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Reports of VHS's Death Highly Exaggerated
aicrules writes "What does it take to ensure that a technology choice will remain relevant and available to the general public? Well, being sold by Wal-Mart is certainly pretty high on that list. According to a CNN/Money article, Wal-Mart Stores will continue to sell VHS tapes for as long as its customers want them. With Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target all dropping sales of the VHS medium, how long can VHS hold out? What is the major reason for people still sticking with VHS?"
There's a poll in the article asking " Are you planning to replace your VCR with a DVD player? "
I guess that sums up why VCR and VHS tapes are still selling, because while DVD players are pretty advanced and cheap right now, DVD recorders are still expensive to most households, and what are consumers going to do with their precious VHS tapes?
What is required is a VHS+DVD recorder with easy to use interface to transfer VHS to DVD, that'll be the first step to move consumers away from VHS.
I'm moving all my CDs to DVDs. It's pretty easy to do that with a software, and let's not forget that my DVD writer is also capable of reading old CDs, that's why I didn't think so much while buying a DVD writer.
I suppose if technology moves too quickly without sufficient transitional period, older technology might get a chance to stay longer.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
If it remains profitable to sell it then I don't see why it will disappear. Some shops might find out that the demand is not worth stocking VHS but on the other hand some stores might come up that only cater for the VHS clients. Somehow a la Vinyl. If the demand persists.
Yeah, it's the poor man's (READ MY) TiVO. I can pop a tape in on my all-in-one TV upstairs and tape up to 6 hours of shows. Why buy new hardware when this is still working?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's also pretty annoying to fast forward a DVD when the stupid thing just puts up a big red X icon and forces you to watch crap you don't care about.
Morphing Software
1. It's the easiest way to record something. Not as convenient/intelligent as DVR/Tivo, but damned easy.
2. It's cheap for both the VCR and the media.
And, if you have small kids they want to start watching the movie from where it stopped the last time, not from the beginning or the beginning of the DVD chapter.
"What is the major reason for people still sticking with VHS?""
You mean besides the obvious? (consumer protest of DVD due to the region coding system.)
Admittedly VHS winds up having some of the same "features" but at least this is a byproduct of 2 different standards (PAL vs NTSC). It's not an intentionally designed feature like DVD region coding, and it's not as restrictive as DVD region coding is.
-Matt
or how you cant watch movie that are out of your region code
Linux is like living in a teepee. No Windows, no Gates, Apache in house.
Well, perhaps some of us don't cream our pants for every new technology. Perhaps some of us don't feel like cable is worth the cost, and therefore devices like Tivo are worthless. Perhaps some of us don't have DVD recorders. Perhaps some of us don't feel like making a "media center".
Perhaps some of us have VCRs that work, and don't feel like it's money well spent to invest in a something new which isn't useful to us. Perhaps some of us don't really like TV so that we consider it worthwhile to invest in something new when something we have works.
I really am insulted sometimes when people act as if I'm not doing my patriotic duty when I don't rush out and buy a 42" digital television and cable and tivo and x and y and z. My 20 year old zenith and VHS are good enough for me to watch a rented flick every now and then.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
It's because you know it works, without having to worry about drivers or anything. You can buy VHS tapes anywhere, and you know they'll work in your VCR, and that you can play them back in any other VCR.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
1. Not everyone has a Tivo, and while people are recording programming on VHS, they are likely to pick up a VHS every now and then particularly becaus of point #2.
2. PRICE!!!! Have you priced VHS compared to DVDs? It's the same racket as cassettes versus CDs. They are more expensive to produce, like cassettes, but are usually a fraction of the price. Hmmmmm. While the prices of VHS are so much less than DVDs, there will still be a market, especially at discount places like Wal-mart.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Let's see. The vast majority of households already have VCR technology.
There is a huge installed base of players and media.
It's the only recording technology the average home consumer understands and is willing to invest time in. My mom can record on a VCR. The letter PVR and DVR don't mean anything to her.
It's only in the last few years that 1.44" floppy drives are no longer included in PCs by default. I personally haven't had data on a floppy in quite some time, I've still recently used 'em for boot disks.
TV stations have been using video cassette to archive video for as long as we've had them.
Why does someone always get shocked by the fact that technology which has been massively accepted by the consumer market doesn't suddenly go away overnight just because someone else builds something new??
Hell, how many people do you know who own manual (or even electric) type-writers.
Despite what you've read in Wired magazine, a new digital technology doesn't automatically obviate and replace and older, clunkier technology. Sometimes the sheer inertia of that old technology takes a while to get rid of.
Heck, how many Windows 3.11 or Window 95 boxes are still out there?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
at $600, compared to what, $50 for a vcr? and most of what I record on a vcr is watched a few times and then recorded over, as opposed to throwing away a burnt dvd. I realize that I can buy dvd-rw's too, but the tapes I have I have essentially used forever and there's no real reason not to continue to. Also can't see ever having a problem with running out of space, I can't think of 6 hours of stuff I wanted to record in one small time block. Only advantage I can see is not rewinding tapes.
My wife is pregnant with twins, and as much as I'd like to get a DVD of the ultrasounds...
Has the "video every moment of your kids lives" craze really gone so far as recording ultrasound videos for posterity?
What happened to the idea of the ultrasound as a medical diagnostic procedure?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Umm, I have 20 year old VHS tapes. Most of my 7 year old DVDs have issues. You have that argument reversed, although the rest are valid. Do some googling on DVD rot- the oxide layers on most cds and dvds die in under a decade.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I had the same concerns. Then we learned about MythTV and started ripping our DVD's over to Myth. Now our kids can pick any movie from the list without danger to our DVD's.
:-D
The original DVD's are placed in our storage room for safe keeping and we get to watch these great movies with little worry.
Of course there is always the problem where the kids were pulling the power plug on the Myth box. After the third time of being unable to watch watch "Little Mermaid" they decided to stop pulling the plug.
---
That's right!!! They CAN be taught!
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
More accurate version:
VCR: Find show in guide. Enter show time information into user interface that has not been improved since mammoths roamed the Earth. Look for blank tape. Stare at tape and wonder what was on it. Put in tape. Hit record. Hope scheduled time for show does not change if it's a recurring recording for a series.
Tivo. Find show in guide. Hit record. Done.
No lie. With DVD players out that are 30 bucks but don't work reliably out of the box, people will still keep their VHS around and stick to VHS tapes because they are more reliable.
First hand, mother experience.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
One of the main reasons I prefer to watch movies at home rather than the theater is because of the ads. I don't want to sit thru 15 minutes of ads before I watch a movie. Guess what? I've never bought a VCR tape of a movie that has ads on it. Guess what? I've never tried to fast forward through something at the beginning of a VCR tape and have my player tell me "NO! the maker of this DVD insists that you have to watch an ad first! Just because you bought it does not mean you can skip the ads! Sucker!"
I record TV shows to DVD and buy shows on DVD that I know don't have ads on them, but for the most part I prefer VCR. I'd rather forgo the convenience of not having to rewind if it means I am not supporting a system that will eventually be used to force me to play more ads in my home. I'm sick to death of all the inane chatter and insipid "buy me and you'll be cool" shit. I'm sure as hell not going to pay for more of it.
Oh yeah, and VCR tapes, despite being more expensive to manufacture, are cheaper (even if you factor in the cost of a blank DVD for me to encode it on).
No free media - no problem, there's always space on the hard disk. Want to record more than a tape's, or DVD's, worth - no problem.
For me, there's never enough space on the hard disk. I got the 400GB DMR-E500H in March. Since about April, I'm only ever left with at most 15 hours free on the HDD. I record way too much and actually end up watching all of it at 1.3x and commercial skipping. (The average 60 minute program takes 30 minutes to watch this way, except The West Wing because they talk so fast already on the show that at 1.3x speed it's really hard to follow.) I record in XP mode so 400GB gets 92 hours worth, but the lower quality settings are just not satisfactory to me.
The problem with recording more than a DVD's worth is that you'll then have to use the dodgy Divide function that may or may not nuke all your recordings on the HDD or you'll have to record using one of the lower bitrate settings. You also can't use the fast copy mode (e.g. burn 8X DVD-R) to offload from the HDD to DVD because bitrate conversion to from HDD to DVD can only be done in real time. For example, if you wanted to record a 3 hr movie onto 1 DVD, the machine will take 3 hours to copy it while it lowers the bitrate on the fly.
Other problems with the DMR: You can't delete recordings while this is going on either. You can't delete recordings while disc burning is going on. You basically have to find some block of time in the day to offload from the HDD to DVD.
The zero-copy convenience of VCR is one of the things I find amiss with HDD+DVD. At one point I had 3 VCRs to record all the shows I wanted. It was convenient because I would end up with one tape of only Enterprise. Whenever it got full, I could just pop out the tape and archive it; no need to do any further transfers. Could I do this with DVD? Sure, but not at a comparable quality to VHS and not with the current DVD capacities. MPEG-2 encoding at bitrates lower than XP are just not acceptable to me.
Could I do this with more than one DMR-E500H? Yeah I suppose I could go buy 2 or 3 more of them (or wait for 500 GB models), and since these have network ports yeah I could use them over the network. And yes it is possible to wget (yes, wget, using http) the MPEG-2 files off the HDD to transcode to MPEG-4. But the VCR method was more convenient.
According to About.com, it affects only a small % of discs. Of course, like all digital data, replication is essential to keeping eternal life (despite the best efforts of the MPAA to stop you ;) ). More about the overalarming cries of DVD rot from PC Magazine, Manifest Technologies, and Enterprise Networks and Servers.
Your 20 year old VHS tapes should have suffered significant quality loss by now. It doesn't have to be defective to go bad; VHS slowly goes bad on its own.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
I saw a movie like this. I forget which one, it wasn't very good either way but whatever. Anyway I put it in, and it's playing previews. I try to skip to like the chapters, the first chapter, but it wouldn't let me. I then tried to just fast forward it; it wouldn't let me do that either. There was around 20 minutes of advertising that had to be sat through. I paid 4 dollars to rent the DVD and it still made me and my friends sit through advertising.
I've downloaded movies off of the internet before and it was much nicer. I just click on the "Get this torrent" link and it starts downloading. A few hours later it's done. Then I click "Open" on the client for the download and it opens and the actual movie starts playing immeadiately.
Also choosing a movie on the torrent sites is nicer too. If you're in the movie store all you have is the back of the case to tell you about the movie. The torrent sites have links to allmovie.com and imdb.com reviews. If you're not sure what movie you want to watch, but you know you want to watch a movie, it's just nicer to choose using the torrent sites.
If the MPAA wants to decrease pirating, maybe they should make it easier to watch their movies legally? As it currently stands, watching them illegally is not only the cheaper way to do it, but the easier way to do it. The only thing about getting them illegally is that you have to get them ahead of the time you want to watch the movies.
No.
It is possible to buy DVD players that'll convert on the fly, but they tend to be expensive or have lousy video quality in the conversion.
Bought a VRC this year. It has a death simple UI, no RTFM required. The hardware and medium is cheap. You can buy VHS cassettes nearly everywhere. No format war, no DRM, highly interchangeable. Quality is not the best, but that doesn't bother me at all, because my cable network is analog too.
Cool, can you tell me where I can buy one for minidv?
just because somebody out there with a tin desk and a red tie thinks I should replace everything I own with whatever they decided to sell this year... is not a reason to do so.
there are two reasons that we still have vinyl records, analog tape, VHS, boring passenger cars, bicycles, trains, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
first, there is plenty of the old technology around, it still works, and folks still use it and like it.
second, there is not enough money around, folks want to use it in ways that are more important to them than to the fool with a tin desk and a red tie.
not to mention, my LPs sound better off the Linn than my CDs do, and I have absolute right of use within my user license (copyright law) without some little robot determining that I have made six copies of "Don't Worry, Baby" from the same album over the past 35 years, for alternate mode use with no overlap in real time between the different sources, and therefore I can make no more.
the more of that BS they roll out, the higher the prices for analog stuff get on eBay.
-0-
short version: I make the purchasing decisions around my house, not EIA.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I don't want to "re-buy" all my VHS movies just because of a format change. I already spent money on them once. Unfortunately this is probably a major reason retailers are so eager to drop the older format - people spending money on the same thing twice makes their short term numbers look better. Look at all the whining the RIAA have been doing ever since their numbers came down from artificial highs after the vinyl-to-CD change.
Then there are the older films that would be a hassle to find on DVD, even if I did have money coming out my ears. Which I don't.
You were speaking of VHS-C, one single type of analogue tape format, and hardly the most popular.
I didn't even know they still sold analogue camcorders.
my point was not that VHS will stick around because ultrasound machines use it. :) My point is that there's a lot of infrastructure in place that will take a lot more than Best Buy only selling DVD's for people to want to replace.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */