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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.
Except for TiVo there still remains no replacement for VHS's ease of use. Pop in a tape, hit record. I know that there are DVD recorders that can do this but at least a year ago you still had to worry about DVD type, ending a track, etc.
A large portion of the populace does not have a TiVo or a DVD recorder - meaning they lost functionality.
Ah yes, never. In a related point, Sony lays off thousands. That's some great plan you got there, Lou.
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?
Probably not, although there will probably still be paid services available than can convert them to digital media. Anyone with a VHS collection who still has a working VCR had best get a good framegrabber board and start digitizing them before it's too late. I have a couple of VCRs (although I haven't used them for a long time) and for a mere $100 per tape hour I'll be happy to put them on DVD for you.
... but wait a few years. People will be paying big money to have little Tommy's graduation video converted.
Sure, that's ridiculous
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
While I mostly like DVD's, there is one thing about them that have always angered me. With VHS, you could pop in the tape, hit Fast Forward, and cruise by the 10 minutes of crap at the front of the tape (Copyright Warning, obsolete trailers, etc). I sure wish some DVD maker would produce a unit that would let me skip right to the main menu on a DVD, instead of forcing me to sit through that first 5-10 minutes of filler. I just want to watch the movie, already, and it seems to me that if it's *my* DVD player, it ought to obey *me*, not the disc producer.
Yeah, Travan, I remember them. Nice drives, long gone.
... maybe now's the time.
... no, your House, M.D. .AVIs don't count) to non-volatile media, with offsite storage, etc. Everything else gets copied over to the next generation of hard drive every so often. Heck, I've gone from a 5 Mb. Corvus to terabyte drives in the past 30 years. I just keep buying bigger drives and moving the stuff over.
I used to run a multinode BBS, and we backed up the file server every night onto an HP Sure-Stor DAT drive. I still have all the tapes, but the drive died years ago. I think I could still find one (EBay, whatever) but eventually that won't be possible. And like you said, it's not all that important anyway. Twenty year old Fidonet messages and thousands upon thousands of old DOS shareware apps. Not exactly stuff anyone really needs or wants. I just couldn't make myself throw them away. Packrat instinct, I suppose. Still
After that experience, I back up all my truly critical data (if we really think about what's critical most of us don't have that much
Like you said, though, you have to stay on top of it. It's all too easy to find yourself suddenly unable to read your old media. I understand that NASA is losing enormous quantities of 9-track tape data from the sixties because they can't find equipment to read them, and the tapes are reaching the end of their lifespan. Not good.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There was also a time that cassette tapes were used for [b]primary[/b] data storage. ;)
With €10 DVDs and now €5 or less DVDs, even the VHS tapes in my collection that I wasn't actively looking to replace are now getting replaced. There are a handful of films I can't get hold of on DVD yet, but even this year has seen old films released cheaply on DVD - so chances are I'll replace them all. Hopefully the one or two only out on Region 1 DVD will be out on Region 2 eventually - I'm not interested in the lower resolution NTSC DVDs rather than PAL.
Even the good VHS recordings are distracting to watch nowadays, with the blurring and grain, and sub-par sound. I think I have one or two "Super VHS" recordings made from a perfect TV signal, and these are OK (again, only one or two left now that haven't been picked up on sub-€10 DVD).
With the £/€ exchange rate, I'm hoping to fill out the cheap DVD collection a bit more in the New Year thanks to Amazon.co.uk.
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Actually, the Betamax cassette DID win. There are still thousands and thousands of TV newsrooms that use Digital Betacam for one application or another -- usually for ENG camcorders. And because of this, the tapes won't go away that quickly.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
"Song of the South," at least, is widely, and only semi-clandestinely, available on DVD from online sellers. The quality of the copy I bought is certainly not up to Disney standards wrt quality of transfer, but it does include a bonus that Disney's almost certainly won't, if they ever do release it: a parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves performed by the SotS's black cast members called "Coal Black an' De Seben Dwarfs." (Cue David Brent dismissal: "Racist.")
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 ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I mean the Microsoft Office document format is almost undocumentable
You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.
what hope do we have reverse engineering it from 1000 years from now, especially if there was a civilisation collapse, and the one doing the recovering doesn't have much continuity to ours.
If they get back to anything like our level, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Possibly with a bit of work, but they'll probably do it.
Not the obscure weird-ass formats, perhaps, but the dead common ones like those based around MPEG-2, JPEG, etc. Yeah, I think they'll manage.
Human beings are incredibly ingenious. Did you know that they recently retrieved the colour from a black-and-white copy of UK TV series Dad's Army?
It was originally shot on colour, but the BBC (as they used to do a lot) wiped it, and only a black and white telecine copy remained.
The engineers noted that "chroma dots" (v. minor interference caused by the colour signal not having been filtered out of the signal before the mono copy was made) remained on many such films. (The engineers at the time "should" have turned this off, but it wasn't a big deal).
They managed to use this pattern of tiny dots to figure out what the original colour information had been. Now, that's clever.
Anyone as clever as us with the desire to retrieve metric assloads of information from rotting media will be able to manage it, I'm sure.
If they remain very primitive for a long time, I'm worried about more than some hard drives; I'm sure that there will still be a number of human-viewable hard copies anyway. Probably way more than there were of the middle ages as well.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The NTSC television standard itself is quite the marvel when it comes to compressing information to fit into limited bandwidth, especially considering that it was created about 60 years ago. Such concepts as the encoding of color information in a subcarrier at a lower frequency than the luminance signal, interlaced instead of progressive video, etc, were invented for one reason: to get as much information as possible through the limited bandwidth that they able to use. The guys that came up with this stuff were just as clever and innovative as whoever came up with DCT compression.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
... Like you said, though, you have to stay on top of it. It's all too easy to find yourself suddenly unable to read your old media. I understand that NASA is losing enormous quantities of 9-track tape data from the sixties because they can't find equipment to read them, and the tapes are reaching the end of their lifespan. Not good.
Really sad about NASA -- that information should be preserved and made publically available. The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to recover it. We've lost all the details on building the Saturn V rocket, and we lost that a long time ago. Lots of technical hurdles had to be overcome, and it would also be good to have that information preserved for future rocket engineers.
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.
But if there's one thing us humans love doing is creating volumes and volumes of information -- just visit any library.
And now we have the totality of the Internet, with who knows how many websites, blogs, and what not. Torrents of stuff that comes and goes. More stuff than any one person could read in a million lifetimes -- nor probably would not want to.
Ahh, humans. A fascinating species, if I may say so myself. It will be fun to watch its progress over the next few decades.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
And don't forget, when the world changes, things that we consider now to be too tedious to be worth documenting can suddenly become interesting.
F'rinstance, I think they used to do guided tours of the World Trade Centre. Did anyone think to record one of those tours? Perhaps nobody did. Perhaps the tour guides didn't see any point (after all, the building wasn't going anywhere), and perhaps the people taking the tour didn't record it, because it would have seemed like such a geeky thing to do, spending the entire tour with a camera in front fo your face, to record a "personal" version of something that's exactly the same as the tour that thousands of other people have taken. And yet, if someone found that hypothetical home movie footage now, how many of us would be interested in watching it?
There are still things that nobody thinks of recording officially, where the only record ends up being on some piece of retrieved amateur movie footage.
Eric Baird