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The VHS is Dead
Ronnie Coote writes "The UK's largest retailer of electronics is phasing out VHS VCRs. Sales of DVD players have outstripped VCRs by 40-to-1 recently. So how long until the mass market will be saying goodbye to the DVD player?" A few historical links to commemorate the occasion: Sony Kills Betamax, Why VHS Was Better, and How to Preserve VHS Recordings. For the future, maybe we'll have Digital VHS, but I suspect it will mostly be hard drive-based recorders.
Maybe in the early days of the video wars, but Beta turned out to be a far superior format than VHS. The quality was better, less quality was lost when copying, the tapes were a bit smaller, Beta tapes last longer, etc. The reason VHS won was because a Beta would only hold one hour and a VHS would hold two when they were released. Later Beta tapes would hold 5 hours in an extended play format, and they'd lose less quality in the extended format as well. Sucks that VHS had to win.
Unless you have a big screen TV, the qualit of VHS is noticeable but almot a non-issue when it comes to recording a TV show. Until I got my DVR Lyra I still used a VCR even to record HDTV shows off of sattelite. They are fast easy and most importantly cheap. 40 dollar deck 2 dollar tape, you can catch that show that you want to see after you get back from whatever it is you're running off to. And best of all, NO MONTHLY FEE!
I'm not certain why you got a funny for telling the truth.
I have over a 100 VHS tapes going back over a decade. Quite a lot of it irreplaceable.
I have (some) of the equipment needed to convert (I need a genlock), and the skill, although time is an issue.
However the majority have none of the above, and VHS is a good example of the "good enough" and "If it aint broke" principles.
Eventually I'll get a DVD recorder (once all the "whatcha gonna call it" settles down), but then there's the issue of "what's good to record on TV?"
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_trolling_phe nomena#Netcraft_confirms_it
Anyway, we recently bought a Pyro A/V Link analog-to-digital converter. It plugs into the Firewire port on my wife's iMac and appears as a video camera to iMovie. Converting our VHS movies to DVD consists of:
The killer app for us is being able to move our kids' movies to a more future-compatible format. As a bonus, we can use the same device to burn content from our DVR without having to mess with its broken Firewire port.
My wife mumbled something about "wedding video", so I guess everybody has their own pet use.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The number of scratched DVDs that I get from my video store, I think perhaps VHS was actually better. These DVD movies are just crap with their pausing and skipping.
I used to think the same thing, then I got a decent player. Haven't seen a DVD skip since then.
Try cleaning your DVD player. If that doesn't help and brand new discs still skip, try replacing it.
Your experience is pretty atypical.
Man, if only you were in a position to...teach them patience or something. But nevermind, you're just a parent.
Let me guess how many kids you've got...
Zero, right? No matter what you try, most toddlers don't have patience. It isn't something you can teach a 2 year old. If you really think that you can, you've got a big surprise coming when you do have kids.
Good DVD players (both hardware and software) will remember the time at which the last N discs were stopped, and offer to resume from there.
Betamax gets the last laugh - it seems that it was better than DVD too.
Soooory, not even close. I once did a technical comparison and Betamax is about 5% better than VHS (10%, maybe). It has a few more lines of resolution (220 vs 200, IIRC) and cleaner chroma recording. It definately does not even touch DVD for quality.
You might be talking about BetaCam, which does compete with DVD for quality (although, again, doesn't match). However, it doesn't compete on price; a decent BetaCam VTR usually being in the $1,000+ range.
BetaCam came out a long time after BetaMax was totally dead. Its VHS competition, Super-VHS, found a niche market in the homes of cheap people who wanted near DVD-level quality at a reasonable price (at the time). Also, it seems to be popular with very small TV studios. Super-VHS is not as good as BetaCam, although it is very reasonably close, and is about 1/3 the price.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
VHS tape drives for backup was tried, back in 8088-based PC days. They used to advertise them in Byte magazine. They were a little touchy, tho, so they never gained trust, so never gained momentum.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
You can run a ReplayTV without a monthly service if "Record Wednesdays on Channel 4 at 9:00PM for 1 hour" service is all you want. The 12.95 per month is to use the guide service.
They actually have devices which can make 4GB backups on VHS, and it was even on Slashdot in 1998. The comments are gone, but I seem to remember that it didn't work very well.
It's sort of like a swap meet. You can load up your car/pickup full of stuff you want to sell, then go to the place. You pay some amount of money ($20 or so), and then you get a designated spot and you can sell stuff to the other people who come. People who come to buy stuff either pay nothing to get in or they pay only a nominal fee ($3 or so).
My other first post is car post.
Very few VCRs can record Macromedia encoded content without additional hardware to strip/clean the video signal. What Macromedia does is add an alternating black and white stripe to your video signal that displays off the screen for most tvs. This "invisible" stripe tricks your VCRs auto-gain control into adjusting the picture brighter then darker over and over throughout the movie. The resulting recording is thus unwatchable.
Many of the older (mechanical tuner, die cast chassis, top loading) VHS machines have AGC and sync circuitry that seems unfazed by Macrovision encoding. I have an ancient Panasonic PV-1000 that I keep around just for this reason. Short of the occasional drive belt or sensor bulb replacement, the thing just refuses to die. Of course, the fact that the thing originally sold for close to $1000 may have something to do with that. This thing is built like the proverbial "brick shithouse".
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Letting the Media conglomerates decide when you can
fast-forward is part of the original deal to get a license to build
DVD players. Google was not immediately helpful, but the truth is out there...