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

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Sure, that's ridiculous ... but wait a few years. People will be paying big money to have little Tommy's graduation video converted.

Re:No players on the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in the U.S. you can walk into your nearest Best Buy, and they likely have 3 different models on the shelf. Lots and lots of other stores have them as well.

Re:No players on the market

[VinylRecords]

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?

Considering that there are upscan converters (or upscalers or scalers) that can convert 240i/480i and even smaller interlaced video feeds up to 1080p you can take any VCR/VHS player that has composite video output (or S-video) and plug them into an upscaling device and watch the amplified and upscaled image on an HDTV monitor.

Yeah sure it will look awful but through adapters and converters the technology isn't going to die in our lifetime.

Re:No players on the market

[keraneuology]

There's always Amazon. But Best Buy alone has 9 on their website at the moment. They are out there - slowly fading away, but they're still out there.

Re:No players on the market

[Wild Wizard]

Now that no major manufacturer is producing new media,

This is certainly not the case on a global scale.

It seems that the US centric view is striking again as the only news article I could find on VHS production closure was for a Sony plant in France.

Not to mention that the article in question doesn't even mention a manufacturer, it's talking about a distributor.

Re:No players on the market

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I work for a web-based virtual retailer and we still sell *reconditioned* units for around £13 (UK). Although the success of lines outside the core "DVDs/CDs and printer ink" is patchy at best, we've sold quite a few of those. Quite surprising to be honest, probably just because we're so damn cheap. (I wonder if the margins are worth it when you take returns into account).

They could get a six-head NICAM/HiFi stereo model for just a few quid extra, but everyone goes for the very cheapest mono model. Bit crap if you want to transfer anything that's in stereo, but it shows you how little VHS is worth to the remaining market.

Honestly, there are likely plenty of people with one or two spare video recorders that they don't use and would give away for even less.

Anyway, even almost five years ago when I replaced my VCR, I got a six-head HiFi stereo model from Amazon for £50. Granted, that was very cheap (and it makes a horrible whining noise), but that's still *nothing*. Now VHS is old tech and they're about to switch off the analogue signal here. (That- as someone else observed- is what will finally kill VHS among the holdouts. You *can* record digital TV using an external tuner, but it's more of a PITA than it's worth to do both timers. Especially as digital PVRs with user-friendly guides are available for way lower than VCRs used to cost).

One thing I don't get; people buying stupid combo units for the purpose of transferring videos to DVD, cassettes to computers. You've probably already got a damn VCR/tape deck, and you're not going to use *that* either once you've finished transferring crap.

Even more stupid, one of those USB cassette player was a double-deck model. WTF?! You're not likely to be dubbing tapes, are you? Who the heck wants *another* massive unit to join the junk in the attic?!

Much better to buy a really user-friendly unit that takes an existing audio/video source as input, detects correct input levels and so on, and digitises it in hardware before passing it to the computer. Who the hell wants more crap? The last remaining producers of these mechanisms must be selling them for next to nothing.

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

[Elahrairah]

Reminds me of Cowboy Bebop looking for a Betamax.

Re:No players on the market

[ralphdaugherty]

      I just bought a combo DVD/VHS a few weeks ago.

Re:No players on the market

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah, Travan, I remember them. Nice drives, long gone.

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 ... maybe now's the time.

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 ... 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.

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.

Re:No players on the market

[Anonymous Coward]

Ihr seid beiden Trolle.

Re:No players on the market

[Antony-Kyre]

Agreed. It's impossible to find a brand new standalone VHS machine, but combos are aplenty.

Re:No players on the market

[nurb432]

Ummm just bought a DVD/VHS combo this summer. See them all the time at the local electronic super store ( even walmart ).

Dunno where you live but something is wrong.

Re:No players on the market

[sortius_nod]

There's a lot here in Australia. Not that I'd buy one.

Kind of feels like being a caveman using VHS.

Now BetaMAX, that's a standard you can be proud of.

Re:No players on the market

[Toll_Free]

GoVIDEO always will be producing VHS, methinks.

I shudder to think of the end of SVHS. It's a novel format by todays standards, but it has a LOT of archived footage.

To answer your questions, the BEST place to try to find a geek to be able to open ANY format, is your local news station.

The last one I visited could open ANYTHING, they had Reel to Reel, 16 track, you name it. Audio, Video, they could open it all.

--Toll_Free

Re:No players on the market

[Shakrai]

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 ... no, your House, M.D. .AVIs don't count)

What about my porn, xxx .AVIs?

Re:No players on the market

[ScrewMaster]

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 ... no, your House, M.D. .AVIs don't count)

What about my porn, xxx .AVIs?

Definitely in the "critical" category, I'd say.

Re:No players on the market

[cyber-vandal]

Merry Christmas you grumpy Yankee plonker :-)

Re:No players on the market

[my $anity 0]

Bit of a grammar nazi, but Cowboy Bebop is the name of the show. There is no character or thing in the entire show named "Cowboy Bebop". The crew of the Bebop (Spike and Jet's ship) did go looking for a Betamax player in one episode, because somehow Faye made a tape in her adolescence in the early 2000s on a Betamax.

Re:No players on the market

[zoney_ie]

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.

----

Note - hello Slashdot, 2009 marks 10 years since the introduction of the euro. How about supporting the symbol properly in posting?

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

[cayenne8]

I need to set up and digitize all my VHS copies of the old original WKRP in Cincinnati episodes....with the real music soundtrack intact....since it looks like copyright and inflated licensing issues will prevent this show from every being put on DVD in its original format. I'd like to even copy off some movies that apparently will never be put on dvd, like Spring Break, The Wild Life, and Endless Love.

Re:No players on the market

[Kjella]

Honestly, I haven't seen much of a problem since we started using normal file systems, where the files can be arbitrarily transferred to another file system. Every so often, simply copy it over to a new and bigger medium and you're done. I can still open files from the 80s that way and there's no reason to belive formats will become less persistant. Already there's plenty emulation and with virtualization I see even less reason I should ever have to worry even if I may have to run a C64 emulator inside a Windows VM inside a Linux VM inside whatever OS I'm running in 2050.

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.

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 decendants 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 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.

With time people will learn to take care of their digital valuables too. Honestly, buy a USB stick and copy gigs and gigs of data on it and carry it with you. Give one to your family or your friends, password-encrypted if you prefer. You don't need expensive equipment, nor bank vaults, nor much time to copy-paste. Just to be a little less lazy and most people wouldn't lose anything at all. I just saw recently how much some photographs that were made 25 years ago had faded. Scanning and photoshopping them now is the only hope to preserve those for another 25. With a little care they'll be bit exact the same in 100 years.

Re:No players on the market

[flajann]

... 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.

Re:No players on the market

[aliquis]

Back in the days when I had a DVD-player and they was pretty common some stupid friend bought, not one, but TWO VHS machines, so he could copy movies ..

The not so brilliant part of the idea was getting two of the same (the cheapest one) so the remote fiddled around with both of them :D

Now he rent DVDs by mail and copy all movies that way instead of downloading them.

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

[couchslug]

It's cheaper to buy another deck used or new than fix the old machine.

Re:No players on the market

[hairyfeet]

Why haven't you converted them yet? You can pick up a video capture card for as little as $15 nowadays. Just pick you up a cheap VHS from any pawnshop(you can usually find the really good models there cheap) run your tapes through the capture card, and voila! You never have to worry about tape breakage, rewinding, etc.

I do VHS to DVD conversion on the side at my shop and have made some decent cash doing it, but the cards have gotten so cheap now and easy to use that I have been selling more and more of those cards to my customers. After they see how easy it is to do themselves they are quite happy to pay me to put in a capture card and do the initial setup and then convert their mounds of VHS movies to a format they can easily use again themselves. The last one I sold was to a 67 year old gentleman who very quickly got the hang of it and is now converting all his old VHS home movies(which are actually pretty cool as he helped to build the NASA mockups of the shuttle) to DVD to preserve. So just get you a capture card, set it to record when you go to bed, and let the PC do the work. So much easier than dealing with those aging VHS tapes.

Re:No players on the market

[WCLPeter]

I have an old, high end mitsubishi VHS I need to get fixed (tape transport mech)

From "tape transport mech" I'm going to assume you're saying that the tape doesn't go all the way into the unit when you insert it? If this is the case it is often caused by one of the belts that drive the gears, that operate the transport system, being worn so it's not gripping tightly.

This happened to me on my VCR a while back, and still did until my niece decided to spill juice in it. ;-)

If you haven't done it yet, take the cover off, plug it back in, and then insert a tape you don't care about. Watch how the gears, levers, and belts move. One of them will look like it's slipping. Probably the one that drives the equipment that pulls the tape in, lowering the cage. If the tape gets stuck, pulling the plug and then plugging it back in will usually cause the sensor to read a tape halfway in and eject it.

Try it a few more times until you can spot what is loose or stuck. Once you spot the location, if it's easily reached, put the tape in and then at the same time use your finger to turn the cylinder / gear / gizmo that the belt is trying to turn. This extra push from you *should* be enough to finish lowering the cage. Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible. Use your common judgment and determine for yourself if it's safe.

I was able to use my old VCR for an extra 4 years, until the aforementioned niece decided it would be fun to spill a drink in there. ;-)

Of course, if this doesn't work it probably won't be fixable with the "turning gizmo with finger" method. In this case you'll want to look for a local "mom and pop" electronics store that does home electronics repairs. Or you could just look online for another high-end VCR, I do believe they still make them, although I haven't looked.

Re:No players on the market

[afidel]

Quantum has drivers for XP for the later Traven drives, there are IDE/SATA bridge chips that will work with the oldest IDE drives, parallel SCSI cards are still available (the classic for tape drives is the Adaptec 29160 which also has an internal 50 pin header which will work with SCSI-1 drives). The only common media I'm aware of that you can't easily read on a modern PC is the 8" floppy and MFM/RLL HDD's. Everything else going back 30 years can be read today.

Re:No players on the market

[RiotingPacifist]

Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible.

Be aware that the psu is inside the VCR(well end stuff it is anyway) so there will be some transformers with high current/voltage lying about in there.

Re:No players on the market

[RiotingPacifist]

You mean capitalism is falling apart and we need to go to some remote island to create an encyclopedia of everything? *damn you Wikipedia for ruining in this reference*

Re:No players on the market

[lgw]

Reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, looking for a Betamax.

Re:No players on the market

[Anonymous Coward]

There are torrents available online (at least of WKRP) from people who have already done this. I found very good quality copies at tvtorrents.com with the original music intact.

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

[FormOfActionBanana]

translation: mod off-topic or troll.

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

[Hal_Porter]

I believe that should be "English, motherfucker [, do you speak it]?"

Re:No players on the market

[Alioth]

Building a SCSI interface is something easily within the reach of the electronics hobbyist, as is an IDE interface (in fact, an IDE interface is trivially easy to make for anyone with some practical digital electronics experience). There are USB FIFO chips on the market that should make it relatively straightforward to make a USB - SCSI adapter for old drives. While 8 inch disc drives are as common as rocking horse shit, 5.25 and 3.5 inch disc drives were made in huge numbers so there's no real shortage of those. (My 25 year old 5.25 inch discs all read perfectly), and 5.25 inch drives aren't difficult to repair. Floppy disc controllers are still pretty easy to get hold of - any self respecting electronics junk shop should have some WD177x types in stock still, and they come up on ebay quite frequently. Even when they get hard to find, it would be perfectly possible to roll-your-own disc controller with a CPLD and a handful of discrete components.

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

[flajann]

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, hopeful there will be enough information in different places to shorten the next Dark Ages by a few centuries.

I would go so far as to say that because we have so much information available to so many in such a highly distributed fashion, the fall of civilization a la the "Dark Ages" would be next to impossible sans a major nuclear exchange.

Of course, governments may come and go -- and there are certain ones I would just love to see go away -- but alas, I fear that, for the same reasons, many of these major annoying governments will also have resilience.

For the people are sheep, still, even in the midst of this technological knowledge and information revolution, and now government has highly effective ways to keep the sheep brains of the world asleep.

But then, there are always possibilities. Governments themselves are stupid, too, you see...

Shutting up now before they kick my doors in.

Re:No players on the market

[flajann]

You mean capitalism is falling apart and we need to go to some remote island to create an encyclopedia of everything? *damn you Wikipedia for ruining in this reference*

I liken Wikipedia to what was going on in the Fertile Crescent 1000 years ago or so -- except on a grander scale. Knowledge from around the world being gathered into one place for all to benefit.

Let's hope the Christians and the Cossacks don't ruin it for us a second time. :-)

Re:No players on the market

[flajann]

Building a SCSI interface is something easily within the reach of the electronics hobbyist, as is an IDE interface (in fact, an IDE interface is trivially easy to make for anyone with some practical digital electronics experience). There are USB FIFO chips on the market that should make it relatively straightforward to make a USB - SCSI adapter for old drives. While 8 inch disc drives are as common as rocking horse shit, 5.25 and 3.5 inch disc drives were made in huge numbers so there's no real shortage of those. (My 25 year old 5.25 inch discs all read perfectly), and 5.25 inch drives aren't difficult to repair. Floppy disc controllers are still pretty easy to get hold of - any self respecting electronics junk shop should have some WD177x types in stock still, and they come up on eBay quite frequently. Even when they get hard to find, it would be perfectly possible to roll-your-own disc controller with a CPLD and a handful of discrete components.

While you are totally correct and it would be possible to build some bridge controllers or snag something on eBay, these days my time to do such things is gone. It's all about priorities. The time it would take me to throw something together and read the old stuff, sift through the old stuff, and perhaps have a few "nostalgic moments" (I actually WROTE that horrible code way back when??!!!) I could also be focusing on creating new stuff that would be more meaningful to many -- and make a few $$$$ in return!

The Internet has completely ruined me. Now, I am constantly seeking ways to capitalize on it for any number of reasons, including financial and political, and the time to reminisce in the old days of yore is just not there anymore. Wah!

Re:No players on the market

[drinkypoo]

I recently had the challenge of trying to find a VHS player in a retail store. I couldn't find one

Aim lower. Every Kmart and Wal-Mart in America has them. (Dual-format decks in most of them, too.)

Re:No players on the market

[drinkypoo]

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 ... 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.

that's pretty much what I was going to say, so I'll just add to your comment. Disks and data are increasing in size so rapidly that hard disks have become perfectly acceptable backup media. Many have made arguments about their long-term storage, which would be valid except that the data just keeps getting bigger. For archival storage the best solution is still some form of WORM drive (DVD-RW etc included) with archival-quality media, but for all other purposes, hard disks are pretty much the answer.

If we all had versioning file systems there would be little reason to ever use anything else.

Re:No players on the market

[drinkypoo]

It's fairly trivial still to get a PC with an ISA interface. I have an AMD Geode based platform that would be great but there's no ISA DMA.

The problem is largely nonexistent anyway; there are plenty of people who specialize in this sort of thing, and now that the problem has been identified there will be tons of nerds saving their 880kB Amiga drives and their 800kB Mac drives, et cetera. (I already got rid of my Altos CP/M machine with the 8" floppies, sorry.)

The common PC floppy controller, by the way, used to be able to handle four drives which could have a broad variety of timings. I would be very surprised if you couldn't find a modern motherboard with a floppy controller capable of talking to one of those disk drives. But if you really can't, it honestly can't be that hard (by modern standards) to build one from scratch and the specs. I know at least two people capable of doing it.

Re:No players on the market

[drinkypoo]

Be aware that the psu is inside the VCR(well end stuff it is anyway) so there will be some transformers with high current/voltage lying about in there.

Anyone who can't identify which part of the VCR has high voltage should really observe the sticker on the case that says "No user serviceable components inside." If you don't already know better, keep out!

If you are obstinate enough to ignore this warning, then obviously you belong in there. Or deserve to die.

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:No players on the market

[aqk]

Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible.

Be aware that the psu is inside the VCR(well end stuff it is anyway) so there will be some transformers with high current/voltage lying about in there.

Hello. This is /.
We assume he knows what he is doing with all this (snicker) "HIGH VOLTAGE" stuff.
Choose 1 or 2:
1. He is insufficiently intelligent, therefore should not be on /.
-or-
2. He electrocutes himself, thus fullfilling some sort of Darwinian principle. The hope here of course is that he has not yet bred any offspring to carry on his "klutz" genes. ...Oh, wait- this is /.

Mr WCLPeter, or whoever, go ahead- grab that screwdriver and pliers and GET TO WORK on the VCR! You have my blessing!
However, you may want to keep one hand inside your pants pocket. Just dont move it too much.
. -

Re:No players on the market

[impengo]

I came "late to the party," at noon after x-mas. The hardships of having a life I guess... Did you see anyone giving even LIP-SERVICE to VHS's value for ARCHIVING? When I hit the library, I hate to use the Microfiche machine [it is grainy and hard to either search OR read,] but I DOES serve the purpose. For data, tape has always outperformed platters on reliability. I may send off to OZ for a bunch of VHS as they disappear, and just dig my player out when needed for news reports.

Re:No players on the market

[retchdog]

No, it isn't, as long as you return the DVD. It's copyright infringement; neither more nor less.

It was also clear that we were talking about the practical aspects of the procedure.

Re:No players on the market

[MilesAttacca]

I have about 400 8-tracks at home, most of which probably sound just as good as the day they were taken out of the shrink wrap. My oldest is probably 40 or close to it (that's around when they superseded 4-tracks, which I also have a few of). With a little care and preliminary maintenance (if you've just bought one from a thrift store or whatnot), 8-tracks will not only play today, but remain playable for years to come. 8-tracks, like VHS, are big both in cartridge and tape; have mechanisms (internal in 8-tracks, external in VHS) that would seem to get finicky over the years; but are respectively proven and poised for longevity. CDs and DVDs might rot or get scratched and the digital data is irrecoverably gone, but analog tape can be spliced, have its playback tweaked to give the highest fidelity possible, and almost always still be *somewhat* playable, period. I'm just asking to be flamebait, but this old analog equipment is made to last, even though 8-tracks were implicitly conceived as a true throwaway format. A few of us cultists will be listening to our 8-tracks, records, and cassettes, and watching VHS movies, for years to come. :)

Re:No players on the market

[Selivanow]

dvd/vcr combos are easy to find. The hard part is finding a standalone vcr. Who wants a crappy vcr with a crappy dvd player attached to it?

Re:No players on the market

[jriskin]

This is a case of FALSE NEWS...it was a SINGLE distributor who stopped selling VHS. There are PLENTY of other companies still manufacturing, selling and distributing VHS tapes.

I have no love for the format, but this is a total FAKE STORY...It's based on a SINGLE distributor in Burbank, CA, who some LA Times reporter interviewed...

Re:No players on the market

[joeljkp]

We've lost all the details on building the Saturn V rocket, and we lost that a long time ago.

That's a myth:
http://stason.org/TULARC/science-engineering/space/76-What-happened-to-the-saturn-v-plans.html

When the last major supplier stops...

[leuk_he]

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.

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!

Re:When the last major supplier stops...

[captaindynamo]

I'm using FreeBSD right now, and my vcr still works.

Re:When the last major supplier stops...

[raynet]

Yes but are you running FreeBSD on your VCR?

Re:When the last major supplier stops...

[FishWithAHammer]

Nah. NetBSD is for the VCR, it runs on everything.

Re:When the last major supplier stops...

[Toll_Free]

No, but I bet He's watching FreeBSD for Dummies on VHS.

Or was it on Beta?

--Toll_Free

Re:first

[dotancohen]

first - nothing better to do on christmas day

Try masturbating. See how well I type with one hand?

DVD = VHS?

[SolidAltar]

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.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[TheRaven64]

My stepfather has a DVD recorder, and it works almost exactly like a VHS recorder, except the picture quality is better and you can jump to individual recorded shows more easily. I don't really see the need anymore though - I tend to rent TV shows rather than watch them over-the-air, so I avoid adverts and BBC content I can grab from iPlayer easily. It's not so much the loss of functionality, as the changing usage patterns. When I grew up, broadcast TV was relatively scarce and it was common to collect loads of films recorded from TV. Now, it is cheap to rent access to a much larger collection than you could collect yourself (and then you don't have to worry about storage either).

Re:DVD = VHS?

[Tubal-Cain]

Most people never used that functionality. I, for one, never got it to work the few times I tried.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[an unsound mind]

There are hard drive recorders available. Most are from $200 to $300. Same ease of use - except faster and better, and able to record more than one channel at a time. VHS is dead. And someone should cut it's head off and fill it's mouth with garlic, for we really don't need it anymore.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[retiredtwice]

I absolutely agree. I do not have a TIVO because in my household tapes get recorded in 2 different places and are never watched at the taping location. Besides, why should I pay someone a monthly fee when I can set up VHS recorders for nothing.

DVD recording is not very easy (yes I have one) but the VHS tapes are transportable from room to room so you can be watching and recording at the same time. Besides, VHS tapes will last for many many recordings whereas DVDs do not (cheaply, at least).

And in the case of wife keeping up with episodes, once set up, she doesn't need to do anything except put a new tape in once or twice a week. And she watches in either of 3 places so you just grab the tape and put it in. Quality is not an issue either. 6 hr mode for these shows is plenty good.

I do have to throw out the occasional tape because it won't sync right (stretches along the edge where the track is) but DVDs are very fragile and prone to damage.

As far as I am concerned, the demise of VHS is a giant step backwards in the scheme of things taking away more personal capability and flexibility so the cable folks can earn more money by charging us for TIVO and TIVO-type devices.

And yes, when the cable companies decide to not transmit analog over the air, I expect to have big problems (probably a couple of years, comcast assured me 3 years but I don't trust them). Losing the flexibility of the remotes for regular TV is something I do not look forward to.

This tendency to make us pay for every minute of watching TV that is absolutely saturated with commercials is a giant scam and you all know it.

My rant for todsy.

Now, GET Off my lawn....

Re:DVD = VHS?

[cyber-vandal]

Merry Christmas you grumpy Yankee :-)

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.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[Bill Dog]

And we go full circle. Think about the joking about millions of homes with VCR's flashing "12:00" because they don't know how to set the clock. Old people don't know how to record something on a VCR, and now neither do young people!

Re:DVD = VHS?

[paganizer]

Really?
I can't think of anyone I knew, from around 1987 to 2000, who didn't use their VCR for some aspect of recording.
I still do for cartoons & certain movies; my 5 year old can't even look at a VCD or DVD without scratching it, but he has no problems whatsoever with VHS tapes; whenever we buy a new movie, I rip him off a copy on VHS for his room.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[paganizer]

You really should consider setting up a MythTV box; it's relatively easy, relatively cheap, and very easy to use.
if you have a old, but not too old, computer sitting around (say, 1999 or newer manufacture) it would have enough horsepower to work; all you need to get additionally is a capture device, and they can be had for less than $40 on pricewatch.
It does everything a VCR does; if you don't need to record something in HD, don't; record it in low quality, you will take forever to fill your drive.
And when you want to keep something, just burn it to a CD or a DVD, and put it up; just take them out of storage long enough to copy back to the PVR.
I still use a VCR, but only for my enormous collection of VHS tapes, and to occasionally copy a cartoon or kids movie for my 5 year old; he has a VCR in his room, and VHS tapes last longer with him than CD's do.
There are a lot of guides out there for making a PVR.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[afidel]

VHS tapes will last for many many recordings whereas DVDs do not (cheaply, at least).

Uh, a spindle of 50 DVD+-RW's costs about 10 bucks, each can be recorded to many, many times with zero loss in quality. That's significantly better than VHS. As to your moving tapes comments, get a couple Tivo's, then you can share between them and even with your PC or portables.

Re:DVD = VHS?

[cbiltcliffe]

Your clock's probably blinking 12:00, too, isn't it?

Re:DVD = VHS?

[ErkDemon]

VHS tapes used to be cheaper than re-recordable DVDs, but I'm not sure that this is still true.

When I was in Poundland a week or two ago, a customer was complaining that the shop used to sell VHS tapes in three-packs for a quid a shot, and now they were selling the tapes individually for a pound each (the same price they charge for CD-RWs).

Re:DVD = VHS?

[retiredtwice]

You really did move on a long time ago, didn't you.

6 hour has just as good a sound as 2 hour mode in any decent VHS with "HiFi" recording. They quit using the linear tracks along the edge a long time ago.

As for reliability, I have tossed a couple but because of the outdated preset tuners rather than the tape transport. I think I had one go bad and it just needed cleaning.

I can walk a tape to a different room in a shorter amount of time than 10 min and dont have to waste a blank DVD.

Time is money. Mucking around setting up a Windows Media Center, and then giving it care and feeding and then figuring out how to get the playback in some other room instantly takes a lot more time than grabbing the tape, walking across the house and plugging it in. Also you end up running a computer 24/7 which is not cheap electricity wise. VHS machines are pretty efficient in that regard and my Solar PV system likes them better. Computers get turned off at night around here (or just put to sleep in the case of my MBP which is in normally heavy use about 5 hours a day).

I have better things to do than screw around with the current crop of computer video solutions although I do think about a Myth setup on occasion.

While those solutions work for you and might for me if I wanted to put up with a Windows computer in the house (the 2 windows machines are relegated to the shop, Macs in the house), the video solution for most isnt out there yet.

I do agree that the events will force me to change at some point but I will only go kicking and screaming... LOL

Currently this place has 5 tvs plus a tuner in a PC and 4 VCR of various types. But I watch TV (other than the stock market stuff) about 1 hour per day. The reason for the number is convenience of where I want to be and that is the downfall of the current solutions (when you factor in wanting to slide by commercials). The wife watches her shows whereever she happens to be and the tape solution is so far, the absolute best. I rigged the house with a dual cable system so I can play any vcr on any tv but that ignores the problem of remote control of the VCR (the IR and Wireless solutions I have seen/used are garbage, pure and simple so that system goes basically unused).

Now something like a slingbox that could transmit to any receiver with full remote capability would be fine but the price has to be reasonable which it is not and they dont have the flexibility anyway (yet).

So, Get off my lawn, again..... LOL

Re:DVD = VHS?

[cbiltcliffe]

Uh, a spindle of 50 DVD+-RW's costs about 10 bucks,

A spindle of DVD-Rs costs $10, on sale, where I am. Regular $15-20. But these aren't the erasable ones. DVD-RWs cost at least $35 for 50. Frequently as much as $30 for 25.

In fact, the cheaper large online retailers in Canada have them at $25.99 for 25. I just checked.

Where the heck are you getting 50 DVD rewritables for $10?

Re:DVD = VHS?

[afidel]

Anywhere with decent PC pricing, but they don't have the Canadian media tax on them so I guess I can understand why they are more expensive up there even if I disagree with the reason. Even so, at a buck a piece they are no more expensive than a VHS tape and barring little ones dragging them across the floor should last much longer.

And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable?

[gelfling]

Ah yes, never. In a related point, Sony lays off thousands. That's some great plan you got there, Lou.

Re:And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable?

[Nick Ives]

There was a time when everything you just said applied to DVDs too. Blu-ray is getting cheaper faster than DVD did; I think it was 98 when DVD hit the market but it wasn't until past 2000 when they became mainstream here in the UK.

The format war was only won at the start of this year but already Blu-ray is in the hands of a lot of people. I ended up getting the complete Band of Brothers on Blu-ray for my dad (and also the Batman Begins / Dark Knight boxset for myself!) for xmas and I was far from the only person shopping for BRs.

Re:And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable?

[UnxMully]

I've been thinking about blu-ray adoption and there's a bit of a different hurdle it needs to get over at the moment, as I see it. In my house, we have four laptops, each of which can play DVDs but only one can play blu-ray. Now, yes, I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked, but it's my wife's laptop and she's not going to stand for a lot of that kind of use/abuse of her pride and joy. And even then, her laptop's a year ol spec machine but it can't play a DVD without the lights dimming in he house.

My point is that when DVD replaced VHS, it was usually supplanting one device in the house. Blu-ray is replacing and "obsoleting" potentially many devices. In the case of laptops, until we cycle through and replace all of them with blu-ray capable versions, it's a bit like going back to VHS - one place in the house were we can watch content. OK, so there are usb Blu-ray players on the market but that kind of defeats the object of having a laptop you can carry around and stick a dvd in any time you want, as my daughter does.

I'm not for one minute suggesting that Blu-ray's not going to be successful but I do think there are some other obstacles to its acceptance that didn't affect the VHS to DVD switch.

Re:And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable?

[Nick Ives]

I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked

Actually, blu-ray is getting more secure as time goes on. The current crop of releases have been secure for at least the past few months and I think Slysoft (authors of AnyDVD, the guys who generally lead the way in these matters) have said they won't have a working crack until something like Feb next year.

I think you're quite right that this is a big hurdle to adoption. Right now blu-ray is being driven by the massive number of HDTVs being sold - even average people are preferring 1080p "FullHD" sets here in the UK - but that doesn't do anything when it comes to portable video devices.

There's not much point in having a HD portable media player as screen sizes are generally smaller plus lighting conditions are never ideal on the move. I reckon they should implement a mechanism for allowing people to make SD rips of BDs or even put a one-time code in each box for a non-DRM SD download, ideally an x264 mkv with a full selection of DVD quality audio streams & subtitles. It'd be a great incentive to buy new rather than used but it'd take far too much common sense than the film industry has these days.

Re:And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable?

[UnxMully]

I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked

Actually, blu-ray is getting more secure as time goes on. The current crop of releases have been secure for at least the past few months and I think Slysoft (authors of AnyDVD, the guys who generally lead the way in these matters) have said they won't have a working crack until something like Feb next year.

Ah, thanks for that. I suspect it's not a problem that's going to bother many who don't ravel with a portable device but it does suggest why Apple haven't dived in. If their user base is going to have problems getting content onto their iPhones from their shiny new blu-ray disks then it's something they want to manage properly.

I think you're quite right that this is a big hurdle to adoption. Right now blu-ray is being driven by the massive number of HDTVs being sold - even average people are preferring 1080p "FullHD" sets here in the UK - but that doesn't do anything when it comes to portable video devices.

That includes me. I just replaced my old Sony flat screen with a Viera and only have standard definition content coming through it. It's still better than I thought it would be but I keep looking at blu-ray players and wondering... But I really don't want to go back to the old days of VHS with one player in the front-room and nothing else :(

There's not much point in having a HD portable media player as screen sizes are generally smaller plus lighting conditions are never ideal on the move. I reckon they should implement a mechanism for allowing people to make SD rips of BDs or even put a one-time code in each box for a non-DRM SD download, ideally an x264 mkv with a full selection of DVD quality audio streams & subtitles. It'd be a great incentive to buy new rather than used but it'd take far too much common sense than the film industry has these days.

As you say, it would be too much like common sense but it would solve all my problems with the format.

Security systems

[Weaselmancer]

Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?

If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.

Re:Security systems

[ScrewMaster]

Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?

If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.

Nah ... they'll just go on hard disk. They just put in a bunch of security cameras at work (all IP-based) and I'm sure the feeds are going to some hard drive array somewhere.

Re:Security systems

[dotancohen]

Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?

If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.

Many (most?) record to hard drive nowadays. In fact, many of the cameras are designed for use with standard PCs.

Re:Security systems

[pseudopawn]

Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?

If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.

I would think instead of using a VHS tape or DVD the video would just be stored to a hard drive for say a week or month and then recorded over.

Re:Security systems

[Tubal-Cain]

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.

Re:Security systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite large! (But horrifically poor retention quality.)

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. :-)

Re:Security systems

[Keruo]

I have Danmere backer card somewhere in my storage shelves.
That device converted data to video signal and basically turned your vcr into tape storage drive.
It managed to store something like ~1GB/hour with normal vhs tape.

Problem with the technique was that the card had no way of controlling the vcr.
You had to play the whole 3 hour tape through to restore single file if I recall correctly.

Re:Security systems

[bhtooefr]

There was also a time that cassette tapes were used for [b]primary[/b] data storage. ;)

Re:Security systems

[petermgreen]

mmm, pretty high actually. Remember that while the resoloution was low by modern standards there was absoloutely no use made of data compression techniques. The composite video signal was more or less (there were some complications due to the recording gaps created by the helical scan system) recorded directly onto the tape.

most home recordable VHS tapes can store either three or four hours of PAL video at thier standard speed (tapes used for prerecorded releases are usually shorter and I have seen five hour tapes availible for sale before), according to wikipedia NTSC vhs tapes use a higher tape speed and therefore store less hours) most later VCRs also support "long play" and "extended play" modes which cram more onto the tape (at the cost of lower quality).

Wikipedia reckons VHS tape has about 3mhz of bandwith (they don't say if that is at PAL or NTSC tape speeds, i'm assuming NTSC since I suspect the wikipedia article was written from american sources) with a SNR of 43db.

If we assume the noise is white guasian noise then per the shannon-hartly theorem.

43db expressed as a power ratio is approximate 20000 the base 2 logarithm of this is approximately 14

per the shannon-hartly theorem (ignoring the +1 since it is negligable) with such a large SNR) this would give a maximum achivable reliable data rate of 14*3=42Mbps

multiply that by 10000 seconds (about 3 hours) and you get a theoretical capacity of about 52GB.

Of course considerations of maintaining reliability with poor quality equipment and the fact that perfect codecs don't exist mean the real capacity given by products that used vhs tape for data storage was much lower. Typically a few gigabyte per tape IIRC.

Re:Security systems

[Shakrai]

and I'm sure the feeds are going to some hard drive array somewhere.

Nah, they go to my house. You should really be more careful where your pick your nose, btw ;)

Re:Security systems

[Toll_Free]

There was a time that notebooks where the only way you could remember to configure the switches on the terminal, but I'm dating my grandfather now :)

--Toll_Free

Re:Security systems

[ScrewMaster]

and I'm sure the feeds are going to some hard drive array somewhere.

Nah, they go to my house. You should really be more careful where your pick your nose, btw ;)

If that's what floats your boat. Here ... watch this!

Re:Security systems

[soupforare]

The ones I've seen that aren't HDD have been DVD-RAM. Really, DVD-RAM would make a great replacement for VHS tape, it's a much, much better choice than DVD+/-RW. Too bad it never caught big in the states, double too bad it's now caddieless.

Re:Security systems

[karnal]

*gulp*

You're dating your grandfather now? Why do we need to know that?

Re:Security systems

[Hans Lehmann]

"Remember that while the resoloution was low by modern standards there was absoloutely no use made of data compression techniques."

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.

Re:Security systems

[LtGordon]

I worked Loss Prevention for a department store. We had four Intellex DVR's: rack-mounted PC's running Win2000 + a special interface. They're a huge scam, but it beats the hell out of analog tape. The video is automatically stored in a loop, with the oldest video being overwritten. At 320GB per box, we had about 30 days of reviewable footage and a search function to quickly find and watch a certain feed at a given time without interrupting recording. When video of interest is discovered that should be retained, you manually burn the data to a CD-R. Other than that, no need for anything other than HDD storage.

Re:Security systems

[nxtw]

D-VHS can hold 50 GB on a DF-480 500 m tape - equivalent to T-240, for 4/8/12 hours on NTSC SP/LP/EP. D-VHS did apparently use higher quality tapes, though.

Still, 50 GB is the capability of a dual layer Blu-ray disk.

Re:Security systems

[afidel]

An hour of video at much better than VHS quality is only ~700MB using H.264, with 1TB HDD's costing about $100 you get 1,300 hours of recording for a pittance. Even if you use a cheaper recorder that does MPEG2 you are still looking at over 500 hours (almost a month) for that price.

Re:Security systems

[Alioth]

Our security cameras have been hard disc based for years.

Re:Security systems

[gemada]

No. they all use hard drives for storage.

Re:first

[Tubal-Cain]

Slashdot isn't that exciting.

Re:first

[dotancohen]

Slashdot isn't that exciting.

Tabbed browsing is! My /. addiction is so strong that I take porn breaks to browse.

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.

[dotancohen]

The question is, what the heck can I burn it to so it might survive 30 more years?

Amazon S3 _and_ tape?

You will want multiple copies, in different formats, in different locations. Can't get much better than those two.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

The *real* question is, who cares? Do you want to watch your parents' 30 year old home movies? How about your grandparents' 60 year old home movies? And what about your great-grandparents' 90 year old home movies? At some point, nobody is going to care; nothing lasts forever, nor should it. I call this the irrelevance factor. For the majority of us, after enough time passes our lives are pretty much irrelevant. The world marches on without even knowing you ever existed. How well do you know your great-grandparents? Someday, that's going to be us; relics of the past, long forgotten.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[ColdWetDog]

Are you always this depressing? Or is it just Christmas?

You must be fun at parties.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[hitmark]

maybe the generations that never got to know those persons directly?

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Dogtanian]

In a not unrelated vein... The panic-mongers have an obsession with "OMG!!!!! Digital media is fragile, our digital age is going to disappear without trace!"

Well, quite honestly, it's true that digital media is pretty fragile and that (despite being perfectly suited to copying) much of it will be lost because it wasn't copied. But I'm damn willing to bet that there's so much digital media out there in various forms, being copied and recopied that our digital age will on balance leave behind *way* more than previous ones.

I guarantee that the digital age will no more disappear from history than previous ones; as a percentage of media produced, more may be lost, but do we really need to keep every damn bit anyway? In the absence of personal interest, there's going to be more than enough to give future generations a good picture of our society.

Matter of fact, I wonder if we're getting to the stage of retaining too much. (That's aside from the privacy issues involved in monitoring and recording our everyday lives). Do I really care if security camera footage of me eating my lunch is lost?

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[NotQuiteReal]

print each frame as a still picture on good quality archival paper.

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.

[sjames]

Many historians would give an arm to watch Plato's home movies. For that matter, ANY home movies from that era would be highly valued today (if such a thing could exist). Yes, our individual significance tends to vanish over time, but at some point our time itself vanishes and historians then value any otherwise insignificant glimpse into daily life.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would *love* to watch some of my grandparents' or even great grand parents' home movies. You know, when they were my age, and my parents or grandparents were children. Most of them are no longer alive, which would be another reason I'd like to re-visit them on film if it were possible.

Would I watch hundreds of hours of birthday parties over and over? No, viewing highlights once or twice in my life would be enough. Why not watch something that actually has something to do with your life instead of the new Josh Whedon show for one night?

You know, I'd even love to see footage from great-great-great-grandparents... Mine or yours. You genuinely don't find the idea of footage of daily lives from a hundred or more years ago interesting? I mean from a sociological standpoint, just to see how they dress, and how they interact in a much different time?

But then, I happen to love my family, and actually take an interest in how they lived their lives before I knew them... I'm not the cynical misanthrope you seem to be. And Merry Christmas.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[vux984]

Well, quite honestly, it's true that digital media is pretty fragile and that (despite being perfectly suited to copying) much of it will be lost because it wasn't copied. But I'm damn willing to bet that there's so much digital media out there in various forms, being copied and recopied that our digital age will on balance leave behind *way* more than previous ones.

Fast forward a 1000 years. Will anyone be able to reverse engineer the media and formats, especially given that the media will mostly be highly degraded.

Its been pretty challenging to recover information from 1000 year old media today, and it was almost exclusively plaintext printed on various media in large type faces, using symbols we mostly know.

I mean the Microsoft Office document format is almost undocumentable, drop it on a magnetic storage media like a hard drive... 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. Say we knocked ourselves back to 17th century technology, went a few hundred years without electricity and 'rediscovered' electronics and computers along a whole new path...

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Dogtanian]

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.

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.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[grumbel]

Fast forward a 1000 years. Will anyone be able to reverse engineer the media and formats, especially given that the media will mostly be highly degraded.

The joy with exponential growths of storage space is that it can not only hold all the stuff you need today, but also *all* that stuff you used to store in the past. Today I can have all stuff ever released on the Atari2600, C64, Amiga, early PC and a bunch of other devices on a SD card, i.e. 20 years of computer history in the size of my fingernail and of course I can store all the emulators and source code along with it. You likely won't be able to read it in 1000 years, since then the storage might be completly degraded, but given how computers are all networked and stuff gets copied around all the time, you likely will find a copy of it somewhere on whatever that Internet is called then. Storing the whole Library of Congress today takes storage space that costs less then $1000, just for reference.

I think the biggest danger for long term storage has nothing to do with the storage device or the format, but simply copyright. Copyright forbids to build a public archive of newer stuff, so very few are doing it. You still find most stuff out there if you search long enough, but there is little or no quality control, so you get quite frequently digital degeneration (i.e. video recoded multiple times, bit flips, etc.). Add to that, that many of the original media might be degraded beyond recovery when copyright allows it to enter public domain, you might end up with quite troublesome mess in 100 years down the road.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Whiteox]

I actually get that.
I was going to buy this for Christmas.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[SynapseLapse]

You're right, why would anyone want to see a 90 year video old?
Or a movie that's 60 years old.

Sarcasm aside, I do think you have a somewhat valid point. Most videos probably aren't worth the effort it would take to save them. I think it's silly to build huge libraries of preserved home movies to cling to the past. I really don't care to save the wife's old VHS copy of Ace Ventura.
Still, I would like to preserve a couple of these older movies for "someday." At least so I have something to show my kids of the grandfather they never got to meet.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Sentry21]

The thing is, once it's in a digital format, it doesn't matter. The problem with analog is that every time you do anything with it (even play it, in the case of VHS tapes!) it degrades, so you have to be careful with it.

Once it's digital, you can make a million copies, and it doesn't change a thing. Rip all your VHS tapes to DVDs. Copy all of those DVDs to 1/10th as many Blu-Ray discs. In a few years, copy them to another 1/10th as many Blu-Ray discs. Five years after that... etc.

Optical media these days lasts long enough that you can burn it onto $1 discs, and then wait until the next generation of storage holds 10 times as much and costs $1 as well. It's not 'no work at all', and requires maintenance every few years, but after a while, you've only got one disc left, and it gets much easier.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Reziac]

Wow. Most insightful thing I've read in a while.

A lot of these "memories" don't seem important when you're young. It's later on that you start to feel their significance (or mourn their absence).

A while back someone dug up and sent me a whole bunch of routine paperwork from my late uncle, dating the early 1950s. (Some really demonstrate how much our society has changed -- frex, checks written in PENCIL, and with no name on them except for the signature.) Dull as it sounds, it was actually very interesting to experience these secondhand memories from before I was born. :)

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[jrumney]

At some point, nobody is going to care;

Actually, I'd turn it around. I'd much rather see my great grandparents' 90 year old video of their vacation than someone's video of their vacation they just went on. Time only makes things more interesting, not less.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[drinkypoo]

Just put it on hard disks. Don't use optical disks. Even at the times when they work out to be cheaper than hard disks, there's still the pain of reading them back. Also, archival-quality optical discs are expensive. I wouldn't trust a basic HP DVD-R to last more than, say, five years. But a dual-layer verbatim might last 20. It also costs many times more. I got a terabyte WD MyBook for $139. When the 1.5TB or whatever comes out and comes to about the same price I'll buy that, and this will be a backup. When I buy the one after that, the oldest one becomes a scratch volume or something. I'll just keep buying externals (I'm over having to open cases just to mess with a disk) as I need more space, and as the size increases. The data on the disk now came from several other volumes, which I still have lying around...

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[ErkDemon]

I dunno, I only remember one of my grandparents, and I never got to meet any of the great-grands. It'd be fun to dip in and watch some footage.

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.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[jyx]

As someone living in the tropics, let me assure you that trying to watch a VHS from the 1980's is not a pleasant experience. Hell, after 5 years most tapes were hazy rubbish unless you took extra special care and had a spare house to store the immense bulk of each tape.

Sure, you might occasionally run into a nice bit of non-moldy tape, but by then your heads are so dirty with filth that it doesn't matter anyway - not to mention the stuttering constantly dropping out sound.

Sure, we have the same problems with our CD/DVD media, but at least we can make a 100% accurate copy of them every year or so if they are so important. 3 copies down with a VHS movie and you'll be trying to figure out how to take the gauze wrapping off your telly.

VHS was always only tolerated because there was nothing better, let them go man, let them go.

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[vux984]

You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.

Right.

But you are working from a 1000 year old hard disk platter. I think even 'well preserved' will mean 'significantly degraded'. You aren't going to just pop it in and read a file... you'll be examining the platter with an electron microscope or better, trying to reverse engineer the disk geometry, partitioning system, the file system, and then... after all that you'll get an indecipherable binary stream.

Go ahead, pull up a typical ms document in a hex editor. You'll find the text in there as ascii (well sort of... its there in unicode... so everything is two bytes wide), and in a 10k word file, 90%+ of it won't be the contents ... so you'd be working to extract the meaningful text from the list of font names and formatting data... using an electron microscope. (And some of the newer xml formats are including a compression layer too rather than storing plaintext.)

I'm not saying it will be impossible... but it is going to be pretty ugly.

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

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Yeah, or Jack Valenti. Oh, I know he's technically deceased but I always figured he wasn't, you know, all the way dead. Seriously though, you're right, at least here in the U.S. and probably most of Europe.

Re:Song of the South

[petermgreen]

Though i'm sure the pirate networks will make sure it remains availible :/

Re:Song of the South

[timothy]

"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

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.

Re:Song of the South

[pressman]

Think of it this way. Everyone is embarrassed by aspects of their past and would love to hide them at all costs. A company with a public image is no different.

This is a postmodern society we live in. If Disney to were to release on DVD something that was explicitly racist, most people wouldn't bother to go over the history of the piece and find out that it was the result of a time where this was considered acceptable social behavior. They're just trying to protect their image.

Can't say I blame them really. It might negatively affect their bottom line. Then again it might not,but they're a huge corporation and they're just trying to protect their shareholders.

Not saying I agree or disagree, just that they don't owe anyone a release of this piece of the past. They are not obligated to do so.

Re:Song of the South

[tepples]

If Disney to were to release on DVD something that was explicitly racist, most people wouldn't bother to go over the history of the piece and find out that it was the result of a time where this was considered acceptable social behavior.

Unless the DVD is programmed to show some random bit of history every time it's put into the player.

Still have one

[moniker127]

I still have one, but I never buy disks for it. I dont really use DVDs that much even. The storage market has evolved enough that we dont really need it most of the time.

Re:Still have one

[Mishotaki]

What? VHS disks? what planet are you coming from?

Re:Still have one

[whohou]

What? VHS disks? what planet are you coming from?

Apparently a square and shitless one.

Re:Still have one

[moniker127]

You could still buy them a year or two ago. Theyre not THAT out of date.

Re:Still have one

[Toll_Free]

Buy what?

A VHS disk?

Or a DVD for the VCR?

You're as stoned as the parent is.

--Toll_Free

Re:Still have one

[moniker127]

Whoops forgot to login. AC was me.

And I heard...

[3seas]

...the same supplier is providing video tape transfers to DVD for free.

That way we don't have to buy dvd copies of movies of already paid for.

Re:And I heard...

[flajann]

...the same supplier is providing video tape transfers to DVD for free.

That way we don't have to buy dvd copies of movies of already paid for.

But the quality -- the quality will sucketh big time.

THINKGEEK has converters

[Jack9]

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/digital-conversion/

There are lots of services and gadgets around to do VHS to Digital. These guys sell something like that, I think.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[ScrewMaster]

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/digital-conversion/

There are lots of services and gadgets around to do VHS to Digital. These guys sell something like that, I think.

Yes indeed, but the question is ... what happens in ten years or so? With nobody selling blanks and nobody selling recorders, and nobody selling pre-recorded tapes, the market is going to consist solely of people that want to convert older recordings. Is there enough money in that, to make it worth manufacturing consumer-level equipment that will basically only get used once?

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:THINKGEEK has converters

[lysergic.acid]

i guess it all depends on how resilient VHS is as a storage medium. the format has been used for over three decades. billions of VHS cassettes have been manufactured and sold. there have been millions of video titles released to VHS only. many documentaries, cult films, instructional videos, etc. were never re-released on DVD.

i imagine it will take quite a while for all those VHS titles to be ripped/converted to digital format before they're lost forever. we'll probably continue to see new VHS-rips popping up on BitTorrent sites for another decade or so if the cassettes themselves hold out for that long.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[afidel]

There are patches out there to disable Macrovision on ATI cards, the first link on that page is to one such tool. Not sure if it works on current drivers but you could always downgrade while ripping.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[Tintivilus]

Use a timebase corrector between the source and your capture card. It'll clean up garbled VHS video and accidentally strip macrovision in the process.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[drinkypoo]

If you look around you can get "Pro" level S-VHS gear with a TBC built in. I have one such deck from Panasonic, it's half of a "Desktop Editor" package which also has a control board. I found two decks, one obviously damaged, and the control unit at a flea market for free, so I brought home the better-looking one. I tried recording SVHS on an old VHS tape and failed, I know basically nothing about S-VHS. Interestingly my Panasonic LD player also says it has a TBC in it. I guess I should get me a toaster or something :)

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what originally put me off DRM. This was my first run-in with it and the reason I won't have anything to do with it ever again.

I got my first DVD player as a Christmas gift. At the time, I had an old TV and the only possible way to connect the DVD player to it was to run it through my VCR. Guess what happened when I popped in the first movie...

It didn't take long before I googled an explanation for the shitty video. I was so friggin pissed off I wanted to mail that thing back to Sony as a bag full of smashed plastic and silicon along with a lawsuit for sabotaging my private property.

Steam-coming-right-out-of-my-ears pissed off. The whole neighborhood got an earful.

I finally calmed down enough to find that there is a converter box that lets you connect to an old TV without using a VCR at all. I was hugely offended that I would have to buy another device to circumvent goddamn DRM so I could watch MY movies on MY DVD player. But it was cheap and I already had the player and some movies, so I bought it.

I wanted to send Sony an invoice, demanding reimbursement for having to buy that damn converter thing. Wish I'd done it now just to see how it would have turned out.

That was all years ago and I'm still pissed about it. I can't stand DRM to this day and refuse to buy anything that includes it. I wanted HD-DVD to win the format war, because it mandated that one copy could be made. I haven't bought a blu-ray and probably never will.

I also haven't bought Fallout 3 or GTA 4 either for the same reason and those were tough decisions. I really wanted both of those, but I refuse to support any company that uses that crap, so I just kept the credit card in the wallet.

If this trend keeps up, there won't be any form of entertainment I can buy. Nice to be saving money during the financiapocalypse, but it's really aggravating.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[Jack9]

They also sell a digitizer for LPs. Visit the link?

The cost of a consumer converter to move any analog recording to a digital format is going to be incredible cheap for the foreseeable future. There's no reason not to offer to sell them, whatever the volume until the last of the media is likely fallen to bits 50 years before*. Even constructing the mechanism to do the conversion is likely to be trivial.

*People still recover and convert (parts of) celluloid film, when you can find it intact.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[PCeye]

It's too bad the audio cassette devices at Thinkgeek do not (appear to) have Dolby B & C decoding. Transcribing tapes recorded with B & C noise reduction to wav, without the decoding will sound like crap (especially Dolby C)

One might as well buy a used cassette deck, and use analog hookups to your PC.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[Jack9]

Everything at thinkgeek is relatively low quality or just plain junk (everyone's definition varies*). However, the fact that there are crappy appliances, for cheap, at such a "hip" online shop illustrates an existing market, imo.

*I have been consistently disappointed with ThinkChina's product quality.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[pressman]

VHS is dying... and for good reason. It was a crap format from the get go. Stupid Sony and their insistence not to license their technology to anyone who would use it for "blue" purposes.

VHS won the format war even though it was the inferior technology.

People need to start thinking now about converting their VHS to some digital format and actually do it. Who cares if 50 years down the line, someone finally decides they need to make a copy of a VHS tape. Everyone will have had plenty warning that the format was going the way of the dodo and they should have done something about it.

Who was the last supplier?

[grahammm]

One thing the article does not state is the identity of the last major supplier of VHS tapes. I would guess it would be someone like 3M or BASF.

Re:Who was the last supplier?

[Megane]

After reading the article, even though it's not metioned explicitly, this actually seems to be the last supplier of pre-recorded VHS tapes. Not blanks. The bit about selling to dollar stores was the clue. Which is fine with me, because those things take up way too much shelf space even for dollar stores.

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:DVDs still don't have everything

[Dogtanian]

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.

No, you *can* do that. You just can't do it legally, but it hasn't stopped countless people doing it anyway.

I wonder if this has pushed the sale of what would have previously been considered obscure material in (e.g.) "complete series" form, whereas on VHS you'd have been lucky to get "best of" compilations or at best the series on 1001 bulky tapes with no extras.

Re:DVDs still don't have everything

[bhtooefr]

Or buy a server in some country that doesn't respect copyright, and put the movies on that server. Voila, problem solved.

Re:DVDs still don't have everything

[RJFerret]

Actually, for such usage a stock house or the publisher is contacted, and after whatever license fee, a master in most common editing formats is sent.

When I was working in the video industry, 3/4" was on the way out in favor of Beta SP, which was being replaced by D-Beta (digital beta) for mastering.

You would think that it would be expensive? We used clips of a Seinfeld episode in a cheap corporate video.

All these places adapt to current standards, some slower than others (depending on revenue of course). Which is why most editing facilities have multiple players for different format sources.

(We could take in consumer beta, VHS, aka 1/2", Hi8, 3/4", DV and Beta SP tape formats. Another nearby facility could play 1" and Digital Beta and convert them to Beta SP for us. Oh, and Pal or Secam could be converted of course too.)

Where there is a need, there is an industry!

Really?

[Pentium100]

I can buy tapes made by Maxell, Fuji, Emtec, Sony and Acme (at least I can buy all of them locally, did not try eBay...). Which manufacturer has stopped making tapes? I probably should buy a lot of them because I still record to VHS.

Now, I know DVD has higher video quality and is cheaper (the media at least), but can DVD recorders join recorded parts seamlessly (sp?) ? What I mean - When I am recording some TV show and a commercial starts, I just press stop on the VCR. When the commercial ends, I press record. The result is smooth, as if the commercial was never there. I can do the same when I connect two VCRs to cut commercials out of a TV show that I had recorded by setting the VCR to do so without my presence. Can DVD and/or hard drive recorders do so?

I ask because I used to record TV shows using my PC and a TV tuner, but I always had problems - the PC was too slow to start recording (like 5 seconds after I pressed "record" it actually started recording) and each recording was in a different file, sometimes the file did not have sound, or video...

Re:Really?

[Dogtanian]

I can buy tapes made by Maxell, Fuji, Emtec, Sony and Acme (at least I can buy all of them locally, did not try eBay...). Which manufacturer has stopped making tapes?

Probably most if not all of them; I'm willing to bet that those are all made by a third-party contractor, probably one of very few remaining. VHS is the bottom of the market and likely too small to make it worth keeping their own facilities. Most "big name" video recorders are now made by other companies anyway for similar reasons.

Most of them don't even make their "own" DVDs and CDs...

Re:Really?

[Pentium100]

Probably. At least on Acmes site they say that their cassettes are made with BASF and ECP tape (it is not written where the shells are made)...

It seems that Fuji is still making SVHS tape, though I can't buy it locally (I do have one SVHS VCR, and have tried recording SVHS signal on VHS tape, and while the result is of higher quality than VHS I usually record VHS signals for greater compatibility).

Re:Really?

[cpghost]

When I am recording some TV show and a commercial starts, I just press stop on the VCR. When the commercial ends, I press record. The result is smooth, as if the commercial was never there. I can do the same when I connect two VCRs to cut commercials out of a TV show that I had recorded by setting the VCR to do so without my presence. Can DVD and/or hard drive recorders do so?

Of course, a HDD recorder will do just the same: you can pause the recording and resume it after the ads end. But wait, it is even more practical! Just record the whole show to HDD (you may even do something else in the mean time), and then, before you want to burn it to DVD, you can edit/cut the ad blocks out with extreme precision (up to a single frame, if you're a purist), and you may fast-forward between and within the ad blocks and get the work done in a couple of minutes (say, 5 minutes or so copy-editing out the ads for an average length movie).

I recorded more than 2000 VHS cassettes (240 mins each) of movies and series and always cut out the ads while recording. Now I use a HDD recorder, and never missed my VCR recorder, because it's so much easier to do the editing when I DO have time to babysit the whole process in real-time.

The only thing that's annoying: I still have a lot of media shifting to do, despite all re-runs that I've recorded on HDD directly off the air -- not every good show gets re-broadcasted, which is really a shame!

Re:Really?

[Pentium100]

Of course, a HDD recorder will do just the same: you can pause the recording and resume it after the ads end. But wait, it is even more practical! Just record the whole show to HDD (you may even do something else in the mean time), and then, before you want to burn it to DVD, you can edit/cut the ad blocks out with extreme precision (up to a single frame, if you're a purist), and you may fast-forward between and within the ad blocks and get the work done in a couple of minutes (say, 5 minutes or so copy-editing out the ads for an average length movie).

My experience with video editing on a PC:

I wanted to record some TV shows and then wanted to cut out the commercials and had only one VCR. So I went to wikipedia, read about some video editing programs and downloaded them (p2p) (to try them out, maybe I would have bought the best one later). My TV tuner has a hardware MPEG2 encoder, so I recorded from tape to MPEG2. So, now I just launch some software and edit it? Right...

One application crashed while loading a 6GB long file (it tried to load that file for about half an hour and then crashed).
The other loaded the file, I could make edits and save the result, but with a minor problem - the sound was out of sync with the video (and it started after the first cut).

After trying to edit the recording for some time I said "screw it" and bought a second VCR...

And the HDD recorders are more expensive than VHS VCRs and I read somewhere that a lot of HDD recorders have DRM so hat you can't transfer the recording to PC (except using analog connections which force you to transfer in real time, just like VHS).

Re:Really?

[makomk]

I just use MythTV to record everything, and it has pretty good support for editing recordings to cut commercials. Unfortunately, it would seem doing it outside of MythTV is a bit harder - I think the tools MythTV uses to do it are custom-developed, and the standard software out there isn't as good.

User Interface

[AtomicSnarl]

Almost as sad as the people still using it.

You push it in the slot, push Play, and it works. No menus to wander, no special features to get in the way, no Director's Cut, no frigging mind games with some dinky remote with tiny print and bitty buttons to poke at to get the bloody thing to play, now. Get off my lawn! Damn kids these days... Harumph. Where did I put my bifocals?

This message sponsored by AARP, because you'll be old someday, too!

Re:User Interface

[QuantumG]

VCRs often work as good without the remote as with. DVD players are almost completely useless without that remote.

Re:User Interface

[Cazekiel]

IAWTC so hard.

Re:User Interface

[Jorophose]

After breaking the remote on one of my DVD players I'd have to agree.

Can't skip through anything, you can't access any "special material", and did I mention you can't skip through anything like those annoying ads? For some reason DVD players don't come with "fast forward/rewind" buttons on the player... just start, stop, eject.

I think this is about pre-recorded tapes

[JSBiff]

I read (most of) the article, and as far as I can tell, this is about VHS tapes which have movies on them, not blanks for you to record on your own.

No unskippable ads

[JSBiff]

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.

Re:No unskippable ads

[ceoyoyo]

I particularly like how they write "forbidden" or somesuch on the screen when you try.

DVD Player that comes with OS X seems to let you skip. I have a REALLY old DVD player that does as well.

Re:No unskippable ads

[phillymjs]

Amen. I just watched a movie on tape that I haven't re-bought on DVD yet. While I was amazed at how bad the picture quality was compared to the DVDs I'm used to now, the one thing that was very nice was being able to just fast-forward through all that bullshit at the beginning that I'm now used to having to sit through.

I used to have a DVD player that let me do what I want... it was GE-branded but my understanding was it had Apex guts. Some Apex players had a 'secret' menu that let you set them to ignore 'no skip' flags and other stuff, and also let you set the player to be whatever region you wanted or shut the region crap off entirely. When this was discovered, Apex players got yanked off store shelves in the US. Do some googling, I'm sure you can still get your hands on one somehow. Mine died about a year ago, and I just bought a run-of-the-mill Sony to replace it.

~Philly

Re:No unskippable ads

[kvezach]

That err, "feature", is called the User Operation Prohibition flag. Some DVD players can be patched to disregard the UOP, others disregard the UOP by default. Do a web search if you're interested... I note it's also considered DRM, which just shows exactly whose "rights" are being preserved here.

Re:No unskippable ads

[SanityInAnarchy]

Pop it in a computer, use something like vlc, and you can skip anything you want. And unlike VHS, you don't have to sit there for 2-5 minutes watching that 10 minutes go by -- you just click "next" a few times, and you're done.

And this is, indeed, one of the effects of DRM and patents -- no one's going to sell a player without all the licensing in place, which means that the DRM gatekeepers could always decide that no players can be made which allow skipping. It's also the reason they try crap like region-coding.

Fortunately, DVD was cracked years ago, so you have VLC.

Re:No unskippable ads

[fermion]

I never did like DVDs. I only started buying them when they became as cheap as VHS was, and when I could play them on my computer, so I no longer needed a tv.

The insanity of a DVD is how complex it is to use. I did not realize this until I was trying to teach my mother how to watch a movie. Read the barely legible text to select the play option. Since the creators value eye candy over usability, a person with limited vision has a great deal of trouble with this. Next, select the episode on wishes. This HBO DVD did not have a play all option, or just play on insert option. Next, read the another difficult menu and press enter to tell the machine yes, I really do want to play this episode. Really, please, I bought this DVD to watch the miniseries, not play with menus and watch cool graphics. Please, sir, let me watch the movie that I have paid good money for and have a legal right to do. Please!

This is a far cry from the VHS player that went like, put it in, if the tape was at the end autorewind, and start over and play. We have DVD players for many years. Can't we at least be at the usability level of the VHS? Or is selling stale stock for $15 a pop not profitable enough so you have to make sure that some extra monitoring of the customers can be put in.

More likely it is spending money on graphic artists rather than competent UI designers. It is like when we began using the trash can motif on the computer, and for years we were still asked 'are you sure you want to delete this?" Not only is putting something in the trash can not deleting it, but it is also no where near to be irreversible act, so there is really no reason to waste my time asking the question.

And everyone wonders why few people want blu ray. We still remember DVD, and the though many things were better, many things were also worse.

Re:No unskippable ads

[AmberBlackCat]

The backup copies of the DVD movies don't seem to have that problem...

Re:No unskippable ads

[Jamie's Nightmare]

5 to 10 minutes of mandatory filler? What exactly are you watching? I realize your exaggerating, but if you think you can cue up your VHS tape faster than I can start a DVD playing a major Hollywood title, you're crazy.

Re:No unskippable ads

[Jamie's Nightmare]

AnyDVD is a program for making backup copies of movies, not for watching movies on the computer. The copy would have the UOPs removed.

Re:No unskippable ads

[Nick Ives]

I don't know if this is true for all Blu-rays but my copies of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight just go straight into the film. I actually found it a little confusing as you have to push a button to get a pop-up menu to reach the extras but to be honest I prefer it and I'm hoping this is true for other BDs.

Re:No unskippable ads

[drinkypoo]

That err, "feature", is called the User Operation Prohibition flag.

Negative. Sometimes, that's all there is. Sometimes they separate each video crapblob into its own title, put chapters out of order and all kinds of crap, so even if you can skip them, you don't go anywhere useful.

A better solution is to rip movies you plan to rewatch to another format using a convenient program like Handbrake. It's possible to store multiple audio and subtitle tracks using a container like OGM or MKV. (I believe you can also store multiple AC3 audio tracks in an AVI, so if subtitles aren't an issue to you, that might be sufficient. But AVI has other limitations.)

Also as an aside, Xbox Media Center has an option to try to auto-skip that sort of thing, and DVDFab has an option to try to remove them. The latter is probably more reliable than the former.

But hang on to one, anyway.

[RyoShin]

Even though I no longer own any VHS tapes myself, I have a dual-player that I'm going to hang on to. My family has a lot of video memories that are still on VHS, and it's unlikely they'll be converted anytime soon.

In fact, I'll probably try to get a mid-range VHS player (one of the small ones) once I have a bit of extra cash, and just store that away. Either it will come in handy for myself, or in 50 years I can sell it for a tidy sum to someone who needs one.

I'm also reminded of a certain Cowboy Bebop episode. Of course, they actually needed a Betamax player and got a VHS deck at first, but the same idea holds.

Re:But hang on to one, anyway.

[AkaKaryuu]

I'm glad someone finally mentioned that episode. I've been debating mentioning it for a good 20 minutes now.

This isn't about blank VHS media, folks!

[adnonsense]

I RTFA (hey, it's Christmas!) and using my advanced English comprehension skills can hereby inform you that it's about what's apparently the last major supplier of content in the VHS format in the USA giving up on VHS. It says nothing about manufacturers of VHS media (aka blank tapes) stopping production.

I bet blank tapes will be available for a good few years yet.

Re:This isn't about blank VHS media, folks!

[MtViewGuy]

Fortunately! I do know that both Maxell and Sony are still manufacturing blank T-120 and T-160 tapes for the many millions of VHS videocassette recorders still out there, based on seeing them available at Wal-Mart. I have a Mitsubishi HS-U595 deck from 2000 and it still works very well recording shows off cable TV.

Re:This isn't about blank VHS media, folks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you're not supposed to research anything, just rant about something tangentially related!

Read the FAQ's of how to post on Slashdot!

(Insert random newbie slight here) ;-)

Re:This isn't about blank VHS media, folks!

[Bill Dog]

That must've been an expensive mofo. I bought the cheapest one that still had the rotating controls on the front (the only kind in the store that could have its timer set without having to turn on the TV), an HS-U580, and it was quite pricey, $350 I think. (I also remember initially marveling at being able to see freeze frames, being the first time I could afford a 4-head model! Whooppee! :)

Re:This isn't about blank VHS media, folks!

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, the Mitsu HS-U595 was pretty cheap--I got it for US$150 brand new in 2000, pretty cheap for such a "loaded" VHS recorder (remember, it has VCR Plus Gold support, which was rare on almost any class of VCR).

The most expensive model from Mitsubishi at that time was the HS-U795, which was essentially the HS-U595 but with Super VHS support and a few more features.

sad as the people still using it?

[nurb432]

BS, why should someone change when what they have works fine?

Just because its new and shiny and you don't care doesn't make you a sad loser. It means you don't succumb to marketing.

Well that's the problem

[g2devi]

> The *real* question is, who cares?
> For the majority of us, after enough time passes our lives are pretty much irrelevant.

Well that may be the case for you, because history is irrelevant to you.

But if you could see the ebbs and flows and textures of history across many generations, you'd be able to see how significant a life can be and how seemingly minor events and decision can affect generations to come. You'd see that the winds of change that appear to erode any value and meaning out of life, do little more than blow away the irrelevant fluff off a person's life to reveal the deep grooves of that person's purpose.

So which format is next DVD or BlueRay?

[upuv]

R.I.P. list:
Beta
HDDVD
VHS

Which one is next?
DVD?
BlueRay?

Re:So which format is next DVD or BlueRay?

[MsGeek]

My guess? Blu-Ray, unless Sony allows small producers to reasonably produce BluRay discs.

Re:So which format is next DVD or BlueRay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried to buy "The Usual Suspects" on DVD but found that it is already out of print. It is now available on Blu-ray only. Rather than "upgrade", I simply bought used.

Re:So which format is next DVD or BlueRay?

[ErikZ]

Since the processing requirements for bluray are so high, and CPU power gets cheaper every year, there's no reason for bluray to take off.

A HD movie has 1080p video and sound. The data can be stored on a variety of mediums and decoded by a variety of devices. Sony won the HD disk wars, but that's looking like it's not that big of a deal.

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:This may sound weird

[cdrguru]

Optical media, including DVD doesn't store video on anything magnetic at all - there is no magnetism involved at all. Optical media is written with heat and read with light.

Re:This may sound weird

[Jamie's Nightmare]

There is nothing simple about pulling 12+ inches of tape clear out of the cassette with a series of gears and belts then wrapping it half way around a spinning drum along with 2 other heads, then using a set of timing signals embedded in the tape to synchronize the drum and playback speed.

Re:betamax ftw

[tronicum]

Don't forget about Video 2000 another great underestimated video system...

Re:betamax ftw

[MsGeek]

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.

Rosetta stones

[drolli]

Buried below stone plates with the engraved pictures, we can place punch-cards (made from platimum coeated tungsten) for binary formats and engraved text for text formats.

I suggest the following set to understand todays state of the internet:
-a messed up word document containing an non-logical formated cruelly layouted document
-frames from a porn movie
-a spam mail, ehich demonstrates how to encode mail in multiple character sets (i imagine this would give them a headache....)
-a crazy frog mobile ringtone
-a flash game

Totally irrelevant

[brunes69]

When you can make a bit for bit perfect copy of a DVD in under 3 minutes at a cost of 20 some cents, the fact that the media degrades is a non issue.

Hell, I can fit 15 or so DVD quality movies on my key chain (32 GB microSD keyfob). You really think in 5-10 years you're still going to be playing DVDs? Give me a break. By then you'll have copied all your stuff to some other format.

Re:Totally irrelevant

[Pentium100]

And when you are doing that for hundreds of DVDs?

Yes, digital media are good that you can make infinite generations of it and it will still be a perfect copy of the original, however, to do that, you mus actively copy the data every few years. If you forget - it's gone. Now, I can play an almost 100 year old shellac record or a vinyl record about first man on the moon released in the same year that the landing happened. The didn't need a lot of copying. The same with photos. Sure, they became discolored, but I can still see what my grand parents looked like when they were young, they also didn't need copying.

Who is going to copy your collection of hundreds of DVDs? You? Really, even if your day job takes a lot of energy from you, and when you come back home, you can't even think about that huge pile of 7 year old DVDs?

I am currently using LTO-1 tape to archive digital data and VHS to archive TV shows that I record from the TV (the downloaded ones go to LTO tape). It is written that LTO-1 tape should last about 30 years, but I'll probably copy everything to some newer format after 10 and still keep the originals as a backup).

The good thing about analog is that is degrades gracefully. On a bad/old VHS tape you will see some snow, the video may even lose color, but it will still work. On a very old R2R tape that I have, the frequency response is down to about 4kHz and some parts are very hard to understand, but it still works. OTOH, a DVD with a single scratch in a wrong place will not work (it won't even become a snowy black&white video).

I have an idea. How about converting data to some analog signal and writing that signal to vinyl? That should last for a long time in archival storage.

A Brief Moment of Silence...

[coaxial]

For the day that users could fast forward past the FBI warning is now gone. And so as remember this day, let us recall those guiding words: Be Kind. Rewind.

And DTV on 2/17/2009...

[antdude]

I noticed a lot of people, with VCRs including myself, still use VCR to do mostly recordings. Since most digital to analog TV converter boxes do not have schedulers and older VCR models don't know the new channels, this would also add the death of VHS tapes and VCRs.

Since VCRs and VHS tapes are going extinct...

[antdude]

... are there any local store-bought DVRs that do not require paid subscrptions, can store onto HDDs and DVDs, support HDTV, lets me connect to computers to transfer video recording files (back and forth), etc.? The last time I checked, they didn't exist. I also don't want to use computers to be my DVRs since they tend to crash (e.g., programs, blue screens, bugs), I like to modify/upgrade them, etc.

Advantages of VHS

[FooAtWFU]

The advantages of VHS (and, for that matter, of audiocasettes) are simple and easy to see. You can give a VHS tape to your toddler. He will not break it. He can probably even throw it across the room a few times, and it'll be fine. Your kids can rifle through the library to find their favorite film. Until you get absurdly violent with them, they're not going to break. You can't say that about CDs and DVDs. You can't even really say that about the average CD case, though DVDs are marginally better.

DVDs are a scratchfest. It's somewhat sad.

Re:Advantages of VHS

[Jamie's Nightmare]

I guess you've never had a kid pull and snap the tape without opening the door. While snapped tapes can be re-spliced, it's not an enjoyable affair. The child doesn't even have to break the tape, but just crinkle it enough so it will snag the playback heads on the deck and clog them with tape debris. You grossly overstate the reliability of VHS tapes.

Re:Advantages of VHS

[freedom_india]

That is very much true.
All my son's pack of Scooby Doo, Tom & Jerry & Thomas Engine DVD's are scratched beyond redemption.
My DVD player can play them but the day will soon come when it refuses to play.
OTOH, I also own a Sony VHS Recorder/Player. I still own Star Trek Voyager in VHS.
And the tapes are heavy enough, robust and still play. (to prevent fungii, i put them in sealed bags).
My Son looks at me weirdly when i insert them.
He did try inserting a DVD into the VHS player, but i caught him before he could damage the relic.

killing the format? A somewhat US centric concept

[marxz]

"Killing the format" no sir, I think not, I've little doubt that just like the Compact Cassette the VHS will remain as at least a viable format (and probably the dominant format) in markets from Eastern Europe to China and probably a vast majority of Africa and South America for many many years after the western markets abandon it.

Similar with LP to CD

[KingAlanI]

A lot of the big name artists (think the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, for example) did get their back catalogues reissued in CD, but a lot of musically-interesting stuff did not make it to the new format.
So, you're stuck unless you want to fire up a turntable or muck around with converters

I can get close...

[Voyager529]

Unfortunately a device like this is too desirable to be manufactured, but heres something close:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=7049&A=details&Q=&sku=448811&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation#specifications

It:

-does not require a paid subscription

-can store onto both the internal 250GByte hard drive and direct to DVD (also MiniDV if youre interested)

-connects to your computer via firewire so you can capture whatever you want. You can also pull content from the hard drive directly to your computer as it saves to either MPEG-2 or DV-AVI.

-is fairly expensive at $1,299

It does not:

-support HD

-tune programs natively; I/O is done through RCA or Component inputs

I dunno if youre going to find anything much closer.

Joey

Re:I can get close...

[antdude]

Thanks Joey. Crazy price!! Oh well. I think I will probably just get a DVD recorder. I recall it can act like a DVR.

Generous thought, but not CRT TVs to Africa...

[electrogeist]

Aside from the prohibitively expensive shipping costs, and african electric being 220V/50Hz, there is also the issue that CRTs from the USA may not operate correctly in the southern hemisphere

*cough*

[SeaFox]

'Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly...

I'll remember that next time a rental DVD jumps back to the menu screen after hitting a scratch halfway through the film it can't read past, or when I'm forced to wait through ten minutes of promos before the film because I can't fast forward through them anymore.

Insecurity systems

[Ostracus]

So you'll know grandma is still available.

Define 'affordable'

[dreamchaser]

A very cursory search shows me players starting at around $115. Define 'affordable'? They've come down a HUGE amount in price already.

Re:Define 'affordable'

[powerlord]

They've definitely come down dramatically in price, but the two "profile 2.0" players that everyone usually looks at as a reference are the PS3, which start out at ~$400 (for a non-refurbished unit), and the Panasonic DMP-BD35 at ~$245-299 (which just got the CNet editors choice for matching the PS3 at a lower price point).

Going with the $245 as the best player for the cheapest price, thats still over twice the price of $115 (and realistically most places are still selling it for ~$300 which is almost 3x as much as $115).

I'm not denying that BD players are dropping in price like mad at the moment (which is a good thing), but DVD players are still much cheaper and more ubiquitous (at least until more computers start shipping with BD drives).

Re:I have to return some videotapes

[AbRASiON]

You bastard! I just posted that and it told me someone else has posted it :(
Do you like Hewey Lewis and the news?

Basic physics, my friend

[ZmeiGorynych]

DVDs get written and read with lasers, 'heat' is just a side effect. Lasers emit coherent photons, and light _is_ electroMAGNETIC waves, you silly!

Or was that a particularly strange joke on your part?

Re:Basic physics, my friend

[confused one]

Phew! For a moment there I thought I mis-understood all my Physics professors. Glad someone else remembers it this way too -- light is an electro-MAGNETIC wave.

The cost to schools is gong to be heavy

[American Scum]

Of the public schools I have worked in, in two states, their video libraries consisted of 90% VHS tapes.

Some valuable teaching tools (videos) are going to be really difficult to find on DVD, and a lot of them just won't be found.

I am not saying VHS should stick around, but as the format dies there will be a somewhat substantial loss.

I don't want to write an epic rely here, but you really ought to go into older high school's libraries to see what I'm talking about. Even if they have the tapes (which wear out eventually), not having VHS players that work is going to be an issue.

Re:betamax ftw

[Megane]

Betamax != Betacam. Only the physical tape/cartridge format stayed the same.

"Antique" VHS recorders?

[ErkDemon]

On the plus side, there might now be a niche market for really expensive VHS machines.

I'm thinking, expensive heavy-duty mechanism, transparent casing made of sheets of toughened glass held together with brass edging, gold-plated chassis mounted on pillars above a toughened mirrored glass base, replace some of the cheaper mechanical components with nicer-looking custom parts, add a few internal mirors at strategic places.

Then charge several grand for it, like it's an antique glass-domed carriage clock or something.

Make it like the Faberge version of a VHS recorder, so that future generations can ooh and ahh at the mechanism as they watch all the little intricate moving parts jumping out and doing their thing when you load a tape.

Heck, in a few years time you'll probably be able to sell 'em to science museums as exhibits.

Someone Better Tell DVR Guys!!

[gpronger]

It's been a long time that I wanted to record something to VHS (though this may have to do with what's currently being broadcast) but my DVR has an option; "Copy to VHS". Someone better tell the makers of the latest recording technology that one of it's earlier predecessors has bit the dust.

Greg

Stock up on blanks now...

[Aereus]

My parents still have a nice 6-head SVHS deck that I helped them buy around 10 years ago just before DVD hit. (I have one as well) This seems disappointing because in the US at least, DVD recorders never caught on, and DVRs still aren't that ubiquitous as they're mostly service-related unless you DYI.

Ironically enough they never got a single SVHS tape due to the high cost. (Don't think I ever saw them for less than $6-7 a tape) But it has a recording mode that produces near-SVHS quality on standard VHS tapes.

I'll have to tell them to stock up on some more blank tapes, as they really aren't the technical type. I tried getting them to get a DVR, but they don't want the extra cost when what they have still works fine.

Oh Great!

[HexaByte]

Oh Great! Now in addition to converting all my single sided, single density 5 1/4" floppies to a new format, I have to deal with converting VHS tapes, too!

I guess I'll be get around to that by 2038.

Anybody remember the rewinders?

[babernat]

When I was a kid for some reason I remember thinking that if you were rich then you had one of those dedicated rewinders so you wouldn't have to wait for your tape to finish. I don't know why I thought that, I just did. Those were the good old days... Copy protection was so much easier to overcome and it seems like fair use was more respected by both the producers and consumers. I may be wrong though. Call it a function of me being so young back then.

Compared to WHAT?

[jonadab]

> Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly

What's the basis of comparison? I would argue that at this point the major alternative is DVD, which is a lot *MORE* brittle and *extremely* user-unfriendly. And if there's anything clunkier than the assortment of different kinds of not-so-good cases that DVDs come in, I'm sure I don't know what it is. Really VHS would be a huge improvement over DVD.

In terms of user-friendliness, VHS is pretty hard to beat. You put the thing in and it *just plays*. No fiddling, no menus to navigate, no figuring out which buttons do what (which actually varies from one DVD to another), and if you want to fast forward or rewind you *can*, but if you don't want to mess with buttons the tape will play to the end and, in most VCRs, automatically rewind and eject when it's done, so you literally don't have to push a single button. You just put the tape in the player and that's *all* you have to do. Okay, so you do have to manage to not put the tape in backwards, which I guess might be hard if you have the same level of intelligence as a garden slug.

The brittleness claim would have more merit, if the alternative weren't DVD. Sure, if you beat up on a VHS tape too much it'll break. But at least you don't have to be too worried about what happens if you get a *scratch* on it, for crying out loud.

I suppose "clunky" can mean a lot of different things...

Not dead to our parents

[kgwilliam]

Two days ago when I was home for the holidays my Mom asked me to fix something with the TV. I asked her what was wrong and she said that her VCR wouldn't let her record something while she was watching something different.

I would love to bring her out of the 80's, but what other options does a person have who is completely averse to paying for something that they feel they don't need? I would suggest Tivo, but there is a monthly fee. I would suggest a cable set top box w/ DVR, but she is still on basic cable because digital TV costs more.

I guess I will let her keep going with those old VHS tapes. But I better tell her to stock up on blanks before she can't find them anymore :)

Re:I have to return some videotapes

[AbRASiON]

Who could mod you down? :( such a fail.

note to moderators

[drinkypoo]

correct moderation choices include informative and flamebait. this followup comment is offtopic. moderate accordingly. kthxbye.

Re:How about D-VHS, the ONLY format that records H

[HTH NE1]

DVD doesn't record HD.

Yes, it can. There's BD5, BD9, and AVCREC for Blu-Ray content on DVD media, 3x DVD and HD REC for HD DVD content on DVD media, and AVCHD which is media agnostic (BD-R, DVD-R, tape, whatever) but might not be played by Blu-Ray players.

D-VHS RECORDS HD (!)

If you were lucky enough to get an early model that didn't recognize Macrovision's HD version of copy protection. Also, I have yet to see a D-VHS deck that supported playback of S-VHS video at anything better than VHS quality. (Unfortunately S-VHS decks already are hard to find, and if you find one it's expensive.)

Consumer recording is pretty much over.

I still have my TiVos (three series of standalones), and if the source was broadcast or analog I can transfer to my desktop computer and burn to DVD (until someone forces cable companies to stop encrypting all digital non-broadcast channels) or on the one with a DVD burner built-in.

However, I did predict that VHS would be going away soon, especially with the impending digital switchover. Though there would have been an option to sell VHS decks without tuners (neither NTSC nor ATSC).