remember to configure the switches on the terminal, but I'm dating my grandfather now :)
--Toll_Free
Re:Security systems (Score:5, Funny)
*gulp*
You're dating your grandfather now? Why do we need to know that?
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I have Danmere backer card somewhere in my storage shelves.
That device converted data to video signal and basically turned your vcr into tape storage drive.
It managed to store something like ~1GB/hour with normal vhs tape.
Problem with the technique was that the card had no way of controlling the vcr.
You had to play the whole 3 hour tape through to restore single file if I recall correctly.
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mmm, pretty high actually. Remember that while the resoloution was low by modern standards there was absoloutely no use made of data compression techniques. The composite video signal was more or less (there were some complications due to the recording gaps created by the helical scan system) recorded directly onto the tape.
most home recordable VHS tapes can store either three or four hours of PAL video at thier standard speed (tapes used for prerecorded releases are usually shorter and I have seen five hou
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.
VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The question is, what the heck can I burn it to so it might survive 30 more years?
Amazon S3 _and_ tape?
You will want multiple copies, in different formats, in different locations. Can't get much better than those two.
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:4, Funny)
You must be fun at parties.
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maybe the generations that never got to know those persons directly?
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Well, quite honestly, it's true that digital media is pretty fragile and that (despite being perfectly suited to copying) much of it will be lost because it wasn't copied. But I'm damn willing to bet that there's so much digital media out there in various forms, being copied and recopied that our digital age will on balance leave behind *way* more tha
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.
Rosetta stones (Score:3, Funny)
Buried below stone plates with the engraved pictures, we can place punch-cards (made from platimum coeated tungsten) for binary formats and engraved text for text formats.
I suggest the following set to understand todays state of the internet:
-a messed up word document containing an non-logical formated cruelly layouted document
-frames from a porn movie
-a spam mail, ehich demonstrates how to encode mail in multiple character sets (i imagine this would give them a headache....)
-a crazy frog mobile ringtone
-a
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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 co
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I never knew my maternal grandfather, he passed away before my parents even met. He was a great hunter and fisherman, and I'm sure I'd be a far better outdoorsman if I'd had the opportunity to learn from him instead of teaching myself (I'm the only one in my family who's into that). I love the old pictures of him and his buddies that my mom has, with huge stringers of fish, or their hunting tally for the day. I wish there was video to go with those, but that was long before the era of home movies.
So yeah, p
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The *real* question is, who cares? Do you want to watch your parents' 30 year old home movies?
When I look at my shelves of books, for example, each spine lights up a universe of memories for me. My life would not be whole without them.
Our lives are made of nothing but memories. The more we lose the less we live.
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Many historians would give an arm to watch Plato's home movies. For that matter, ANY home movies from that era would be highly valued today (if such a thing could exist). Yes, our individual significance tends to vanish over time, but at some point our time itself vanishes and historians then value any otherwise insignificant glimpse into daily life.
Well that's the problem (Score:2)
> The *real* question is, who cares?
> For the majority of us, after enough time passes our lives are pretty much irrelevant.
Well that may be the case for you, because history is irrelevant to you.
But if you could see the ebbs and flows and textures of history across many generations, you'd be able to see how significant a life can be and how seemingly minor events and decision can affect generations to come. You'd see that the winds of change that appear to erode any value and meaning out of life, do
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.
Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years. (Score:4, Insightful)
And I heard... (Score:2)
...the same supplier is providing video tape transfers to DVD for free.
That way we don't have to buy dvd copies of movies of already paid for.
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...the same supplier is providing video tape transfers to DVD for free.
That way we don't have to buy dvd copies of movies of already paid for.
But the quality -- the quality will sucketh big time.
Who was the last supplier? (Score:2)
One thing the article does not state is the identity of the last major supplier of VHS tapes. I would guess it would be someone like 3M or BASF.
DVDs still don't have everything (Score:4, Insightful)
Although I haven't been in a store that sold new VHS tapes in years, I'm a little apprehensive.
While it is true that many shows have been re-released in DVD format, there are plenty of titles that did not (and/or will not) see re-release. In many cases, these aren't "essential" or "good" works, but film historians often use relics of the past to show the evolution of a director's style or the level of technological development at the time. They might also use these works to show the political climate of the country it was produced in, or as a source for historical evaluation.
If you need to make a film based in 1988, wouldn't it be nice if you had a lot of filmed material from 1988? What if you can't get access to what you know you need because it was all copyrighted, but never released on DVD? What if you can't find a collector who's willing to sell you their VHS tapes?
I don't think it's a fault so much of VHS going out of the market, but of copyright law. It's easy to find a VCR, or a tape deck or a record player, but finding a specific release from those mediums is nearly impossible without extensive searching, often commanding high prices from collectors. If that material was considered out of copyright, I could take my library and digitize it, throw up a torrent, and *poof* it's around for forever.. but because I can't, it will sit around until I'm an old man before there's even a glimmer of hope that it might be made available to the public.
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If that material was considered out of copyright, I could take my library and digitize it, throw up a torrent, and *poof* it's around for forever.. but because I can't, it will sit around until I'm an old man before there's even a glimmer of hope that it might be made available to the public.
No, you *can* do that. You just can't do it legally, but it hasn't stopped countless people doing it anyway.
I wonder if this has pushed the sale of what would have previously been considered obscure material in (e.g.) "complete series" form, whereas on VHS you'd have been lucky to get "best of" compilations or at best the series on 1001 bulky tapes with no extras.
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Or buy a server in some country that doesn't respect copyright, and put the movies on that server. Voila, problem solved.
User Interface (Score:5, Funny)
Almost as sad as the people still using it.
You push it in the slot, push Play, and it works. No menus to wander, no special features to get in the way, no Director's Cut, no frigging mind games with some dinky remote with tiny print and bitty buttons to poke at to get the bloody thing to play, now. Get off my lawn! Damn kids these days... Harumph. Where did I put my bifocals?
This message sponsored by AARP, because you'll be old someday, too!
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.
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I particularly like how they write "forbidden" or somesuch on the screen when you try.
DVD Player that comes with OS X seems to let you skip. I have a REALLY old DVD player that does as well.
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Amen. I just watched a movie on tape that I haven't re-bought on DVD yet. While I was amazed at how bad the picture quality was compared to the DVDs I'm used to now, the one thing that was very nice was being able to just fast-forward through all that bullshit at the beginning that I'm now used to having to sit through.
I used to have a DVD player that let me do what I want... it was GE-branded but my understanding was it had Apex guts. Some Apex players had a 'secret' menu that let you set them to ignore 'n
Re:No unskippable ads (Score:5, Informative)
But hang on to one, anyway. (Score:2)
Even though I no longer own any VHS tapes myself, I have a dual-player that I'm going to hang on to. My family has a lot of video memories that are still on VHS, and it's unlikely they'll be converted anytime soon.
In fact, I'll probably try to get a mid-range VHS player (one of the small ones) once I have a bit of extra cash, and just store that away. Either it will come in handy for myself, or in 50 years I can sell it for a tidy sum to someone who needs one.
I'm also reminded of a certain Cowboy Bebop ep
This isn't about blank VHS media, folks! (Score:5, Informative)
I RTFA (hey, it's Christmas!) and using my advanced English comprehension skills can hereby inform you that it's about what's apparently the last major supplier of content in the VHS format in the USA giving up on VHS. It says nothing about manufacturers of VHS media (aka blank tapes) stopping production.
I bet blank tapes will be available for a good few years yet.
sad as the people still using it? (Score:2)
BS, why should someone change when what they have works fine?
Just because its new and shiny and you don't care doesn't make you a sad loser. It means you don't succumb to marketing.
Advantages of VHS (Score:3, Interesting)
DVDs are
Re:first (Score:4, Funny)
first - nothing better to do on christmas day
Try masturbating. See how well I type with one hand?
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Slashdot isn't that exciting.
Tabbed browsing is! My /. addiction is so strong that I take porn breaks to browse.
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doesn's become the next supplier in line the major supplier automatically?
When that supplier also stops we have a duplicate newsreport. Slashdor will surely report this since this is a tradition.
VHS wil be like BSD... dead.
The year of the death of VHS will likely be the year of the Linux desktop. Like another /. poster recently commented, that's every year!
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Yes but are you running FreeBSD on your VCR?
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Nah. NetBSD is for the VCR, it runs on everything.
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No, but I bet He's watching FreeBSD for Dummies on VHS.
Or was it on Beta?
--Toll_Free
I think this is about pre-recorded tapes (Score:2)
I read (most of) the article, and as far as I can tell, this is about VHS tapes which have movies on them, not blanks for you to record on your own.
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I can buy tapes made by Maxell, Fuji, Emtec, Sony and Acme (at least I can buy all of them locally, did not try eBay...). Which manufacturer has stopped making tapes?
Probably most if not all of them; I'm willing to bet that those are all made by a third-party contractor, probably one of very few remaining. VHS is the bottom of the market and likely too small to make it worth keeping their own facilities. Most "big name" video recorders are now made by other companies anyway for similar reasons.
Most of them don't even make their "own" DVDs and CDs...
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:So which format is next DVD or BlueRay? (Score:5, Informative)
My guess? Blu-Ray, unless Sony allows small producers to reasonably produce BluRay discs [digitalcon...oducer.com].