The day VHS passed away... (1 Viewer)

[Winston T. Boogie]

https://www.inverse.com/article/134...-vhs-release-is-there-a-future-for-the-format

Thought people might get a kick out of that article.

In terms of the history of video technology, the most notable thing about the VHS format, looking back today, is how long it remained viable compared to other video formats. VHS tapes were regularly produced from 1977 through the mid-aughts. As a point of comparison, consider the fact that the DVD has not even turned twenty yet (Devotees identify the first DVDs as being Japanese editions ofPoint of No Return, The Fugitive, Blade Runner and Eraser, released in December 1996. Blu-Ray players did not appear globally — outside of prototype versions in select countries — until ten years ago, and sales of the format are declining drastically every year, with U.S. sales coming out to just $6.1 billion in 2015.

 

[Angelo Colombus]

I only have two vhs tapes left and they are Uforia (1985) with Cindy Williams & Fred Ward and The Castle (1968) with Maximilian Schell both not released on dvd or Blu-ray. Glad I bought most of my movies on laserdisc instead of vhs and today I still have my laserdiscs which I still watch sometimes.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I've got a few VHS tapes remaining. The ones most important to me I've transferred to DVD, but I keep the tapes in storage in my dad's attic in case the DVD-Rs ever fail or need to be redone.

My most prized VHS is probably an Italian PAL release of "2001: A Space Odyssey". When I was in high school, I wrote an honors project thesis on the movie and published it as a website (back in the early days of the web). MGM Italy must've seen the site, and they cited it as a source in the booklet that accompanied the tape. A friend just happened to see the tape in stores while on vacation in Italy and picked it up for me as a souvenir. You can imagine my surprise and delight when I opened it up, skimmed through the booklet, and saw my website listed. So that tape's not going anywhere as long as I can help it.

I also have an official VHS release of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy onstage appearance at a Star Trek convention in 1991, right as "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" was being released. They tell stories of working on the original series together, and it's hilarious. It doesn't seem to have ever been released on DVD and looks like one of those long forgotten things. I'm very happy to happy have it, especially now that Nimoy is no longer with us.

I've also got a bunch of live music performances and interviews taped off TV, grabbed from different late night talk shows and stuff like that. One of these days I should transfer them to DVD just for nostalgia, it would be fun to see what I was heavily into in my high school or college days again.

But as far as commercially released VHS versions of movies? Not sure that I really have many of those left. Even the ones that I used to hold on to for sentimental reasons have been donated, recycled or trashed, if I had all of the content elsewhere.

 

[TravisR]

I think virtually every movie I had on tape has come to disc but I've still got a good number of original airings of TV series. Thanks to my insane packrat nature, I can still see the proper framing and the 'Previously On's from The X-Files and no one with just the DVDs or Blu-rays can say that!

I still use my VCR to record movies from TCM, etc. If I enjoy the movie I'll buy the DVD or Blu-ray.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I think virtually every movie I had on tape has come to disc but I've still got a good number of original airings of TV series. Thanks to my insane packrat nature, I can still see the proper framing and the 'Previously On's from The X-Files and no one with just the DVDs or Blu-rays can say that!

I still use my VCR to record movies from TCM, etc. If I enjoy the movie I'll buy the DVD or Blu-ray.

I miss the VCR as a simple, easy device for recording content off TV. The DVR works great and is a fantastic invention, and is good enough for most things - but it sucks for holding on to content long term. And since I'm a home renter and not a home owner, whenever I move, I end up with a different cable company and a different box, so it's impossible to hold on to that stuff. Unfortunately whenever I've tried to hook up a VCR to any of my cable boxes, I end up with a windowboxed tape - the DVR takes the HD signal and sends it to the VCR as letterboxed 4x3, and then the actual 4x3 content sits within that, so it's just really ugly to try to watch later. I'd love to somehow be able to get stuff off the box onto 16x9 formatted DVD-Rs, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

 

[TravisR]

I miss the VCR as a simple, easy device for recording content off TV. The DVR works great and is a fantastic invention, and is good enough for most things - but it sucks for holding on to content long term.

Yeah, that's a major drawback of a DVR in my mind. I'm sure at some point I'll get a DVR but as of now, On Demand makes a DVR 95% unnecessary for me and a VCR takes care of the other 5%.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Yeah, that's a major drawback of a DVR in my mind. I'm sure at some point I'll get a DVR but as of now, On Demand makes a DVR 95% unnecessary for me and a VCR takes care of the other 5%.

My cable company's OnDemand doesn't let you fast forwards, so I end up DVRing everything just to be able to fast forward through commercials. I used to tape things on VHS back in the day for that same purpose, but the DVR is even better at it.

 

[TravisR]

My cable company's OnDemand doesn't let you fast forwards, so I end up DVRing everything just to be able to fast forward through commercials.

Mine either but it does let you jump ahead in increments of 10 minutes so I skip the commercials by jumping ahead 10 minutes and then rewinding it. Even jumping through that hoop, I still watch the show in well under an hour.

 

[Carabimero]

I own only 1 VHS tape, the first one I ever owned. I just couldn't let it go.

The story is, in 1980 I walked into my first video store and there was FANTASTIC VOYAGE. I could take this home for ten days (for only $7.95) and watch it as much as I wanted? I was eyeing it so intently the owner of the store let me rent it for free. He ended up hiring me to work there over the summer, and when he went out of business a few years later, he gave me the tape. Of course I have the movie on factory DVD, but I also have a transfer of my VHS on DVD and, believe it or not, it's the one I still watch it.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Mine either but it does let you jump ahead in increments of 10 minutes so I skip the commercials by jumping ahead 10 minutes and then rewinding it. Even jumping through that hoop, I still watch the show in well under an hour.

Nice! I don't even get that flexibility. It actually does let you fast forward on some programs from certain networks (Comedy Central is the one I noticed it on) within the program segment, but when you hit the commercial spot, then it gets stuck in play and makes you watch the entire series of commercials before the forwarding ability returns.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I own only 1 VHS tape, the first one I ever owned. I just couldn't let it go.
View attachment 30422
The story is, in 1980 I walked into my first video store and there was FANTASTIC VOYAGE. I could take this home for ten days (for only $7.95) and watch it as much as I wanted? I was eyeing it so intently the owner of the store let me rent it for free. He ended up hiring me to work there over the summer, and when he went out of business a few years later, he gave me the tape. Of course I have the movie on factory DVD, but I also have a transfer of my VHS on DVD and, believe it or not, it's the one I still watch it.

My all-time favorite movie is "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the first time I saw it was on the original MGM longbox release - it took forever to even find a video store near me that had it, my stepfather and I spent weeks tracking down a copy. It's a unique master of the movie - it's not just pan and scan, it also has segments where the image was squeezed, and they freeze the background image of the sun and moon rising at the beginning. It looks truly horrendous. I wasn't able to get that exact copy from that exact video store, but I did find that edition on eBay years later and bought it. It looks even worse than I remembered, but for the sake of nostalgia, I'm really happy to have it.

 

[Stan]

I miss the VCR as a simple, easy device for recording content off TV. The DVR works great and is a fantastic invention, and is good enough for most things - but it sucks for holding on to content long term. And since I'm a home renter and not a home owner, whenever I move, I end up with a different cable company and a different box, so it's impossible to hold on to that stuff. Unfortunately whenever I've tried to hook up a VCR to any of my cable boxes, I end up with a windowboxed tape - the DVR takes the HD signal and sends it to the VCR as letterboxed 4x3, and then the actual 4x3 content sits within that, so it's just really ugly to try to watch later. I'd love to somehow be able to get stuff off the box onto 16x9 formatted DVD-Rs, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I've had no problem keeping things long term. I still have "Frozen" and "Maleficent", recorded March 30th, 2015. Eventually I'll get around to watching them, but no hurry. When I switched to HD a few years ago, Dish gave me a new receiver and new antennae on the roof. The HD DVR has loads of space compared to the old one, so pretty easy to keep it cleaned up, deleting old shows I thought I might like, etc.

I've lost four receivers due to overheating, but I've finally learned to keep things open in the TV stand, and Dish replaced every one of them, no charge. Got one warning about things overheating, but it was to late, DVR croaked about an hour later. Everybody seems to bash Dish, but I've had them for 7-8 years now. Maybe it's a regional thing, but I get fantastic service.

Personally I wouldn't even try to transfer VHS to DVD. The picture quality is so bad to begin with and it just gets a little bit worse when you try to copy it.

 

[Carabimero]

I've had no problem keeping things long term. I still have "Frozen" and "Maleficent", recorded March 30th, 2015.

I guess it depends on how one defines "long term." One year isn't even remotely long term for me. Long term for me means until I die.

My DVR dies every 2-3 years.

 

[Clinton McClure]

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I've had no problem keeping things long term ... Personally I wouldn't even try to transfer VHS to DVD. The picture quality is so bad to begin with and it just gets a little bit worse when you try to copy it.

If I was permanently in a place, I'd probably look into a Tivo or one of the DVRs that allows you to add external hard drives to add space. Unfortunately my problem is that I just seem to move too often and the DVR never ends up being able to come with.

As for VHS to DVD - I usually copy things more for convenience than quality. My VCR and the video capture device I use seem to work pretty well, so I don't notice a dropoff in quality going from one to the other. It's really about convenience. I have one VCR that isn't kept hooked up, so it's much easier for me to have the content on a DVD-R somewhere just so I can watch something hassle-free. For the few items I copied from VHS to DVD, I kept the original tapes, so if anything ever goes wrong with the disc, I should be covered.

I guess it depends on how one defines "long term." One year isn't even remotely long term for me. Long term for me means until I die. My DVR dies every 2-3 years.

I've never had a totally reliable DVR... I wonder if it's actually the hardware that's the problem, or if the cable company's software is so bad that it just causes it to become nonfunctional after a certain time. I'm blaming the software more at this point. I had a DVR at my last house and I never had a problem with it. Then I moved, new cable company, new interface, but the actual box they provided was the same model of Motorola as the previous cable company's. But the one from this new company works terribly by comparison and has been replaced, but is still glitchy as hell. I really think it's the software.

 

[Stan]

I guess it depends on how one defines "long term." One year isn't even remotely long term for me. Long term for me means until I die.

My DVR dies every 2-3 years.

So true. I've got DVDs dating back to 1997, just when they were starting to appear. That's much more long term than a year on the DVR

Interesting, but I've never had a problem with DVD "rot" that people were so worried about years ago. Maybe the climate and humidity here keeps things going.

Sorry about my quotes, things are acting up on my end, time for a reboot,

 

[Carabimero]

Interesting, but I've never had a problem with DVD "rot" that people were so worried about years ago.

I just checked. The oldest DVD I have that is still working is the first DVD I ever got around 1998. The oldest DVD-R I have that is still working is a data disc I burned 12 years ago.

 

[David Weicker]

I miss the VCR as a simple, easy device for recording content off TV. The DVR works great and is a fantastic invention, and is good enough for most things - but it sucks for holding on to content long term. And since I'm a home renter and not a home owner, whenever I move, I end up with a different cable company and a different box, so it's impossible to hold on to that stuff. Unfortunately whenever I've tried to hook up a VCR to any of my cable boxes, I end up with a windowboxed tape - the DVR takes the HD signal and sends it to the VCR as letterboxed 4x3, and then the actual 4x3 content sits within that, so it's just really ugly to try to watch later. I'd love to somehow be able to get stuff off the box onto 16x9 formatted DVD-Rs, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

What I've done for 16x9 content is to switch the output on my DVR from 1080 to Widescreen. I then copy the film to my DVD Recorder.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Interesting, but I've never had a problem with DVD "rot" that people were so worried about years ago.

I'm happy to say I've never had a problem with that either. I've also never had a DVD-R or CD-R go bad. For the few burned discs that are absolutely irreplaceable, I've got a backup copy burned and the data files on a hard drive somewhere. But I'm pleased that the sky hasn't fallen yet.

What I've done for 16x9 content is to switch the output on my DVR from 1080 to Widescreen. I then copy the film to my DVD Recorder.

I don't know if my DVR has such a setting but I'll definitely look for it - thanks for the tip!

 

[TravisR]

I just checked. The oldest DVD I have that is still working is the first DVD I ever got around 1998. The oldest DVD-R I have that is still working is a data disc I burned 12 years ago.

The first DVD that I bought was Halloween back in 1998 and it still works. It looks terrible but it still works.

I've had the very random problem disc here and there over the years but some of my earliest DVDs from Universal (Psycho, Vertigo and The Thing) all died years ago. To the best of my recollection, that was a VERY widespread problem with those titles though. I also had an early copy of Mallrats which ended up getting stolen from me so I actually hope that disc died too.