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

[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.

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: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.