The Demise of VHS (1 Viewer)

[Ockeghem]

^^^

I do love that tape. It has some wonderful clips -- including a breath-taking performance of She Loves You and interviews with some (IMO) key people that are not included in the Anthology series (at least as far as parts one and two are concerned). Some of these include Bill Harry (Mersey Beat), Bob Wooler (DJ), Billy J. Kramer, Tony Sheridan, and Milton Oken.

 

[Matt^Brown]

I have not owned or watched a VHS tape in about 4 years. Once I went to a DVR I have no use for VHS. I do not even know if my kids know what they are or how important they use to be.

 

[Lucia Duran]

We have one VCR in our house and it still gets used. I have the 80's Beetlejuice cartoons on VHS that my youngest kid enjoys.

 

[Hanson]

I have one working SVHS VCR in the house that's hooked up to nothing. It's basically a clock. It has been this way for 5 or 6 years.

In the great videotape purge of 2005, I indiscriminately tossed out 300-400 videotapes consisting of hours and hours of movies taped from pay channels and TV shows which, because I didn't label, held mystery content. I simply didn't have the time to go through them to find out, so I bit the bullet and tossed it all.

I now have about 2 dozen VHS tapes lying about the house collecting dust. My children have never seen a movie from a VCR (okay, that's overly dramatic on my part -- the oldest is 4). Sometimes my 4 year old looks at the VHS tapes curiously. She has no idea what they're for.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Originally Posted by Hanson Yoo

I still have a slew of VHS with home movies (and some others as well).

It's time for the "2nd Great Purge."

 

[Lucia Duran]

Originally Posted by Hanson Yoo

In the great videotape purge of 2005

Before our big move to the east coast, I purged about 1000 VHS tapes. Gave them all to my father. The only tapes I kept were:

Roswell S1-3 (taped from the scifi channel so I could have the original music. There are 10 tapes)

Beetlejuice Cartoons (3 tapes)

Disney Movies (Little Mermaid, Lion King, The Rescuers and Mary Poppins)

Home movies (2 tapes)

I am probably going to donate the Disney movies to a childcare center since my children have no interest in them and I am not sure about keeping the Roswell tapes as I haven't watched them in years and I own the dvd's and have the original music from the series on my ipod.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

I still own two identical JVC S-VHS decks and still use them on occasion to transfer home videos that friends give me onto DVD for them.

Plus, there are still lots of rare gems out there on VHS that never made it to DVD and you never know when your going to find them at flea markets for a couple of bucks.

 

[Hanson]

Is that the JVC HR-7900U? I had two of them as well plus a Sharp model (which was actually a better quality VCR). The SVHS ET mode, where you could tape in SVHS mode onto regular VHS tapes instead of super-expensive SHVS tapes, was the end of appointment viewing for me. VHS was of such poor quality that I preferred to watch shows live and used the VHS to make archived commercial-free tapes where I sat with the remote anticipating commercials with my finger on the pause button. I did that for The Simpsons, Buffy, SNL, and so many other shows. But using S-Video instead of composite made all the difference in the world.

The picture quality was good enough that in the days before Tivo, I was time shifting all of my TV. With 3 SVHS decks, I could record two things and watch another, circa 1997. I was also able to dub shows on to archived tapes without commercials with little loss in quality (plus, I could go back and fix my mistakes if I paused or unpaused the wrong moment).

The crazy thing was, the only difference between a VHS tape and an SVHS tape (other than the higher quality of the SVHS tape) was a notch in the casing. The ET decks basically ignored checking for the notch. I found out afterwards that people were melting or using Dremels to mod their cassettes to work in the SVHS decks.

BTW, all of those tapes got thrown out in 2005.

Oh, and I forgot -- the JVC could record both a stereo track (which recorded diagonally like the picture) and the mono track (which recorded on the edges). So I was able to dub DVD's onto VHS tapes and include the commentary track to boot.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

The one's that I have are the HR-S4800U which are also ET decks.

It's funny but I still tell people that recording in EP mode on an S-VHS deck is still superior to recording in EP on any DVD recorder, they can't seem to wrap their heads around a VCR doing a better recording job than DVD recorders lol.

 

[Hanson]

Now that I think about it, I also have the 4600 or 4800. The 7900 was too expensive and from the reivews I read, not worth the extra bucks (I remember fantasizing about owning the 9600, but the champagne color was off-putting). My friend bought a 3800 and it broke within a couple of months.

Once you use that yellow composite cable, it's game over for PQ. The puzzling thing about VHS at the time was not including S-Video jacks to extend their usefulness. Amazingly, the luma and chorma are stored separately on plain jane VHS, but they only gave you composite jacks that recombined them for your TV to figure out. Which meant that recording and then playing back on VHS required 2 comb filter steps (once on the VCR to record, once by the TV to display). If they just put S-Video jacks on VHS decks, there's only one comb filter separation. I assume there was some sort of industry agreement that only SVHS branded VCR's could have S-Video jacks.

 

[Steve Berger]

Originally Posted by Hanson Yoo
... The puzzling thing about VHS at the time was not including S-Video jacks to extend their usefulness. Amazingly, the luma and chorma are stored separately on plain jane VHS, but they only gave you composite jacks that recombined them for your TV to figure out. ... I assume there was some sort of industry agreement that only SVHS branded VCR's could have S-Video jacks.

Part of the reason they didn't want to add S-Video jacks to standard machines was the lack of video processing chips that could handle the S-Video signal. For special effects (like scan, still, slo-mo) they had to combine to composite, process the video, separate back to S-Video for output.

The recombination to composite video was not interleaved either so passing it through a comb filter produces noise. A comb filter de-interleaves the chroma from the luminance to preserve the high frequency detail. The VCR created composite video has no high frequency information, the luminance response is truncated under the chroma frequency. A comb filter will attempt to reproduce high frequency video information that does not exist, adding noise.

JVC controlled the licensing, I believe they even pulled the VHS logo from some prerecorded tapes done in SLP mode, IIRC. Sony had some nifty motor control technology that they used in Beta decks that never appeared in any consumer deck (but did in some commercial machines). JVC, as far as I can tell, would not license anything that they could not do first

 

[Bob McLaughlin]

So is anyone picking the new "House of the Devil" multipack? You can get the DVD and the VHS tape in the same set!

 

[Hanson]

That's pretty a cool marketing gimmick! I like how the box appears distressed to look like a beat up video store copy.

 

[Michael Elliott]

I'm curious what "OAR purist" did in the early days. Wasn't it pretty late in the game when VHS started to release stuff widescreen? From what I've seen, LD wasn't much better. I went to buy a LD player around 2001 or so just so I could get more films in their OAR and noticed that the majority of them were P&S unless they were from labels like Elite and Criterion. Many series were still being released in P&S or not at all.

DVD certainly got the OAR boat floating but now that we're this far into it and sales are (apparently) falling, VHS to me is showing to be the king of all formats in terms of stuff being released. I sold all my videos when I bought into DVD and many of those videos have yet to show up on DVD. I have a hard time believing any of them will ever be on Blu.

Thanks to Netflix I quit buying DVDs many years ago because I could never watch as many as I was buying. That has changed over the past month since DVDs are now available for $3. As for the demise of VHS, hopefully it will be making a strong comeback because there are thousands of movies on it that will never see DVD and certainly never even sniff Blu. I've actually bought four videos this past week and I have several more that I'm interested in. I'm not sure why I should give Universal $20 for a DVD-R when I could buy the VHS for $3-$5. The only exceptions would be those VHS titles that are rare and fetching higher prices.

I can think of at least one hundred titles that I sold off that have yet to surface and it's doubtful they ever will. The videos have even become impossible to find and certain "fiends" are making good prices on them with dubs. I think it's pretty clear that in 2010 a film buff will never be able to live with just one format. I'm glad Warner, Universal and others are offering rare films that were never on VHS but if they try to charge $20 when something can be had for $3 and of equal quality, I'll take a VHS over a DVD-R.

 

[TravisR]

Originally Posted by Michael Elliott

I'm curious what "OAR purist" did in the early days. Wasn't it pretty late in the game when VHS started to release stuff widescreen? From what I've seen, LD wasn't much better. I went to buy a LD player around 2001 or so just so I could get more films in their OAR and noticed that the majority of them were P&S unless they were from labels like Elite and Criterion.

I owned about 100 laserdiscs and the only pan and scan disc that I ever owned was The Dead Pool (which was in the Dirty Harry box set which, bizarrely enough, had the first 4 movies in widescreen). Other than that, I never ran into a problem where I couldn't find a title in widescreen. Having said that, I didn't start buying laserdiscs until the mid-1990's but I'm sure pan and scan was the rule of the day during the late 1970's and 1980's.

 

[Don Solosan]

I started buying LDs around 1990; at that time it was pretty hit or miss whether something would be OAR or not. By 2001 the vast majority of discs were OAR or available in both letterbox and pan & scan versions.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

I got into laserdisc in 1993, by then most new titles were letterboxed, some came out both ways and a few were just pan and scan, but that rarely happened with stuff shot in 2.35. By then Warner was putting out EVERYTHING OAR, though many of their 1.85 movies look overmatted. Older movies were getting reissued letterboxed from the early 90s up til the end of the format. I was sick and tired of getting pan and scan on VHS all the time, so even though I didn't like the side changes I surrendered to laserdisc. I realize now it was for my own good.

Added: common knowledge, but I'll repeat it anyways- "The Color Purple" came out letterboxed on all formats at the insistence of director Steven Speilberg. The tape opened with a brief explanation of letterboxing, but people complained anyway. "Innerspace" and "Always" got the same treatment. I never understood why more filmmakers didn't just insist on everything being letterboxed- DVD proved that the people who disliked it would just get used to it after a while. Ironically several of Steven Speilberg's movies on DVD have been available in separate pan and scan editions.

 

[Bob Graham]

Woody Allen also insisted that all releases of MANHATTAN be letterboxed. Ironically, it debuted on RCA CED disc because they were already experimenting with letterboxed titles.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Originally Posted by Bob Graham ">[/url]

Woody Allen also insisted that all releases of MANHATTAN be letterboxed.[/QUOTE]
And they letterboxed it in the second most distracting way possible. They used light grey bars. The only movies I saw with worse letterboxing bars were the ones that used bright blue bars. Apparently producers feared that if they used black bars people watching in a dark room would just see a band of image filling part of their screen and think there was something wrong with their televisions. So they went with something that was obviously intentional and part of the picture. Strange.


[QUOTE] Originally posted by [b]Jesse Skeen[/b]:
I never understood why more filmmakers didn't just insist on everything being letterboxed[/QUOTE]

Because most filmmakers didn't have the clout of a Speilberg or a Woody Allen in those days. They had no influence over, much less control of, the way their films were released on home video.

In fairness to the studios, you have to remember that most TV screens were 25" or less, and letterboxing was not an entirely unreasonable compromise between artistic integrity and being able to bloody see what was going on. It is all very well and good to preserve the OAR of a scene from [i]West Side Story[/i], but if the resulting image is so small you can't make out the expression on Natalie Woods' face, you lose the peformance and the drama. It wasn't just a matter of a bunch of ignorant yahoos demanding that their screens be filled up. (And yes, I know that some of us watched letterboxed films on 19" sets - but we were generally watching them from a pretty close distance and I daresay that most of us were usually watching them alone.