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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.
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.
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.
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... 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.
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