Last Major Supplier Calls It Quits For VHS

thefickler writes "The last major supplier of VHS videotapes is ditching the format in favor of DVD, effectively killing the format for good. This uncharitable commentator has this to say: 'Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly. But they ushered in a new era that was important to get to where we are today. And for that reason, the death of VHS is rather sad. Almost as sad as the people still using it.'" At least my dad's got the blank-tape market cornered.

Comments

No players on the market

[dotancohen]

I recently had the challenge of trying to find a VHS player in a retail store. I couldn't find one, so in that sense the format has been dead a long time. Now that no major manufacturer is producing new media, I wonder in how many years the last playable VHS cassette will wear out. 20? 50? Will there even be an operable player at that time, that can output video into a then-standard format?

Re:No players on the market

[keraneuology]

I still see DVD/VHS combo units around fairly frequently....

Re:No players on the market

[flajann]

This speaks to the larger problem, in general, of keeping our media formats current. Even with data, anything we may have on floppy will probably not be readable by anything current today. And I had a lot of cool stuff I worked on years ago on the 8" floppies -- remember those? I couldn't find any 8" floppy drives by the mid 80's, and the ones I had broke down, and the manufacturer had no interest in repairing them.

Now with Blu Ray out and getting cheaper and cheaper, we will probably see the gradual dissaparence of the old CD format. Already I have no access to the many backups I've made on 90's tape drives -- Travan, I think it was called.

Much data will simply be lost to the sea change. Thumb drives have displaced the floppy, Blu Ray will eventually displace DVDs, and even IDE drives are beginning to slip into obscurity. I still have stuff on old 40-megabyte SCSI drives (yes, I said MEGA-byte!) back from my Amiga days but forget about SCSI controllers to read them now.

I did manage to snag a high-end VHS machine from a friend who used to do video productions. It is the only machine I have that can read the stacks and stacks of VHS tapes I've accumulated over the years. But much of that stuff is probably not worth digitizing, and the few things that are are litterally buried in the midst of many, many 6-hour VHS tapes that I would have to spend hundreds of hours looking for. Doesn't seem to really worth the time.

Re:No players on the market

[cayenne8]

I have an old, high end mitsubishi VHS I need to get fixed (tape transport mech)...I'd like to get it working again, and use it to hook to my computers and finally digitize a bunch of my tapes. I'd like to get the old, original Live Aid stuff on tape (especially the stuff that didnt' make it to dvd), and some home films of old friends and parties.....

Re:No players on the market

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is certainly a US centric story(unsurprising given the context); but I strongly suspect that VHS is pretty much doomed worldwide. VHS is relatively low tech by today's standards; but it has lots and lots of moving parts in the player, and a fair amount of complexity in the tape(5 screws, a couple of spindles, big chunk of tape, etc). By contrast, something like Video CD is also a very well established technology, and has the advantage of fewer moving parts, shared economies of scale with 12cm optical drives of all kinds, and so forth. VHS might still be better for home recording; but as a cheap video distribution mechanism, VCD is arguably superior and very popular in certain markets.

Re:No players on the market

[ScrewMaster]

Cripes, mods, that's not a troll.

Then again, the history of mankind on this planet is puncuated with massive loss of information throughout the ages. Libraries are allowed to fall into decay or are destroyed by conquering nations, languages are lost to time, and the like.

Yes, like the Library at Alexandria, and others along the way, probably many we don't even know about today. At least that's one good thing about the global network, in general (and through large-scale copyright infringement in particular) information is being replicated around the planet on a scale never seen before. If our current civilization falls, hopefull there will be enough information in different places to shorten the next Dark Ages by a few centuries.

Re:No players on the market

[retchdog]

What's wrong with ripping DVDs?

Throughput isn't that bad, given how much free time everyone seems to have these days; you get to choose the rip quality; and best of all, no (or, very very few) MPAA worries.

Re:No players on the market

[value_added]

With all due respect to antrophologists, we don't need 24/7 records of the boring everyday life of everyone. People lost things before in fires and leakages and break-ins and whatnot before too, it's nothing new.

That boring everyday life you refer to forms the basis of our historical knowledge. Consider, for example, the letters and diaries written during the Civil War with electronic forms of communications related to the recent war in Iraq. The former is housed in museums and is repeatedly poured over by writers and scholars of every sort, while the latter is stored unceremoniously in Outlook and Yahoo inboxes, on transient blogs, and similarly transient backup tapes of White House email servers.

Your guess is as good as mine as to how history will be written (or re-written) if those records aren't archived, and in a format that can be read for posterity.

Re:No players on the market

[flajann]

...

So if you can't be bothered to find them to preserve them (and presumably index a little better), would you ever do it even if they had eternal shelf life? Or is it just some nice-to-have that you think should be left for your descendants and posterity, as if they're going to dig through hundreds of hours of boring stuff looking for the gold? We lose some information, big deal. With all due respect to anthropologists, we don't need 24/7 records of the boring everyday life of everyone.

You may think me totally insane, but...

Wouldn't it be cool if we COULD have 24/7 info on the lives of everybody since the dawn of time? Think of how it would change our view of history! Anthropologists would definitely have a wet dream, but more importantly, "history" gets written by the victors, by those who are in a position of power and authority, and they of course write from their own perspectives.

Meanwhile, many things that happen among the "commoners" are completely lost to time. And yet quite a few of them may have played major roles in the development of history. We'll never know, of course.

Of course, the practical aspect of having such level of details is another thing. Hence, you see "no need", not so much because the information is completely useless, but because much of it would represent "noise" that would need sifting through at great effort. It would be impractical for us to have that much detail on every bloke on the planet since Man descended from the trees.

But if we had a way to deal with that volume of information; if we could sic a major set of computers and databases on the Ulitmate Quest of culling out the important stuff...

Ah, but I veer into the realm of sheer speculation. Hence, my insanity.

Re:No players on the market

[T-Bone-T]

There's nothing wrong with ripping DVDs except when they are rentals and you don't delete the rip when you return the disc. It seems to me that would actually be called "theft of services".

Re:When the last major supplier stops...

[dotancohen]

doesn's become the next supplier in line the major supplier automatically?

When that supplier also stops we have a duplicate newsreport. Slashdor will surely report this since this is a tradition.

VHS wil be like BSD... dead.

The year of the death of VHS will likely be the year of the Linux desktop. Like another /. poster recently commented, that's every year!

VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[SynapseLapse]

When you try to play your DVD-RWs. No, seriously. I've got a Hauppauge PVR150 in my desktop (Salvaged from the sad remains of the first Mythbok that died...) and I've been using it rip my parents old home movies recorded to VHS. These tapes are 20 years old and play great. The question is, what the heck can I burn it to so it might survive 30 more years?

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[gujo-odori]

I never knew my maternal grandfather, he passed away before my parents even met. He was a great hunter and fisherman, and I'm sure I'd be a far better outdoorsman if I'd had the opportunity to learn from him instead of teaching myself (I'm the only one in my family who's into that). I love the old pictures of him and his buddies that my mom has, with huge stringers of fish, or their hunting tally for the day. I wish there was video to go with those, but that was long before the era of home movies.

So yeah, people are going to care an awful lot about those old home movies some day.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[TechForensics]

The *real* question is, who cares? Do you want to watch your parents' 30 year old home movies?

When I look at my shelves of books, for example, each spine lights up a universe of memories for me. My life would not be whole without them.

Our lives are made of nothing but memories. The more we lose the less we live.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[triffid_98]

I couldn't agree more, you can play VHS tapes from the 1980s. They won't look great, but they work. That's damn impressive when you consider a run of the mill DVD-R is good for 5-10 years tops before terminal bitrot sets in.

Although I agree with you, one cannot deny how gracefully that VHS tapes degraded. I guess that's why it's hard for us to completely write off analog formats: My VHS copy of Mission Impossible 1 definitely has streaking on it. My DVD copy of hackers definitely stops playing a few minutes in thanks to a scratch.

Song of the South

[tepples]

Probably not, although there will probably still be paid services available than can convert them to digital media.

Unless it's a major-studio pre-recorded VHS tape that hasn't been rereleased on DVD, such as the PAL release of Disney's Song of the South. These paid services will likely refuse such a transfer request on copyright grounds unless perhaps your name is Bob Iger.

Re:Song of the South

[cayenne8]

"I guess Disney just fears a negative public reaction too much to release the movie, which would be no issue if they hadn't buckled under to protests against it in the first place. It now looks like Disney agrees -- or close -- that the film itself was in some way particularly racist. (More than other films of the time, say, portrayin a similar era.) I was unsurprised that they didn't choose to make their first big Blue Ray film Song of the South ;)"

Funny, tho.....I was just recently at Disney World, and all those characters are still prominately displayed on the log ride there.

I really think it is a shame, that our society is so fucking "PC" now, that we won't still show programs that might have something not politically correct. I mean, c'mon...this IS a piece of history of the US. Media of the past should be available so that people can see what people thought and how much was acceptable in the past. Not making things like this available are almost like re-writing history. Do we not learn from the past both good and bad?

This almost seems, in the US, to be the commercial version of censorship that many European states do with regard to Nazi symbolism and historical content or artifacts. Geez people...it happened....don't run away from the past, view it....learn from it....move on.

Hell...I think it actually would be healthy for people today to know where society has come from...show them that cartoons often had characters blowing up into "black face"...and let people see for themselves how society has changed over the years.

DVDs still don't have everything

[Cookie3]

Although I haven't been in a store that sold new VHS tapes in years, I'm a little apprehensive.

While it is true that many shows have been re-released in DVD format, there are plenty of titles that did not (and/or will not) see re-release. In many cases, these aren't "essential" or "good" works, but film historians often use relics of the past to show the evolution of a director's style or the level of technological development at the time. They might also use these works to show the political climate of the country it was produced in, or as a source for historical evaluation.

If you need to make a film based in 1988, wouldn't it be nice if you had a lot of filmed material from 1988? What if you can't get access to what you know you need because it was all copyrighted, but never released on DVD? What if you can't find a collector who's willing to sell you their VHS tapes?

I don't think it's a fault so much of VHS going out of the market, but of copyright law. It's easy to find a VCR, or a tape deck or a record player, but finding a specific release from those mediums is nearly impossible without extensive searching, often commanding high prices from collectors. If that material was considered out of copyright, I could take my library and digitize it, throw up a torrent, and *poof* it's around for forever.. but because I can't, it will sit around until I'm an old man before there's even a glimmer of hope that it might be made available to the public.

Re:Security systems

[flajann]

Hmmm... This conversation makes me wonder what the storage capacity of a VHS tape is. An hour's worth of video is a non-trivial amount of data. On the other hand, VHS used a very low resolution.

There was a time where the VHS format was used as a "poor man's" data backup, as was done at one place I worked at back in the 80's. Damned unreliable and always have drop-outs. I forget how much data was storable in that format, but it was dinky compared to what we can do today.

Then again, there was also a time casette tapes (remember those?) were used for data backup. But now I am really dating myself. :-)

This may sound weird

[JamesRose]

But actually, VHS was a really good understandable, because you knew exactly what was happening, the video was recorded onto the tap and the tap moved along and the video played. It was all very mechanical and logical. It wasn't fast or high def, and god knows they'd break easy, but with CD, DVD, HDD, HD DVD, Blu-ray you have to learn 20 000 000 different formats, plus there isn't the same direct logic to it, it's like the video is stored on this shiny magnetic layer, and you directly skip from one place to another.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[Mycroft_VIII]

And another problem, Macrovision and such.
    I bought an AIW card a few years back with every intent of converting a lot of my vhs to digital format(s) and found at the first sign of macrovision or such the image would get DELIBERATELY garbled.
      Will these converters 'honor' macrovision, or will they actually work?
If they don't ignore such crap they're useless, and If I bought one I'd send it back as not working as advertised.

Mycroft

Re:DVD = VHS?

[Jamie's Nightmare]

Slow recording speeds (6 hour SLP) might be OK for you, but those of us that can still hear above 10,000 Hz the muddy sound quality is a severe problem.

You sound like you've never had a VCR with clogged heads or had to replace the loading deck and drive belts. VHS machines where a mechanical nightmare from the get go and NEVER offered reliable service. Tabulate the amount of man hours and service charges that went into VCR repair and replacement over the years and you'd see that even high end disk based units provide more value in the long run.

Using Windows Media Center, I have more capability and flexibility than you can imagine. All my shows are recorded. I can keep them or delete them instantly, back up shows to DVD in under 10 minutes, or transcode a program to my Palm TX and have it ready to take with me before I've had my shit, shower and shave. No subscription fee, ever, $0. Not to mention the time I've saved, which has far more value to me.

No offense, but if your panties are this tangled now, perhaps you should find other activities in your old age besides watching television. There is no way in hell I'd ever go back to VHS. They can bury you along with your old deck if you love it so much. The rest of us have better things to do with our time.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[lgw]

There are DVD recorders out there that are as easy to use as a VTR. Or you could just record on a hard-drive recorder in the room that you want to watch the results in - it's not that hard to run a little cabling. PVRs don't have to come with a montly fee, you know.