Tired of loud commercials (1 Viewer)

[Ockeghem]

Seriously? It's a video cassette recorder. We own four of them. We also own over 1,000 VHS tapes, many of which we watch every week.

 

[TravisR]

Same here. Almost verbatim. I've tapes alot of shows and can take that to a buddy's house if he missed an episode of a show. I don't have to worry about space on my VCR or erasing an episode off my DVR and then finding out that the music was changed on the DVD release. As long as I can find blank tapes, I have no interest in a DVR.

 

[Ockeghem]

Agreed. For me it's also aesthetic, as well as the fact that I am a collector and an archivist. For my own part, the VHS tape wasn't replaced by the DVD, it was displaced, much in the same way that the radio was displaced (and not replaced) with the advent of television.

I use both VHS and DVD in conjunction with one another, and also for comparative purposes when I am doing research, which in my line of work is almost all of the time.

Incidentally, I bought a ten-pack of blank VHS tapes the other day. There were quite a few there on the shelves.

 

[Malcolm R]

I have switched to a DVD recorder, myself. Discs take up a lot less space.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

On channels you're paying for, there shouldn't even be ANY commercials!

When I used to record stuff from TV (before the shows themselves became unwatchable) I always left in the commercials- it's easy enough to skip through them when you don't want to see them, and after a few years they become more interesting and valuable than the show itself. Just check my YouTube postings for proof of this. The current era of TV may best be forgotten however.

 

[Ockeghem]

Yeah, I must admit that I wouldn't mind having a tape or DVD filled with commercials from yesteryear. I would, for example, buy up a set of commercials from the 1950s and 1960s. It would be fun to watch those cigarette commercials again. I still play a lot of those jingles on the piano on occasion. People like trying to guess which cigarette commercial they're hearing.

Incidentally, one of the other reasons I cut commercials out is because I can fit at least one more episode (taped at EP) on a six-hour VHS tape (thirteen episodes per tape as opposed to twelve). That's a half-season (and in some cases, a full season) of shows from various series that are watched in our home.

 

[Lucia Duran]

I also hate commercials (with a passion). I tend to just mute them and wander away for a few moments. Also, we tend to just fast forward through commercials since we dvr everything. I'm usually never home when the show is actually airing.

We own a VCR (two really, since we own a tv with dvd/vcr combo built in). I still have all my old videos that I taped off television and I will never part wth my US version of the BIG BLUE movie as it is no where to be found on dvd).

VCRing is a lost art!

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

My TV has this setting but it doesn't actually work. Perhaps if I turned it off the commercials would be REALLY, REALLY LOUD instead of just REALLY LOUD.

 

[Sam Favate]

Here is a bit of an explanation, which includes word of a Dolby audio device that mitigates sound differences:

Why are TV commercials so loud? - ConsumerMan - MSNBC.com

And here is something else on that Dolby device:
Dolby Eases TV Commercial Volume : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech

And, lastly, a recent international article on the subject:
Turning down the volume on TV commercials - International Herald Tribune

 

[Yee-Ming]

I can sadly report this is not unique to the US; we get it as well on local broadcast TV.

Hence the DVR. Nowadays, even if I'm home in time for a TV show, I will actually either hold off watching altogether (and watch a DVD instead), or will wait around 15-20 mins after the program started and use the time-shift feature (called 'chasing playback' on some machines, I think) to watch it 'not in real time' so that there is enough 'slack' in the recording to allow me to skip through all commercial breaks.

Better yet, the local broadcast station very kindly has commercial breaks that are almost exactly 5 minutes long -- and my DVR has a jump button that forwards the recording by 5 minutes. Bliss... (although that 5-min jump only works on an already-recorded program, not one that is still being recorded)

 

[Sam Favate]

There are countries where the sound levels of commercials have to meet regulations and cannot be above or much above the programming broadcast. I believe France is one, but one of our French members would certainly know better.